A toy wind-up brain toys with the idea of self-contemplation.

A Book for the Curious Brain

By Barbara Ellis

You know how it is—the person you meet at a party or on the plane starts up a conversation, and inevitably the subject turns to “So, what do you do?” For some academics—mathematicians or theoretical chemists, perhaps—the answer to that innocent question can be a conversation stopper. But for others, it can lead to a barrage of questions. This has always been the case for Sam Wang ’86, associate professor of molecular biology in Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, and not just on planes or at parties. Wang studies the brain, and taxi drivers, barbers, even scientists from other disciplines, ply him with questions once they find out his field. “Is it true that alcohol kills brain cells?” “Does Sudoku improve my memory?” “Can blind people hear better than sighted people?” Wang heard so many variations on this theme that he finally decided “it would be fun to write a popular book for nonscientists that would bust some popular myths and tell all those curious people some real facts—a kind of user’s manual for the brain.”

That user’s manual has now been published as Welcome to Your Brain by Bloomsbury USA (the same publisher whose British counterpart brought out an unassuming little series about a child-wizard named Harry Potter) and is subtitled Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. Early reviews have been encouraging. “If all scientists could write like this,” enthused science writer Sandra Blakeslee, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, “professional science writers would be out of a job.” Wang wrote the book with Sandra Aamodt, the editor of Nature Neuroscience, who had been thinking of writing a book along the same lines when a mutual acquaintance brought them together.

Sam Wang in his Princeton office.

It’s “a book about the brain for people who own one and are interested in how it works, and how to use it better,” Wang says. It has “practical advice for people in their 40s who are feeling a little less smart than they were; a parent worried about raising a child; and a businesswoman who wants to use her cell phone better.” With its almost-square shape reminiscent of the For Dummies series and amusingly quirky illustrations by Lisa Haney, the book has the look and feel of a graphic novel. It’s precisely that user-friendly aura that Sam hopes will make it accessible and appealing to a broad audience, including “high-school students in Illinois, an art gallery owner in Los Angeles, or a taxi driver in Boston.” It’s written in a humorous, direct style with references to popular culture, personal stories, and puzzles, and although it’s scientifically accurate (every chapter was checked by at least two colleagues in the field), there are no daunting scientific terms, tables, diagrams, or references to papers. Readers who want to know more are directed to a website.

It’s hard not to be drawn into this book, whose shaded boxes in three categories—“Practical tip,” “Myth,” and “Did you know?”—break up the text and carry eye-catching titles such as “Men learn to be gay,” “Go see it on the mountain: The neuroscience of visions,” and “Warning signs of a stroke—and what to do.” (We’ll leave it to you to decide which heading fits which category.) The manual’s six sections, each dealing with a different aspect of the brain, encourage readers to leaf and dip. Wang and Aamodt hope at least some of them will start by taking the quiz that opens the book, to test what they already know, rightly or wrongly, about the brain. (We’ve included a sampling of the questions at the conclusion of this article.) Even Techers shouldn’t be dismayed if they score less than 100 percent. “Surprisingly, even neuroscientists don’t do so well in that quiz,” Sam says. “The people who do best are physicians, because they learn the most useful information about the brain during their medical training.”

Naturally, Wang hopes the book will be a critical and popular success. But he was motivated to write it because “I spend my time in the lab looking for fundamental facts on brain function, and had been wondering how an ivory tower person like myself could do something that’s useful for people.” He points out that over the last 20 years, new techniques have greatly increased scientific understanding of how the brain functions. “We used to look at brain tissue in the dish, and now we’re imaging brain function in the intact animal.” The general public, however, hasn’t had much opportunity to keep up with these advances, because many of them are published in journals that only neuroscientists tend to read. The information needs to be tweaked into something that’s relevant to people.

“When I read scientific papers,” Sam says, “I’m always thinking in the back of my mind how I could make what I’m reading into something to interest a lay person. For example, mice cannot appreciate Diet Coke because the sugar receptors in their tongues can’t bind to the sugar substitute aspartame. A neuroscientist may not think this is a particularly interesting fact, but perhaps a lay person would.” Of course, he adds, “I use different criteria when designing laboratory experiments or thinking up projects for my lab team.”

Wang grew up in Riverside, California, the sociable, outgoing son of Chinese-born parents who settled there in the 1960s. When he came to Caltech in 1982, he quickly immersed himself in student life. “I was the social cochair of Ruddock, the campus social chair, and the business manager for the little t,” he says. “Caltech has an exceptional playing field when it comes to being social—it’s a very accessible place, ‘friendly’ being the operative word, and a lot of activities are available to the individual person if they want to take advantage of it. It’s like a liberal-arts college, but at the same time, it’s a great tech college as well. It’s the only place like that that I’m aware of.”

In 1985 Sam Wang (highlighted) took part in a Ruddock House stunt for the 1985 Big T that could probably not be repeated now without an aerial assault unit appearing overhead. During the morning rush hour, a group of juniors calling themselves “The House Wasted Union” stopped the traffic heading downtown on the 110 freeway expressly for this photo. Wang recalls that the other drivers were so shocked they didn’t even honk their horns.

Wang majored in physics, but was drawn to neuroscience after taking Professor of Physics Jerry Pine’s course on the biophysics of the nervous system in his sophomore year, and a neurobiology course taught by biologists David Van Essen (now at Washington University in St. Louis) and Mark Tanouye (now at UC Berkeley) in his final year. He went on to graduate school in the neurosciences at Stanford, where he conducted research into calcium-signaling among nerve cells for his doctorate.

Although other physicists, among them Caltech’s renowned practitioners Max Delbrück and Seymour Benzer, moved into biological research with great success, it’s not an easy transition. Surrounded by fellow graduate students whose backgrounds in biology were far more extensive than his, Sam initially spent much of his time in the library, putting himself through a crash course in the field. One of the greatest challenges, he says, was replacing some of the intuitive approaches he had come to rely on in physics with different modes of thought. Another was the large mass of know-ledge that had to be acquired. “The field was a zoo—literally,” he says. Researchers have “accumulated a large body of information, but they’re still trying to find out the organizing principles behind it.”

Wang went on to postdoctoral research at Duke University in 1994, but after a year he decided to try something new. He applied for and was awarded a Congress-ional Science Fellowship by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It gave him a year off his studies to work in Washington, first as a legislative assistant for Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett in the House of Representatives, whom he advised on energy and environmental issues, then as a legislative fellow for Senator Ted Kennedy. “Getting to see how Congress functioned was a fantastic experience,” he recalls. While working for Kennedy, he wrote speeches for the senator and worked on science and education policy. At the end of the year, he was invited to apply for a position at the Clinton White House to work on education policy, but says that his break from lab work helped him realize that his first love really was scientific research. He doesn’t rule out a science policy position in his future, though.

After finishing out his postdoc at Duke, Wang spent two years at Bell Labs in New Jersey, before joining Princeton’s department of molecular biology as an assistant professor in 2000 (he was named associate professor in 2006). One of the things his research group investigates is the way in which brain circuits process and store information. The focus is mainly on the cerebellum, the large region at the back of the brain that integrates sensory information to guide movement and cognition. “Our current project, which is very exciting to me, is to understand how cerebellar circuits can encode—and decode—real-world events in a useful way to be processed by the rest of the brain,” he says.

As a Caltech undergraduate, Wang thought about pursuing a double major in physics and literature (as his classmate Sandra Tsing Loh ’83 actually did), and today he continues to emphasize to his students the importance of lively, lucid writing. “Verbal expression is an extremely important skill for any working scientist, and it’s something many don’t do well,” he feels. His model for excellence in science writing is one of his own teachers, Richard Feynman. “In popular books about science, it’s very hard to get things across clearly and still be faithful to the science. Feynman could do this.” One of his fondest memories of Caltech is attending Feynman’s special evening lecture course, “Physics X,” which the irreverent Nobel laureate held weekly for undergraduates. “Feynman would walk into a room at a prearranged time and make himself available to answer any question anyone had, then riff off about it. He was remarkable in his clarity; we felt we understood everything he told us.” Then Sam adds, “But later, we found we didn’t.” (This phenomenon, experienced by many, even has a name: the Feynman Effect.)

Wang’s coauthor, Sandra Aamodt, shares his passion for precision and polish in writing. Together, they spent about three years (on and off) reading through hundreds of scientific papers, writing, and passing their individual contributions back and forth until both felt they had got it right. But progress was slow because Aamodt lives on the outskirts of Davis, California, and Wang in Princeton, so in April 2006 they obtained a writer’s residency grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that allowed them to spend a very productive month together at the foundation’s study center in Bellagio, Italy. Inspired by the romantic setting on the shores of Lake Como, Sam proposed to his girlfriend, Becca Moss, who had joined him for the stay. The two married that September and now have a daughter, Vita, in whose developing brain Sam takes a keen parental and professional interest. He’s not making her listen to Mozart to make her smarter, one of the myths debunked in the book, but will encourage her to learn a musical instrument when she gets older, as this improves spatial reasoning skills. “The important thing, however, is to give babies a lot of experiences,” he adds.

Sandra Aamodt, left, and Sam Wang, right, pose on the beautiful grounds of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, seemingly unfazed by the gruesome statuary between them.

This spring Wang will embark on a five-city book tour, with accompanying interviews arranged by his publishers. He has already had some media experience: in the fall of 2004, he appeared on Fox News to talk about a computer program—or, more precisely, an electoral college meta-analysis—that he’d written to provide a snapshot of the dozens of state polls available at any given moment. On each day, it gave a view of who would win the presidential election if it was held that day. “Fox is very oriented toward a right-wing point of view that is far from my own, so for me it was a bit like descending into the heart of darkness. I armed myself with a power tie and talking points. It was close to Halloween, and in the ready room were three jack-o’-lanterns, painted and carved to resemble John Kerry, George W. Bush, and Ann Coulter. Truly frightening! When I went on air, I talked about polls and probabilities for about a minute, then I was cut short to make way for a story about the country going on a level-orange terror alert. I’m not sure how much the viewers learned, but it was certainly an education for me.”

Sam’s electoral prediction based on state-by-state exit polls, that Bush would receive 286 electoral votes, and Kerry 252, was the actual result. The Wall Street Journal duly took note, writing in an article that appeared shortly after the election, “Sam Wang and his computer look pretty smart.” But this wasn’t what he was predicting on his website on election day, because he felt that he needed to add a correction to take into account undecided voters who might break for the challenger, something that had often happened in other presidential elections. “Thus my big headline was a narrow Kerry victory,” he admits. “It was a lesson to me to not get too clever.”

The 2008 presidential race gives Wang a new laboratory for experimenting with his predictive electoral models, but this time around, he is thinking about how to automate the process. His first effort was very labor-intensive; the polling data had to be harvested from news sources and updated each day. “Come to think of it,” he says, “Caltech students and alumni are an ideal source of data-crunching talent, so if any fans are out there reading this, contact me at election.princeton.edu.”

Sam is the first to admit that coming to grips with the political mind-set is likely to stump even the most dedicated neuroscientists for quite some time. In the meantime, there are plenty of slightly less daunting topics to consider for future books, such as Welcome to your Child’s Brain and Welcome to Your Pet’s Brain. Would such a series be as successful as the For Dummies collection? Early indications are favorable. When the New York Times ran a “teaser” from Welcome to Your Brain on the Op-Ed page last fall on how to keep aging brains healthy, it became the most e-mailed article of the entire newspaper for almost a month. Its kernel of wisdom was precisely the kind of thing Wang thinks people should know, but generally don’t—that the best way to improve brain function is not Sudoku, not crossword puzzles, not computer games. It’s simple physical exercise, which by increasing the supply of oxygen and glucose to the brain’s nerve cells, brightens up gray matter far more effectively than mind-training exercises.

So put Caltech News down for a while and go for a walk.

Answers for the quiz: 1) d, 2) d, 3) d, 4) e, 5) c, 6) c, 7) b, 8) c