Plenty of books
offer advice about how to find or keep love. But Crazy Little Thing unveils the science behind the insane
things we do for love and lust.
Don’t be fooled, this isn’t your grade school science book. Liz Langley offers a hilarious, confounding,
too-strange-to-be-anything-but-true look at the control our chemicals have over
us.
Have a look:
You Are Here: The Layout of the Brain
Why you’re reading this book is your business, but
chances are you liked the cover, identified with the subject matter, and
decided to investigate further.
How you’re reading this book is a much more
difficult proposition. The brain is incredibly complicated. There are a lot of
things you’ve found murky in your life, like algebra and David Lynch movies,
but these are simple compared to the three pounds of material that has enabled
you to pick up, open, and read what you’re reading.
Yep, that’s all that keeps you going: three pounds
of neurons, synapses, glia, and various other squishy oddments housed in a
protective skull. A gallon of milk weighs more than everything that enabled
Handel to write Messiah.
And I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe
that the only thing the brain can’t seem to figure out is itself; hence the
inevitable “What was I thinking?” when it comes to love and other endeavors.
One of the people helping to figure out why we do
the things we do is Dr. Joseph Shrand, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School and medical director of CASTLE (Clean and Sober Teens Living
Empowered) at the High Point Treatment Center in Brockton, Massachusetts. I
originally wanted to interview Dr. Shrand about the adolescent brain, but he
took the time to describe the basic layout of this intricate organ in plain
terms, which was pretty beneficial for a tourist like myself. Like the old
announcements that told people where they were arriving on the elevator (“Fourth
Floor: women’s apparel, camping gear, pets”), Dr. Shrand explained the brain to
me from the bottom up.
“The brain is a very clunky organ that has evolved
over hundreds of millions of years—and humans, we never threw anything away. We
just built one chunk of brain on top of another,” he says. I can’t help
thinking of Hoarders and my brain insisting, “No! I’m keeping my
prehistoric ability to kill a rabbit with a rock. It’s perfectly good and I might
need it one day!”
The first level of the brain is the brain stem,
which is, Dr. Shrand says, “the most ancient part of the brain, responsible for
heart rate and breathing and sweating and all those things that happen
automatically that we’re not aware of. The brain stem really has to be ready to
go at birth.”
The brain is made up of neurons, which have long offshoots
called axons, and the insulation around these axons is called myelin—Dr. Shrand
compares it to the insulation around an electrical wire. The reason babies don’t
walk but “squiggle around” is because the motor part of their brain is not
fully myelinated, “so even though parts of the brain are functioning, they may
not be functioning at a fully mature level.” The brain develops with us.
In fact, check out this beautiful finding from
Pilyoung Kim of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland:
The brains of new mothers grow, not greatly but significantly, in the areas
responsible for “motivation, reward behavior, and emotion regulation,” reports
Emily Sohn on Discovery News. The brain is reconfiguring itself to respond to
its new role, and on top of that, the mothers who are the most gooey and gushy
about their babies have the biggest growth. “These are the areas that motivate
a mother to take care of her baby, feel rewarded when the baby smiles at her,
and fill her with positive emotions from simple interactions with her infant.”
