Professor’s passion for the brain is celebrated
“Use it or lose it” has become an easy shorthand for reminding people to stay mentally sharp in later life, through activities like learning a new skill, sport or language. Think of the sudoku craze, or the well-publicized finding that London taxi drivers had larger-than-usual brain memory centers from mentally calculating the swiftest routes through the city rather than relying on GPS.
Yet few people are aware that it was an infectiously upbeat, longtime UC Berkeley anatomy professor, subject of the delightful PBS documentary “My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond,” who popularized the notion we now take for granted — that cognitive abilities aren’t static.
As a relentlessly curious young scientist in 1964, Diamond, who died last year at age 90, was the rare woman in a field dominated by men, and by their consensus belief
in genetic determinism. She provided the first hard evidence of the brain’s plasticity — its ability to develop, grow and make new connections even into late adulthood — and forever left her mark on the field of modern neuroscience.
Diamond taught for six decades at UC Berkeley and spent the last five years of her life working closely with husband-and-wife Berkeley filmmakers Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan on “My Love Affair With the Brain” (narrated by actress Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory”). Already a hit at numerous film festivals, the film has been nominated for a news and documentary Emmy Award, to be announced at New York’s Lincoln Center on Monday, Oct. 1.
Ryan and Weimberg came to the project after finishing their 2008 Emmy-nominated film “Soldiers of Conscience” about military conscientious objectors and moral injury in war.
“We felt it had been such intense subject matter that we really were asking ourselves the question, Where is the good news for humanity? And not just wishful thinking, but what we call evidence-based good news,” said Ryan in a recent interview.
Diamond’s work as a teacher and researcher was exactly that: grounded in scientific rigor, yet resulting in profoundly uplifting results for individuals and humankind.
“Everyone wants a better brain,” said Weimberg. “It was beautiful to see people come out of Marian’s (neuroanatomy) lectures glowing with the possibility of selfknowledge. You could just see it on people’s faces, their emotional engagement with this idea of their own brain’s ability to absorb knowledge. We called it the ‘Diamond effect,’ and conveying that in the film was one of our main goals.”
“What plasticity reveals is that we are the masters of our own minds. We literally create our own masterpiece,” Diamond says in the film.
The documentary covers all the major accomplishments in Diamond’s career, including overcoming her male colleagues’ knee-jerk skepticism, even outright rejection, of her initial plasticity findings.
“Young lady, that brain cannot change!” a male scientist shouted at Diamond when she presented her data to the 1964 annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists.
In 1985 she became something of an international sensation as the first person to study Albert Einstein’s preserved brain. Examination of paper-thin slices of his cerebral cortex found that Einstein had a greater ratio of glial cells to neurons, leading to greater interest in studying the impact of glia on cognition.
Alongside her research triumphs, “My Love Affair With the Brain” stresses Diamond’s exhilarating teaching style. Throughout her career, she was consistently one of the university’s most popular lecturers. Her fame grew to worldwide proportions after Cal made her lectures available on YouTube in 2005. They currently have more than 4.6 million views, making Diamond the second-most popular professor in the world.
“It’s so rare for someone to be such a great scientist as well as such an exciting teacher, who liked nothing more than to see the ‘light go on’ in students,” said Ryan. “From the very first time we met Marian, over lunch at the Faculty Club, we witnessed the way people would swoon around her, ask to take their picture with her, because she’d made a difference in their lives.”
“Walking around campus with Marian felt like walking around Memphis with Elvis,” said Weimberg, who won Emmy Awards for his earlier documentaries “Loyalty and Betrayal: The Story of the American Mob” and “Earth and the American Dream.” (Before turning to nonfiction, he and Ryan worked on bigbudget feature films. Weimberg did editing on “The Godfather Part II,” and Ryan worked on “The Return of the Jedi.”)
And then there was the hatbox.
Diamond was legendary for carrying around the UC Berkeley campus an oldfashioned hatbox containing a formaldehyde-preserved human brain. It was an indispensable prop during her hundreds of lectures in Wheeler Auditorium.
Dressed in a blazer and colorful scarf, her white hair neatly coiled in a French twist, Diamond would pull the brain from the box and invite her students to marvel along with her at what she once described as “the most complex mass of protoplasm on this Earth and, perhaps, in our galaxy.”
“Even in her late 80s she was just this ball of energy bursting with ideas and curiosity,” said Ryan. She and Weimberg became close friends as well as collaborators with Diamond and her husband of 35 years, UCLA neuroscientist Arne Scheibel.
In her final days, said Ryan, “Marian was in the hospital and nearing the end, and out of nowhere she said, ‘If you are going to do life, you have got to be all in.’
“Is that not beautiful?”