Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)

I stumbled upon this in my search for readings for my course Media and Minds, and it's a gem. Birkerts first drew me in because of some biographical overlap: growing up the child of European immigrants (in his case, both parents from Latvia, in mine my mother from Germany, but my father, with his rejection of his Irish Catholic background and of American culture and his interest in East Asia, might well have been an immigrant), Birkerts was painfully aware of how he didn't fit in with his peers, and wanted to assimilate. Eventually, however - and this is just my surmise - Birkerts's outsider status has given him a perch from which he castigates the entire drift of our culture in our electonic age. The book is a worthy sequel and complement to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written 10 years after Postman's work, and on the cusp of the internet revolution, Gutenberg Elegies is astonishingly prescient in its picture of what has come to pass: the fracturing of attention and selves, the loss of interiority, etc. First, though, Birkerts gives an account of how "deep reading" (a term he coins here and which Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home, borrows) - which was on its way out already 30 years ago - allows us to explore other worlds and uncover or invent other selves, other versions of us.

Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006)

Kandel won the 2000 Nobel prize in physiology for his pioneering work on the neurobiology of memory. In this fascinating scientific autobiography, Kandel takes us from his early years in 1930s Vienna to his Nobel prize and beyond. Kandel explains the cellular and molecular science very lucidly, so that this layman only felt he got lost in the details a few times. Kandel's big contribution was to prove that short-term memory depends on chemical changes - increasing the flow of neurotransmitters at the synpapses between neurons - while long-term memory depends on structural changes - adding dendritic connections between neurons. The three key conditions Kandel examines here, inspired by early behaviorists such as Pavlov, are habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning (all of which he, as usual, explains very clearly). In his 60s and 70s Kandel turned from this foundational work on implicit memory to the more complex topic of explicit memory, which depends on attention and, Kandel suggests, spatial awareness. Kandel also reflects on the skills, choices, collaborations, and serendipity that propelled him to the heights of the scientific world. Through his college years (at Harvard), Kandel was focused on historical questions, writing an honors thesis on different intellectuals' accounts of the Nazi menace that had chased Kandel's family from Europe. A college romance with the daughter of prominent Austrian-Jewish psychoanalysts piqued his interest in the mind and a possible career in psychiatry. However, early on this new path, under the influence of a different mentor, Kandel made a pivotal decision. Trying to pinpoint the biological substrates of the id, ego, and superego, as Kandel hoped to do, was too grandiose; instead, he should focus on the individual neuron. This "radical reductionism," as Kandel calls it, served him very well indeed! Beyond the science of memory and his account of his career, Kandel includes glimpses of him as a person: his lifelong interest in high culture and Bildung, his love-hate relationship with Vienna, which led him in later years, when he was raised to great prominence by his accomplishments, to pressure Austrian politicians and institutions finally to reckon with their country's past.