My Love Affair with the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond

Dr. Marian Diamond may be the world's best known neuroscientist, having made countless appearances in person and been widely covered in the press. According to this affectionate profile, which features narration by Mayim Bialik—an actress (The Big Bang Theory) and neuroscientist herself—Diamond is the second most popular professor on YouTube, where her Berkeley lectures are accessible to all. Other neuroscientists, including her husband, UCLA professor Arne Scheibel, credit her for helping to found the field by challenging conventional notions. In 1953, Diamond earned the first doctorate in anatomy at Berkeley. By her early 30s, she was a mother of four working as a part-time researcher and lecturer. She joined a team to study the effects of the environment on the brain, a project that would last for 15 years. In comparing the brains of rats living in enriched and impoverished environments, the group found significant differences in brain size over time, ultimately concluding that brain plasticity disproved genetic determinism as an immutable phenomenon. The paper they published in the 1960s met with some resistance before becoming widely accepted, and it inspired Diamond's catchphrase, "Use it or lose it," coined to underscore the fact that the brain atrophies in the absence of ongoing stimulation. Diamond made headlines again in the 1980s when she studied Einstein's brain, and while her resulting paper was controversial due to methodology and results, she helped scientists to see glial cells in a new way. More recently, she has been working to educate children in Cambodia who are victims of the same kind of environmental impoverishment that she once studied in a lab. An engaging portrait of a neuroscience pioneer, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)