Iconic Neuroscientist Eric Kandel Shares This Advice for Combating Memory Loss
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Eric Kandel, 88, is a living legend. A specialist in the neurobiology of learning and memory, he received a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on the physiological basis of memory storage. Kandel is the Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science and Co-Director of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, where he has taught and conducted research for 44 years.
"If you walk two or three miles a day, you will release sufficient osteocalcin from your bones to combat non-Alzheimer's age-related memory loss."
And he's still going strong. Leapsmag Editor-in-Chief Kira Peikoff recently caught up with Dr. Kandel about his latest research, his advice for fellow seniors, and his opinions on some of the biggest challenges in neuroscience today.
What are working on these days?
I'm working on three problems: one is age-related memory loss, the second is post-traumatic stress disorder, and the third is the beholder's share: how a viewer responds to works of art. The beholder's share is a term that Alois Riegl created. He said there are two shares to a painting: the painter creates it, but it's not meaningful until somebody responds to it: the viewer, the beholder.
That's fascinating. As far as age-related memory loss, what are you learning in that area?
I'm learning that there are two forms of age-related memory loss. One is Alzheimer's disease, which we've known about for a long time. But the second is a more benign form which I call just age-related memory loss, which begins actually somewhat earlier and has a very different anatomical locus in the brain. It is caused by a different anatomical defect and responds to different therapeutic measures. It critically involves an area in the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and it responds to a hormone released by bone called osteocalcin.
It therefore seems likely that one very effective way of combatting age-related memory loss is walking. If you walk two or three miles a day, you are likely to release sufficient osteocalcin from your bones to combat non-Alzheimer's age-related memory loss. In collaboration with Gerard Karsenty at Columbia, my lab at Columbia has been exploring this over the last year and a half.
Have you published anything about this yet?
We are just getting ready to do so.
"I think at the moment we should stick with trying to just reverse abnormalities."
Another question I have is about brain-computer interfaces to help cure disease or even provide cognitive enhancements. What do you think of companies like Kernel and Neuralink that are trying to push this new technology?
I think if it works it would be very nice. We have to see some direct evidence first, but it's certainly an encouraging approach. I think there are a number of directions we could take. The one I think at the moment is most profitable is to try to use the brain as it is and try to enhance it, restore it, refurbish it, make it function better from its age-related condition.
You mean, without some kind of machine interface?
Without necessarily introducing anything from the outside world. Although I have no objection whatsoever to introducing ancillary aids if they're beneficial and not harmful.
Do you have any opinion on whether neuroscience and technology should aim to provide an enhancement to the brain or just return it to baseline and cure disease?
I would be perfectly satisfied if we just cured diseases. I think at the moment we should stick with trying to just reverse abnormalities, but certainly … having the capability of becoming more intelligent, more attentive, capable of remembering things better than normal, that would be nice.
What do you think is the most important challenge facing the field of neuroscience today?
It's hard to say. I think the biology of consciousness is one fantastic problem. Trying to understand and successfully reverse some of the abnormalities of the brain, like age-related memory loss, schizophrenia, depression, manic depressive illness would be wonderful.
To be able to reverse memory loss, to allow people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s to live free and independent lives, is a major challenge for brain science.
Absolutely. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers about your research or the field more broadly?
I'd emphasize that brain science is a relatively young discipline but it's moving ahead in a very responsible and a very effective fashion, making progress in a number of areas, and is clearly sensitive to, and responsive to, the demands of the social situation. Right now, number one, the population is aging dramatically. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 50, and now the average life expectancy is 78 for men, and 82 for women.
So people are living longer and therefore are having age-related diseases, including memory loss. To be able to reverse it, to allow people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s to live free and independent lives, is a major challenge for brain science in both its basic and its clinically applied fashion. I think this is very important and serious effort should be put into this.
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.
“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.
Over the next several years, Savannah’s seizures continued and worsened. By age five Savannah was having seizures dozens of times each day, and her parents noticed significant developmental delays. Savannah was unable to use the restroom and functioned more like a toddler than a five-year-old.
Doctors were mystified: Tracy and her husband had no family history of seizures, and there was no event—such as an injury or infection—that could have caused them. Doctors were also confused as to why Savannah’s seizures were happening so frequently despite trying different seizure medications.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Savannah with Lennox-Gaustaut Syndrome, or LGS, an epilepsy disorder with no cure and a poor prognosis. People with LGS are often resistant to several kinds of anti-seizure medications, and often suffer from developmental delays and behavioral problems. People with LGS also have a higher chance of injury as well as a higher chance of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) due to the frequent seizures. In about 70 percent of cases, LGS has an identifiable cause such as a brain injury or genetic syndrome. In about 30 percent of cases, however, the cause is unknown.
Watching her daughter struggle through repeated seizures was devastating to Tracy and the rest of the family.
“This disease, it comes into your life. It’s uninvited. It’s unannounced and it takes over every aspect of your daily life,” said Tracy in an interview with Today.com. “Plus it’s attacking the thing that is most precious to you—your kid.”
Desperate to find some answers, Tracy began combing the medical literature for information about epilepsy and LGS. She enrolled in college courses to better understand the papers she was reading.
“Ironically, I thought I needed to go to college to take English classes to understand these papers—but soon learned it wasn’t English classes I needed, It was science,” Tracy said. When she took her first college science course, Tracy says, she “fell in love with the subject.”
Tracy was now a caregiver to Savannah, who continued to have hundreds of seizures a month, as well as a full-time student, studying late into the night and while her kids were at school, using classwork as “an outlet for the pain.”
“I couldn’t help my daughter,” Tracy said. “Studying was something I could do.”
Twelve years later, Tracy had earned a PhD in neurobiology.
After her post-doctoral training, Tracy started working at a lab that explored the genetics of epilepsy. Savannah’s doctors hadn’t found a genetic cause for her seizures, so Tracy decided to sequence her genome again to check for other abnormalities—and what she found was life-changing.
Tracy discovered that Savannah had a calcium channel mutation, meaning that too much calcium was passing through Savannah’s neural pathways, leading to seizures. The information made sense to Tracy: Anti-seizure medications often leech calcium from a person’s bones. When doctors had prescribed Savannah calcium supplements in the past to counteract these effects, her seizures had gotten worse every time she took the medication. Tracy took her discovery to Savannah’s doctor, who agreed to prescribe her a calcium blocker.
The change in Savannah was almost immediate.
Within two weeks, Savannah’s seizures had decreased by 95 percent. Once on a daily seven-drug regimen, she was soon weaned to just four, and then three. Amazingly, Tracy started to notice changes in Savannah’s personality and development, too.
“She just exploded in her personality and her talking and her walking and her potty training and oh my gosh she is just so sassy,” Tracy said in an interview.
Since starting the calcium blocker eleven years ago, Savannah has continued to make enormous strides. Though still unable to read or write, Savannah enjoys puzzles and social media. She’s “obsessed” with boys, says Tracy. And while Tracy suspects she’ll never be able to live independently, she and her daughter can now share more “normal” moments—something she never anticipated at the start of Savannah’s journey with LGS. While preparing for an event, Savannah helped Tracy get ready.
“We picked out a dress and it was the first time in our lives that we did something normal as a mother and a daughter,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
A sleek, four-foot tall white robot glides across a cafe storefront in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, holding a two-tiered serving tray full of tea sandwiches and pastries. The cafe’s patrons smile and say thanks as they take the tray—but it’s not the robot they’re thanking. Instead, the patrons are talking to the person controlling the robot—a restaurant employee who operates the avatar from the comfort of their home.
It’s a typical scene at DAWN, short for Diverse Avatar Working Network—a cafe that launched in Tokyo six years ago as an experimental pop-up and quickly became an overnight success. Today, the cafe is a permanent fixture in Nihonbashi, staffing roughly 60 remote workers who control the robots remotely and communicate to customers via a built-in microphone.
More than just a creative idea, however, DAWN is being hailed as a life-changing opportunity. The workers who control the robots remotely (known as “pilots”) all have disabilities that limit their ability to move around freely and travel outside their homes. Worldwide, an estimated 16 percent of the global population lives with a significant disability—and according to the World Health Organization, these disabilities give rise to other problems, such as exclusion from education, unemployment, and poverty.
These are all problems that Kentaro Yoshifuji, founder and CEO of Ory Laboratory, which supplies the robot servers at DAWN, is looking to correct. Yoshifuji, who was bedridden for several years in high school due to an undisclosed health problem, launched the company to help enable people who are house-bound or bedridden to more fully participate in society, as well as end the loneliness, isolation, and feelings of worthlessness that can sometimes go hand-in-hand with being disabled.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that [people with disabilities] feel they are a burden to society, or that they fear their families suffer by caring for them,” said Yoshifuji in an interview in 2020. “We are dedicating ourselves to providing workable, technology-based solutions. That is our purpose.”
Shota Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy. Ory Labs, Inc.
Wanting to connect with others and feel useful is a common sentiment that’s shared by the workers at DAWN. Marianne, a mother of two who lives near Mt. Fuji, Japan, is functionally disabled due to chronic pain and fatigue. Working at DAWN has allowed Marianne to provide for her family as well as help alleviate her loneliness and grief.Shota, Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy, agrees. "There are many difficulties in my daily life, but I believe my life has a purpose and is not being wasted," he says. "Being useful, able to help other people, even feeling needed by others, is so motivational."