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my shell? I had no idea, but I see now the enormous amount of brain plasticity occurring that year. This was even better than living in Disney World. Everything was so different—not only was I speaking French all the time and taking all of my classes in French but I truly felt like a different person while speaking the language. Suddenly, I was no longer the geeky wallflower with nary a date in sight. Instead, in France I was considered extremely exotic because I was an Asian woman from California who didn’t speak Japanese but instead spoke fluent American. When I was growing up in northern California, Asian American women were a dime a dozen; now I got to be exotic for the very first time in my life. That was huge for me. Not only that, but—I don’t know if you are aware—the French kiss each other all the time. It’s a rule. You have to kiss; it’s frowned upon if you don’t. Finally! An excuse to kiss everyone for the girl from the family that didn’t hug or kiss much at all—I was in seventh heaven.
    And the more I learned, the happier I became.
    In France, all this kissing made me step out of my comfort zone and become a lot looser and a lot more affectionate. I now realize that making these kinds of changes literally expanded who I was: As I changed my behaviors and experienced new sensations, my brain made adjustments to this new information and stimuli.
    Aside from François, my French became fluent because I was also taking some serious science classes—not with American students mind you, but with all the other French students. That meant all the lectures were in French and, most terrifying for me, the oral and written exams were all in French. I was not that worried about the written exams because most of the science words are the same as or similar to the English words. But I had never in my academic career taken an oral exam. Much less in my second language. I was totally scared.
    One of my clearest memories from this time was while I was responding to the questions a professor posed during an oral exam. I was very nervous and suddenly lost all ability to speak with a proper French accent. The words and the grammar coming out of my mouth were all French, but the sounds were pure American. I could hear myself speaking French with an incredibly strong American accent— quelle horreur! Good thing I was graded on content and not verbal presentation. I ended up acing all my classes. Clearly the geeky bookworm was still present somewhere in my new French incarnation.
    This experience in France also gave me another unexpected and what turned out to be lifelong gift. It was in France that I became fascinated with the study of memory, another form of brain plasticity. I had the great good luck to take a course at the University of Bordeaux called “La Neuropsychology de la Memoire” (neuropsychology of memory). This course was taught by a very well-respected neuroscientist, Robert Jaffard, who not only ran an active research lab but was a wonderfully clear and engaging lecturer. I had no idea there was a strong neuroscience group at the University of Bordeaux when I chose it, but what a lucky coincidence. Jaffard was the first to teach me about the history of the study of memory and the raging debates of the day involving two researchers at the University of California, San Diego, named Stuart Zola-Morgan and Larry Squire and one researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) named Mort Mishkin. Little did I know at the time that in the next ten years I would work with all three of these scientists either as a graduate student at U.C. San Diego or as a post-doc at NIH. Most important, Jaffard took student volunteers in his lab, and I happily began testing little black mice on memory tasks in my spare time, giving me my very first real taste of laboratory research. I loved it in the lab, and this, along with the wonderful background in neuroanatomy I had from Diamond (I also worked my entire last