Mayim's Monday Motivation

Let’s get brainy.

I spent 12 years in college and graduate school studying Neuroscience which is the study of the brain and nervous system. My speciality was psychoneuroendocrinology and that’s what my thesis focused on.

A thesis is a novel research project you work on for the bulk of your time as a graduate student. You present and “defend” it in a rigorous oral examination as well as in written form as a bound volume of academic literature. You typically have a primary supervisor and have to select a committee of professors who oversee your research and ultimately, recommend you for your doctoral degree.

For my thesis research, I worked with a population of individuals with Prader-Willi Syndrome and examined if their high rates of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder correlated in any meaningful way (statistically speaking) with certain hormones that can be measured in blood and saliva. I looked at Oxytocin, Vasopressin and Cortisol.

How did I know I wanted to study neuroscience?

I fell in love with neuroscience in my first quarter at UCLA in a class called “Intro to Psychobiology.” The class taught us about the psychology and biology of our existence. This field is also sometimes referred to as Neuropsychology, but it was a class for first year students and it fit into my schedule and was vaguely science-y which I knew I was interested in. Professor Carlos Grijalva was my lecturer one day early on in the quarter talking about neurons, the specialized cells of the brain and nervous system. I vaguely knew about neurons from high school biology, but this was a level of detail I did not even know was possible.

What Dr. Grijalva explained was how electrical signals are the method of communication that cells use. Namely, physical or emotional experiences are not actually physical or emotional. They are encoded by the firing of cells which then leads to the firing of other cells. I won’t get into the blessed details of this process, but, in short, I was floored. I could not believe we could understand things like this - that the human experience could be understood on this intricate and delicate level with mathematical precision. It was at that moment I decided to study Neuroscience and I have never regretted it or wished I had chosen a different major - it was a pure instant love that has endured for decades.

I attended a large research university (UCLA), and most of the professors taught as a side job; their primary job was to do research, publish papers, and make discoveries. This is true in any field at the University.

My first mentor, Dr. Eran Zaidel of blessed memory, was the other Professor who taught my Intro to Psychobiology class, and I joined his lab as a student looking to learn about how labs work. I ended up among a group of inquisitive and dedicated graduate students and professors who were interested specifically in the role of the corpus callosum, the series of fibers that literally connect the right and left hemispheres of your brain.

I ended up being assigned to work directly with an Italian doctor and Neuropsychologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni who helped guide my undergraduate research career, including serving as the mentor for my Neuroscience honors research.

After months studying the corpus callosum, I was told we had the incredible opportunity to meet with some patients who had no corpus callosum. I had read about these individuals in the literature but never imagined I would get to meet them in real life. There are not many cases like these, and I can’t share the details of their cases, but I can say that I had the honor to meet with an individual who was, incredibly, born without a corpus callosum as well as a woman who had hers sectioned to treat debilitating epilepsy.

We got to get to know these patients and I assisted in performing some reaction time experiments with them. If you’re curious about this field, I recommend checking out The Parallel Brain: The Cognitive Neuroscience of the Corpus Callosum.

If I hadn’t had such shaky hands and lack of precision, I would have liked to be a neurosurgeon...I could never get good yield in chemistry lab, and I broke more than one piece of expensive equipment. That was literally what showed me that my dreams of medical school for neurosurgery were not likely to “yield” good results... Plus, no matter how hard I tried, I could not master organic chemistry and I needed at least a B to have the GPA to even consider applying to medical school. That’s how I ended up working towards a doctorate and it ended up allowing me to become a mom in graduate school and be with my kids as I wrote my thesis. A very different path than medical school indeed.

My time at UCLA as an undergraduate and graduate student was a blessed time in my life. I studied every day for hours and hours for 12 years. That’s what most of us did, save for the students who absorbed information and didn’t need to review it - those people never made sense to me!

Most people go on to a post-doctoral research program and begin a path towards being a tenured professor with their own labs. I decided to be home with my kids, teach neuroscience for middle and high schoolers in the homeschool community, and ultimately, I returned to the acting career of my teenage years and played a neurobiologist on The Big Bang Theory. Definitely not a straight or typical path but one I wouldn’t change for anything as it led me here and I am a collection of all of those experiences, as we all are.

This week’s episode tackles suggestions and wisdom from a practicing neurosurgeon, Dr. Rahul Jandial. I love talking to neuroscientists so much and Dr. Jandial brings such an incredible set of experiences and perspectives specifically about sleep and consciousness. I hope you’ll listen to this upcoming episode and see how much wonder the brain produces, and how even though we know so little about the brain, we know enough to make so many of us fall in love with this organ over and over again. Check out Dr. Jandial’s episode tomorrow and tell me you’re not swooning over the amazing capabilities of the brain!