Diamond with a preserved human brainELENA ZHUKOVA
Marian Cleeves Diamond, a neuroscientist who discovered that the brain was malleable to life experiences, died on July 25 at the age of 90.
In the 1960s, Diamond’s experiments with rats revealed that animals raised in enriched cages were better able to navigate mazes and had thicker cerebral cortices than rodents that grew up with impoverished surroundings. This discovery came at a time when most scientists believed that nature, rather than nurture, was the key factor that shaped the brain.
“The idea that the brain could change based on environmental input and stimulation was felt to be silly,” Robert Knight, a University of California, Berkeley, (UCB) professor of psychology and neuroscience, tells the Washington Post. “And that’s the boat she completely sunk.”
Diamond is also ...
