Life’s pretty weird. Recently, I had the most amazing invitation. You will probably agree that it’s amazing but at first you won’t know why it’s also weird. The invitation was from the seriously clever and famous brain scientists at the … take a deep breath … Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience – and yes, I reckon you have to be pretty brainy to work at a place with a name like that. Anyway, amazingly, they had read and loved my book on the teenage brain, Blame My Brain, and wanted to meet me. THEY wanted to meet ME? Well, yes, amazing, but also weird, and let me explain why.
When I was at school I was seriously bad at science. I hadn’t a CLUE what was going on. We did experiments and I had no idea why. We made rainbows and circuits and bangs and smells and people wrote things that had letters and signs and numbers but no words and I just didn’t GET it. We cut up pigs’ eyes and I felt SICK. We watched stick insects pretending to be sticks and I couldn’t decide whether to be bored or disgusted.
But I do have two proud memories of science at school: one was when Princess Anne came to visit and actually LOOKED AT MY BLOOD. How many people can say that? That a royal person actually stared at their blood under a microscope? And gosh, my blood was looking just FAB that day. My other moment of glory was in a science exam. We were all given an apple and the first instruction said, “Cut your apple transversely.” Everyone else dived in and cut their apple in the normal way and then, suddenly worried (a bit late), they all looked at me, because I was known as the swotty one who knew dictionaries back to front. And I coolly and casually (and really, really annoyingly) sliced my apple trans-verse-ly – which, in case dictionaries are not your thing, means across, and not down. You know what? You should try it – an apple sliced transversely is a beautiful thing. Especially when the rest of the class, who are much better at science than you, have ALL DONE IT WRONG.
You may be thinking I’m exaggerating about being bad at science. But I can prove it: my last science report (which I’ve still got) says, “Well below average standard. Nicola shows no aptitude at all for science subjects.” So there! I was rubbish!
It just shows: the things you’re told you’re bad at at school don’t necessarily say anything about your future life. I ended up writing two books on the human brain (in fact, Know Your Brain talks about how cleverness is MUCH more than what your school thinks you’re good at) AND getting that amazing (and weird) invitation to talk about brain to the brainy brain people at the Institute. They were really nice and showed me all the new things they’re investigating about teenage brains. They even showed me inside an MRI scanner. And even though they know much more than I do about brains, they asked my opinion and I didn’t feel stupid at all. (Mind you, I didn’t tell them about that science report …)
To say thank you and to make sure they liked me, I took them some Brain Cake™ (find the recipe on my website here) and I think some of them quite fancied doing some in-depth research into Brain Cake™ to see if it really does power your brain. Hmmm, sounds like the sort of experiment I might enjoy …. If science was like that at school, I might even have been quite good at it.
Nicola Morgan