Meanwhile, her mother is deeply depressed after Nana's death. It's mixed in with her feelings about the racism and contempt she encountered while Nana was in the throes of addiction.
Through much of the book, Gifty tries to reconcile and process her conflicted thoughts about her faith. He gets hooked and his addiction grows into a two-and-a-half-year drug problem, ending with his death.Īfter Nana dies, Gifty loses her faith in God. His sophomore year, he hurts his ankle and is put on Oxycontin. Nana discovers basketball at 13 and becomes a star player. It's also part of Gifty's attempts to understand her mother and brother.Īfter their father left, Nana was angry and resentful over his father's absence. It's science that could eventually transcend its usage on mice to help manage reward-seeking behaviors in humans. Now, she is in the process of using optogenetics (using light to control neurons) to see if triggering those neurons will adjust the mice's behavior. From there, she identified two potential neurons that moderate that reward-seeking behavior. Early on, she experimented to determine that some mice would continue to push a lever that gives a reward (food), even when they will sometimes receive pain (shocks). Gifty takes care of her mother and runs her lab experiments. Now, Gifty's mother is depressed again and goes to Stanford to stay with Gifty.
Nana was 11 at the time and Gifty was preschool aged. Gifty's father eventually moved back to Ghana by himself when Gifty was still young, leaving a gaping hole in their family.
The move made Gifty's father miserable, but Gifty's mother rooted herself in a local church. Gifty's mother is deeply religious, and she had been the one who had once insisted on moving to America. Her parents were Ghanaian immigrants who moved to Alabama after Nana was born. The book intersperses stories of Gifty's past with her current life and research. Gifty's research is aimed at understanding and modifying reward-seeking behaviors, both in cases of too much (addiction) and too little (depression) reward-seeking.
Her older brother, Nana, died from a heroin overdose when Gifty was 11, which led to her mother into a deep depression. Gifty is a 28-year-old sixth-year PhD student in neuroscience who is studying the effect of drugs on the brain through experiments with mice.
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