For nearly 55 years, until her retirement in 2014, Marian Diamond would often be seen walking through campus to her anatomy class carrying a flowered hat box, within which nestled a real, pickled human brain. Gently lifting it from its wrapping, she would display it to classes and express her awe that such a small, three-pound mass of protoplasm was the most complex structure known to humankind.
Over the course of her career, Diamond, a professor emerita of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, demonstrated that an enriched environment builds better brains and helped establish the now accepted idea that the brain changes throughout our lifetimes and that we need to continually “use it or lose it.” She also conducted the first scientific analysis of Albert Einstein’s brain.
Read more from Berkeley News | February 26th, 2016: https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/02/26/brain-scientist-marian-diamond-subject-of-new-documentary/