Healthy Brain, Happy Life (5 page)

MY OWN PERSONAL ENRICHED ENVIRONMENT: ADVENTURES IN BORDEAUX

My life in college was firmly focused on doing well in my classes, though I did date a couple of guys (somewhat awkwardly) during my first two years at Berkeley. Despite my general shyness as a young woman, the truth is that I have always had an adventurous spirit and I was itching to see the world and travel abroad. U.C. Berkley had the perfect study abroad program for me, and I signed up in my junior year. I learned that if I went to particular campuses abroad, I could even take science classes that counted toward my major of physiology and anatomy, so I would not lose any credits. The only country I would even consider visiting was France. I had been enchanted with the French language ever since I started learning it in junior high. My choices for campuses were either Bordeaux or Marseille. In other words, wine or fish soup. The choice was clear—I went for the wine! Little did I know when I signed up for my junior year abroad adventure that France, with its unique culture, beautiful language, strong traditions, glorious foods and wines, stylish clothes, amazing museums, excellent educational system, and brilliant residents (especially the men) was going to serve as my own personal enriched environment for the next twelve months.

IS THERE A CRITICAL PERIOD FOR LEARNING A LANGUAGE?

Everyone agrees that there is a very special time, called the critical period, during about the first six months of life when the brain is particularly good at learning languages. Wonderful work from Professor Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington has shown that babies’ brains can soak up and learn not just one language but multiple languages during this time.

But what if you start learning a new language a little later in life? Like most people of my generation, I began learning a second language (in my case French) at the ripe old age of twelve when I got to middle school. What part of my brain helped me learn this second language? It turns out that the brain does rely on many of the same areas as are used when learning to speak your native tongue. However, you also seem to recruit additional brain areas to help you with a second late-learned language. These additional areas are situated toward the bottom part of the frontal lobe on the left side, called the inferior frontal gyrus. You also use the left parietal lobe. Another study showed that people (like me) who learned language later in life actually had a thicker cortex in the left interior frontal gyrus and a thinner cortex in the right inferior frontal gyrus.

Learning a second language at twelve years or later provides yet another example of brain plasticity. The brain, when prodded to make connections, will indeed do so. It might take longer and be more difficult, but it’s possible!

I loved the year I spent in France because it completely immersed me in a totally foreign and exotic culture that in 1985 was far less infiltrated by American cultural icons like McDonald’s, Costco, and reruns of
Friends
than you see in France today. That year abroad also brought me one of the most romantic experiences of my life.

It all started with my request to live with a family in Bordeaux who had a piano that I could play. I had played the piano from the time I was about seven until I was a senior in high school, and I still played casually (so as not to completely lose my classical repertoire) while I was studying at Berkeley.

Monsieur and Madame Beauville were a lovely couple whose home had a few extra bedrooms upstairs, one of which housed a piano. Soon after I arrived, Madame Beauville asked me to make sure I was at home one particular afternoon at a particular time because she had hired a piano tuner to come. I happily agreed and waited for the little old man with white hair to come walking up the stairs to my bedroom to tune the piano. But to my surprise, it was not grand-père who made his way up the stairs to my bedroom, but a young, hot French guy named François. François set about tuning my piano and chatting with me in French, of course. Before that day I never thought I was particularly good at flirting. But that day I discovered I
was
good at it, and I could even do it in French! In that hour, I not only got a perfectly tuned piano for my bedroom but I snagged a card with the address of a sheet music shop where François worked part time and an invitation to come by and say bonjour anytime.

Of course, I somehow found time in my busy schedule of lectures, coffee, and croissants to visit him in the music shop right around dinnertime, and he invited me for a bite to eat. After just a few more dates that began after his shift in the music shop, we were an item, and I suddenly had myself a very sweet and musically inclined French boyfriend.

How had I come out so far out of my shell? I had no idea, but I see now the enormous amount of brain plasticity occurring that year. This was even better than living in Disney World. Everything was so different—not only was I speaking French all the time and taking all of my classes in French but I truly felt like a different person while speaking the language. Suddenly, I was no longer the geeky wallflower with nary a date in sight. Instead, in France I was considered extremely exotic because I was an Asian woman from California who didn’t speak Japanese but instead spoke fluent American. When I was growing up in northern California, Asian American women were a dime a dozen; now I got to be exotic for the very first time in my life. That was huge for me. Not only that, but—I don’t know if you are aware—the French kiss each other all the time. It’s a rule. You have to kiss; it’s frowned upon if you don’t. Finally! An excuse to kiss everyone for the girl from the family that didn’t hug or kiss much at all—I was in seventh heaven.

And the more I learned, the happier I became.

In France, all this kissing made me step out of my comfort zone and become a lot looser and a
lot
more affectionate. I now realize that making these kinds of changes literally expanded who I was: As I changed my behaviors and experienced new sensations, my brain made adjustments to this new information and stimuli.

Aside from François, my French became fluent because I was also taking some serious science classes—not with American students mind you, but with all the other French students. That meant all the lectures were in French and, most terrifying for me, the oral and written exams were all in French. I was not that worried about the written exams because most of the science words are the same as or similar to the English words. But I had never in my academic career taken an oral exam. Much less in my second language. I was totally scared.

One of my clearest memories from this time was while I was responding to the questions a professor posed during an oral exam. I was very nervous and suddenly lost all ability to speak with a proper French accent. The words and the grammar coming out of my mouth were all French, but the sounds were pure American. I could hear myself speaking French with an incredibly strong American accent—
quelle horreur!
Good thing I was graded on content and not verbal presentation. I ended up acing all my classes. Clearly the geeky bookworm was still present somewhere in my new French incarnation.

This experience in France also gave me another unexpected and what turned out to be lifelong gift. It was in France that I became fascinated with the study of memory, another form of brain plasticity. I had the great good luck to take a course at the University of Bordeaux called “La Neuropsychology de la Memoire” (neuropsychology of memory). This course was taught by a very well-respected neuroscientist, Robert Jaffard, who not only ran an active research lab but was a wonderfully clear and engaging lecturer. I had no idea there was a strong neuroscience group at the University of Bordeaux when I chose it, but what a lucky coincidence. Jaffard was the first to teach me about the history of the study of memory and the raging debates of the day involving two researchers at the University of California, San Diego, named Stuart Zola-Morgan and Larry Squire and one researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) named Mort Mishkin. Little did I know at the time that in the next ten years I would work with all three of these scientists either as a graduate student at U.C. San Diego or as a post-doc at NIH. Most important, Jaffard took student volunteers in his lab, and I happily began testing little black mice on memory tasks in my spare time, giving me my very first real taste of laboratory research. I loved it in the lab, and this, along with the wonderful background in neuroanatomy I had from Diamond (I also worked my entire last year at Berkeley in Diamond’s lab), made it easy for me to decide that I wanted to apply to graduate school as soon as I finished my undergraduate degree.

In between studying for classes and working in the lab, there was François. It turns out that he not only tuned pianos but played the piano and had a near obsessive fascination with the harmonies of the Beach Boys. So I had found a French guy with California in his heart. He had tapes of all the Beach Boys albums and I would often find him in his living room listening intently to them through his headphones as he tried to painstakingly transcribe all the complex chords they used to create their sound. He was doing this with such glee and concentration that I hated to interrupt his sessions. I too was a big Beach Boys fan, but I had never fully appreciated the complexities of their harmonies before François. I thought the Beach Boys were just fun and easy to dance to, but François, with his trained musical ear showed me his favorite chords and riffs in that music I knew so well, and opened it up in a very different way for me.

One of the many things we enjoyed doing together was playing piano duets. At first, François had only one piano in his apartment, but because he worked at the biggest piano store in town, he eventually borrowed a second piano so that we could practice and play our duets in his apartment, where I was spending increasing amounts of my time. And because I loved playing classical music, we played classical duets—Bach, to be precise.

But the really fun part was when we went to the piano shop at night after it had closed. There in the empty store we performed our duets on the big beautiful eight-foot concert grand pianos that were used for performances in the local theaters. I always played the Bösendorfer (I loved the sound of those low notes), and he played the Steinway. We played as loud and long as we wanted, and the beautiful tones of these pianos (expertly tuned by François himself) made even the mistakes sound good. I consider these evenings as some of the loveliest times I spent with François.

In addition to playing classical music together, we listened to a lot of it. One of my favorites was the Bach solo cello suites. I listened to François’s record of Yo-Yo Ma playing these pieces over and over again. It turns out that François noticed how much I loved them, and that Christmas I received the most precious gift that I had ever received before or since: a cello.

I was flabbergasted.

For someone who had dated only a little bit in her first two years of college, I was getting a crash course on romance from François that I didn’t want to end. I decided that the myth was absolutely true: The French
are
the most romantic people in the world!