As a theater major at NYU, Shannon Moffett learned how to get into a character’s mindset. Her latest creative endeavor was harder—getting into the human mind itself. In late January the fourth-year Stanford medical student published The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries (Algonquin).
Moffett spent time with eight experts at work across the country, including an inner-city neurosurgeon removing a bullet from a brain, a scientist probing the brain’s connection to consciousness, and a researcher studying why we sleep. Much of what they are doing is so cutting-edge, says the first-time author, that probably only 5 percent of the information in her book is taught to medical students.
Moffett, 33, got her inspiration for the book from Ben Barres’s first-year neurobiology course, which she took six years ago. Each session an expert guest lecturer introduced a new topic.
“I saw all these different takes on the mind and the brain by these very different personalities, and I thought it was a great way to learn because each topic went along with the person’s personality,” she recalls. Moffett uses a similar format for her book. Reviewing it in the Washington Post, prominent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi cites Moffett’s “dramatic real-life vignettes . . . written in chatty and often elegant prose.”
With the help of Stanford grants in 2000 and in 2001, Moffett wrote the first two chapters, on Chicago neurosurgeon Roberta Glick, and the work being done on consciousness by Caltech neuroscientist Christoph Koch and DNA pioneer Francis Crick. When she graduates, she will have taken seven years to complete the four-year medical program, but will also have a book to her credit.
“I’m still amazed that the process of writing this book gave me a ticket to ask questions of the people I’d most like to chat with,” says Moffett, whose parents and other family members are journalists. She describes some big surprises. In one experiment subject, Koch identified a neuron that seemed to fire only in reaction to images of actress Jennifer Aniston—not for anything else even closely related, like other Hollywood actresses or pretty women. “No one thought you could find such a thing,” Moffett says. “Everybody is still convinced that a conscious concept must be the product of a whole bunch of neurons firing.”
The more Moffett learned, the more questions arose. She cites the case of patient HM, whose hippocampus—which processes memories—was removed to alleviate epilepsy. Since surgery, he has been unable to remember a new event or fact for more than a few seconds, even though he retains memories of events prior to his surgery. “I really started to question what it would mean to be conscious without a memory,” Moffett says.
Her conception of consciousness also broadened after seeing videos of bonobo chimpanzees who had learned language well enough to follow orders like “Go wash the potatoes, cut them up, and put them in a pot on the stove,” even when they had never heard that instruction before. She began to question an assumption implicit in neuroscience—that the mind is a product of the brain. That, in turn, prompted her to write a chapter about someone who doesn’t believe that consciousness exists only in the brain—a Zen monk.
“We can prove that I can no longer communicate with your mind after I’ve destroyed your brain,” Moffett says, “but for all we know, your mind may still be out there—it’s just not connected to a mouth or eyes to communicate your experience.”
It’s perhaps surprising that Moffett doesn’t plan to pursue neurology or psychiatry herself. Instead, she has opted for emergency medicine, something she’s personally familiar with after giving birth prematurely to twin girls last summer. Instead of a three-pound enigma, she had two two-pound ones.
LAURA SHIN, ’97, is a writer in New York.
