{"id":194835,"date":"2017-08-16T19:00:04","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T19:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/marian-c-diamond-90-student-of-the-brain-is-dead\/"},"modified":"2017-08-16T19:00:04","modified_gmt":"2017-08-16T19:00:04","slug":"marian-c-diamond-90-student-of-the-brain-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/marian-c-diamond-90-student-of-the-brain-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Marian C. Diamond, 90, Student of the Brain, Is Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Diamond studied the brains of nine stimulated rats and found that all of them had thicker cerebral cortices than their stimulus-deprived counterparts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the first time anyone had ever seen a structural change in an animal\u2019s brain based on different kinds of early life experiences,\u201d she and Janet Hopson wrote in \u201cMagic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child\u2019s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions From Birth Through Adolescence<\/a>\u201d (1998).<\/p>\n

The results, which Dr. Diamond, Dr. Rozenzweig and the psychologist David Krech published in 1964, helped change scientific understanding of the brain in fundamental ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Diamond showed anatomically, for the first time, what we now call plasticity of the brain,\u201d George Brooks, a professor of int<\/a>egrative biology<\/a> at Berkeley, told the university\u2019s news service last month. \u201cIn doing so she shattered the old paradigm of understanding the brain as a static and unchangeable entity that simply degenerated as we age.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bullfrog Films presents…MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE BRAIN<\/span> Video by Bullfrog Films<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. Diamond went on to show that brains can continue to develop through life; identified structural differences between male and female animal brains; and, by testing elderly players at a women\u2019s bridge club, found that complex card play stimulated the body\u2019s immune system.<\/p>\n

In one of her most celebrated studies, Dr. Diamond and her second husband, Dr. Arnold Scheibel, the director of the brain research institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, examined four samples from Einstein\u2019s brain. The brain had been spirited away and preserved for decades by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein\u2019s autopsy in 1955. Dr. Diamond\u2019s specimens arrived by mail in a jar formerly containing Kraft Miracle Whip and looked like \u201clittle sugar cubes,\u201d she told The Washington Post in 1985.<\/p>\n

Photo<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Marian C. Diamond cradling a preserved human brain in 2010.<\/span>
\n
\n Credit<\/span>
\n Elena Zhukova\/University of California, Berkeley <\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. Diamond looked through a microscope and compared stained slices of the samples with brain tissue from 11 former patients at a Veterans Administration hospital. She found that one area of Einstein\u2019s brain \u2014 the lower parietal lobe, associated with higher-level mathematical and language functioning \u2014 had a high concentration of glial cells, which cushion and feed neurons.<\/p>\n

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The findings, although headline-grabbing, were inconclusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany idiots have big brains loaded with glial cells,\u201d Janice Stevens, staff psychiatrist at the neuropsychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, told The Post. Later research by other scientists, however, showed that glial cells play a hitherto unsuspected role in brain chemistry, helping to build connections between neurons and promoting more complex brain structure.<\/p>\n

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