Marian Diamond: the scientist who discovered brain plasticity

Scientists are also at the mercy of the vagaries of fame.

In 1985 Marian Diamond published a study on the brain of Albert Einstein. In the work he had analyzed several samples of the brain of the German physicist and compared them with similar samples taken from control brains. The result was that in the brain of Albert Einstein the number of glial cells, a type of cells that together with neurons forms the human nervous system, was higher than normal in some of the areas studied. As a result of this publication Marian Diamond rose to fame, and the figure of Albert Einstein made invisible in front of the cameras the great works that Marian had already done at that time.

Figure where the brain of Albert Einstein is represented and the areas from which samples were taken are marked. Diamond et al., 1985

In 1964 the first solid evidence was published that the adult brain changes anatomically with experience. Currently, the brain is a plastic organ with a certain capacity for reorganization and adaptation to stimuli is a fact recognized by the entire neuroscientific community but in the sixties it was not believed that way. In fact, the works that precede this publication focus on studying whether experience produces changes in the biochemistry of the brain, not in its structure. Including anatomy was something innovative in the work "Chemical and Anatomical Plasticity of Brain", which had four authors: three men and one woman, Marian C. Diamond.

In this experiment, rats were bred in three situations:

-Control control, where the animals lived in ordinary breeding situations.

-Condition social, where animals lived with more partners than normal to increase their social stimuli, had toys and were motivated to perform various activities.

-Condition of isolation, where among other limitations the animals lived alone, without toys, etc.

The idea was to see if living in an environment with many stimuli or in one of isolation generated significant differences in the brains of rats. So it was; the most important result of the study were the anatomical differences found between the brains of the rats in social condition and isolation. This article supposed a change of paradigm towards the idea of ​​a changing, adaptive, plastic brain.

In addition to her career in the laboratory, Marian combined the research with teaching: she was professor emeritus of the Integrative Biology unit at the University of Berkeley, and fortunately some of her anotomy classes are still preserved thanks to the fact that they are available on YouTube: