Very smart documentary on neuroscience pioneer
My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond: Documentary by Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg. 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 22, on KQED.
I just did something great for my brain and you can do the same, when the documentary “My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond” airs on KQED on Wednesday, March 22.
According to the UC Berkeley professor emerita, the five things that contribute to the continued development of the brain at any age are: diet, exercise, newness, challenge and love. You can check off three of those elements for the day by watching the film by Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg. No matter how smart you are, even about anatomy and neuroscience, you will find newness in the information about the miraculous human brain, how it works, and how it keeps on working no matter how old you are.
That’s one of the fundamentals of modern neuroscience, of which Diamond is one of the founders. You will also be
challenged to consider your own brain, to consider how Diamond’s favorite expression — “use it or lose it” — applies to your brain and your life. You will be challenged to consider what Diamond means when she says brain plasticity (its ability to keep developing by forming new connections between its cells) makes us “the masters of our own minds. We literally create our own masterpiece.”
Before Diamond and her colleagues proved otherwise, the prevailing thought was that brains developed according to a genetically determined pattern, hit a high point and then essentially began to deteriorate. Bushwa: A brain can grow — i.e., learn — at any age, and you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Finally, you will experience the fifth element essential to a healthy brain: love, for the singular accomplishments of the now 90-year-old Diamond, who in 1953 was the first woman to earn a doctorate in anatomy from UC Berkeley, who saw her first brain when she was 15 years old, and who has taught, with singular enthusiasm and sheer love of subject and teaching, more than 60,000 students in a six-decade career. And that doesn’t even include the 1.7 million people who have made her the second most popular teacher in the world via YouTube.
Narrated by actress Mayim Bialik, the film details in understandable terms how Diamond determined that brains do better in “enriched” environments than in impoverished ones, and, through studies of four pieces of the brain of Albert Einstein, found a previously undiscovered role for parts of the neurosystem known as glial cells. Diamond really has a love affair with the human brain, and through this joy-filled film, it’s highly contagious.