The "rock star of neuroscience," as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel has aptly been termed, has produced a provocative multi-disciplinary blockbuster whose many facets can scarcely be adequately summarized, let alone analysed, in a brief review such as this. His immensely learned effort to reconcile the "two cultures" encapsulates a lifetime devoted at once into research into the biological basis of memory and refined appreciation of art. The Age of Insight consists of a mammoth argument, based on the premise that the sciences and the arts can learn from one another and constituted by seven elaborately interconnected elements. Thus Kandel links