Hi there, I'm Jason Gautz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas in little doses from some of the most creative thinkers around.

On the Think Again podcast, we take ourselves out of our comfort zone, surprising my

guests and me, your host, with unexpected interview clips from Big Thinks archives, ideas

that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss. Today, I'm so happy to be joined

by Professor Eric Kandel of Columbia University. In the year 2000, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering work on understanding how memory is stored in the brain

by studying a particular type of sea snail with a relatively simple nervous system.

In his recent books, he's been pioneering in a very different way,

trying to bridge the gap between the quote-unquote two cultures of the sciences and the humanities.

His current book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, continues this work, looking at the ways both modern art and science reduce complex phenomena down to their component parts to achieve new insights and effects.

Welcome to think again, Professor Kendall. Thank you very much. I guess maybe we should start with

the cultural divide between the humanities and the sciences. I mean, this is a very big topic, but

maybe you want to start with a bit of an overview of how that happened?

Yes. I mean, this was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, C.P. Snow wrote a series of, gave a series

of lectures and wrote a series of essays on the divide between the humanities and the sciences.

He thought that this was an unbridgeable divide

because humanists and scientists not only had different aspirations, different goals, but used

different methodologies. And the point that I try to make in this book, the overriding theme,

is that humanistic

aspirations are not unique to people who are called humanists, but scientists can also have

humanistic aspirations.

And all immodesty, I can say, that the study of learning and memory is a humanistic ideal.

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