101 Theory Drive by Terry McDermottMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the amazing tale of Gary Lynch, am obsessive, driven, Scotch-loving neuroscientist at UC-Irvine. His lab studies memory and, apparently, has made important discoveries. This book covers his research into long-term potentiation in memory; a persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent patterns of activity. It is both exciting and some-what disheartening to learn of the awesome potential of human memory identified in intracellular calcium transients left over from primitive olfactory evolution. This science history work seems to fit along with theoretical physics advances where the actual underpinnings are more complex than expected (the hippocampus directing memory tasks to various brain areas), the "there" there being so seemingly insignificant (phosphorylation; a chemical reaction in which a small phosphate group is added to another molecule to change that molecule's activity).
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