Although thoroughly assimilated and acculturated, the family sensed the Nazi danger and, unlike others, left Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938 at great expense.

[8] After arriving in the United States and settling in Brooklyn, Kandel was tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies and was accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, from which he graduated in 1944.

He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on "The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger".

The researchers Kandel interacted with were contemplating the technical challenges of intracellular recordings of the electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the vertebrate brain.

After starting his neurobiological work in the difficult thicket of the electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex, Kandel was impressed by the progress that had been made by Stephen Kuffler using a much more experimentally accessible system: neurons isolated from marine invertebrates.

After becoming aware of Kuffler's work in 1955, Kandel graduated from medical school and learned from Stanley Crain how to make microelectrodes that could be used for intracellular recordings of crayfish giant axons.

When Kandel joined the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the US National Institutes of Health in 1957, William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner had recently described the patient HM, who had lost the ability to form new memories after removal of his hippocampus.

Kandel felt it would be productive to select a simple animal model that would facilitate electrophysiological analysis of the synaptic changes involved in learning and memory storage.

Kandel took a position in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School, eventually forming the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior.

Working with Irving Kupferman and Harold Pinsker, he developed protocols for demonstrating simple forms of learning by intact Aplysia.

The results from Kandel's laboratory provided solid evidence for the mechanistic basis of learning as "a change in the functional effectiveness of previously existing excitatory connections.

"[citation needed] Kandel's winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was a result of his work with Aplysia on the biological mechanisms of memory storage.

[15] Starting in 1966 James Schwartz collaborated with Kandel on a biochemical analysis of changes in neurons associated with learning and memory storage.

By 1972 they had evidence that the second messenger molecule cyclic AMP (cAMP) was produced in Aplysia ganglia under conditions that cause short-term memory formation (sensitization).

In 1983 Kandel helped form the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia devoted to molecular neural science.

[17] The Kandel lab has also performed important experiments using transgenic mice as a system for investigating the molecular basis of memory storage in the vertebrate hippocampus.

Neurotransmitters, second messenger systems, protein kinases, ion channels, and transcription factors like CREB have been confirmed to function in both vertebrate and invertebrate learning and memory storage.

[34] Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city,[35] similar to Carl Djerassi.

Kandel's 2012 book, The Age of Insight—as expressed in its subtitle, The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present[36]—represents a wide-ranging historical attempt to place Vienna at the root of cultural modernism by focussing on the personal interconnections between doctors such as Carl von Rokitansky, Emil Zuckerkandl, Sigmund Freud, with artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Arthur Schnitzler, all of whom engaged with the "unconscious" in one way or another and influenced, Kandel claims, one another in the tight-knit salon of Berta Zuckerkandl and related occasions.