Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 2000. His book, In Search of Memory:Towards a New Science of Mind, was published in the US in 2006 to multiple awards and rave reviews from leading neuroscientists. It has not been published in the UK, and is scarcely known here.
Professor Kandel guides us through a history of brain science from the discovery of the neuron by the Spanish Nobel laurate Cajal in the 1890s (Sigmund Freud nearly beat him to it) via the isolation and electrical stimulus of individual cells in the sea snail Aplysia, to his discovery of the electrochemical process that stimulates brain cells to grow new connections that become the basis of long-term memory. This is the key illustration for teachers and parents:
Professor Kandel's work establishes memory as a key focal point for education that should rescue it from the alternatives of abuse (Gradgrind) and neglect (Dewey) that have held back progress from millennia. The most important point is the stimulus promotes the growth of new connections at points of potential within the cell. What is not stimulated doesn't grow. What does grow contributes in the longer term to evolution. We need this growth, and we need research on the best ways of promoting it in specific contexts, from the two times table onwards.