So You Think You Know Your Brain?

The public’s fascination with the brain, says neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt ’94 (PhD), has spawned scores of myths about how it functions.

Take the assertion that drinking alcohol kills your brain cells. Not true, says Aamodt, coauthor of the new book Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.

That’s a myth that has its origins in the early days of neuroscience research, Aamodt says, when scientists observed what they thought were the death of brain cells after drinking. And while heavy drinking shrinks neurons, neurons generally bounce back to normal once you quit drinking, though people with advanced alcoholism may lose brain cells to the effects of malnutrition.

“The early neuroscientists didn’t have the proper statistical sampling to count the cells,” says Aamodt. “The effects are reversible.”

Then there’s the one about having your children listen to Mozart symphonies to make them smarter. The research doesn’t back that one up either.

“Listening to Mozart won’t make them any smarter, but having your children learn to play an instrument will improve their spatial reasoning skills,” she says.

Aamodt, who lives in Winters, Calif., with her husband, Ken Britten, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Davis, has spent the past two decades studying the brain, first as a doctoral student at Rochester and currently as the editor of the academic journal Nature Neuroscience. While advances in neuroscience have been changing the scientific view of the brain and its abilities, much of that work has been slow to make its way into popular culture.

She and her coauthor, Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton, hatched the idea to write the book about eight years ago, both hoping to share their in-depth knowledge with the general public.

The book arrives in the midst of a growing industry aimed at selling video games and puzzle books to aging baby boomers worried about their own cognitive decline.

Aamodt says the research has failed to show a strong connection between such activities and improved mental fitness. But she says physical exercise has been shown to help brain health, most likely by getting more blood to the brain and by slowing the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain responsible for what’s called “executive function”—the set of abilities that allows humans to behave properly and focus on the job at hand.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University, Aamodt studied for her PhD in the Rochester neuroscience lab of Kathy and Ernest Nordeen, whose research focuses on how zebra finches learn to sing birdsongs from their fathers.

She continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, but by 1998, she was yearning for a professional life outside the laboratory. She was contemplating a career in science writing when the company that publishes the journal Nature founded Nature Neuroscience. She was hired as an assistant editor, and five years later was named editor-in-chief, responsible for helping choose 15 papers to publish a month from about 200 that are submitted.

“Our function is to screen the papers and select the top ones, both in interest and quality,” she says.

With the successful launch of the book this spring, including publication in 14 languages, Aamodt has decided to take a break from her editorial duties. In June, she’ll set sail with her husband on their 45-foot ketch Aquila. He’s on sabbatical, and they plan to cruise in the South Pacific over the ensuing 14 months, returning to San Francisco in August 2009.

Aamodt’s not sure what she’ll do upon her return. If Welcome to Your Brain is a hit, she may turn to that science-writing career she dreamed of a decade ago.

“That might be my third career,” she says. “Who knows?”

—David McKay Wilson

David McKay Wilson is a New York–based freelance writer.