Pleased to meetcha

Ever since "The Mommy Brain" was published just one month ago, the one question I've been asked the most has been, "What was it like to meet Katie Couric?"

I'm going to answer it here so that if anyone else asks, I can just give them the URL. I have written two previous books, neither of which has gotten anywhere near the response of "The Mommy Brain." This has been mostly wonderful (I'll be filling in some caveats in a later post) and included a high point of getting flown to New York to be on the Today Show. On the plane, I wore my glasses and a somewhat mangy sweater I may have drooled on as I napped. After I awoke, I got into a conversation with a young architect sitting beside me. He asked me why I was going to New York. "Oh, I'm going to be on the Today Show," I said. "There will be a car waiting for me." It looked to me like he moved just a little bit away from me at that point, as if whatever I had might be catching.

The next morning, after being made up for about an hour, I walked out to the set and sat next to Jill, the bright and lively New Jersey mom the show was featuring as an illustration of how motherhood makes you smarter. (You can watch the feature on the website.) Ms. Couric came out to meet us before the cameras started rolling and said, "Hi, I know who you are, but just want to make sure. You're Jill, right?" (Jill said she was.) "And you're Kathy, right?" "Right," I said. "And you're Katie?" "I would have thought you knew that by now," she answered, a bit brusquely. Great, I thought. Now I'm really off on the right foot.

Aside from that, however, things went pretty well, and she seemed friendly, even offering to fetch coffee or tea, which wasn't what I'd expected from the recent New York Times story that talked about how the clicking of her stiletto heels down the hallway made colleagues douse their lights. Best of all, she asked about the rats. The rat studies I cite are a controversial part of "The Mommy Brain," but, I'm convinced, a key part. In one of the most interesting studies I describe, Virginia neuroscientists Craig Kinsley and Kelly Lambert have found that when rats become mothers, their learning and memory capacity appears to increase -- one sign that the survival instinct is kicking in, making them sharper just when boosted brainpower is an evolutionary necessity. Humans share the same brain architecture and are swayed by the same neurochemicals as rats, but there's some understandable resistance to carrying the comparison past that point, perhaps particularly on the East Coast, where rats are more often pests than pets. Still, we're beholden to rats for much of what we know about our own physiology. For one thing, scientists simply can't do the same kinds of tests with humans as they do with rodents, such as having them chase around mazes for Froot Loops, or timing them as they swim to a platform in a tank, or, sad as it is, dissecting their brains. Besides, trying to measure increments of basic smarts in humans is inevitably complicated in that so many other variables -- our childhoods, temperaments, and maybe what we had for breakfast -- cloud the picture.

But what was Katie wearing? you may want to know. You can see it in the video! I was much too nervous to notice anything other than the glasses she held in her hand, as if she had truly been reading the book. The only other thing I can say is that my mom called after it was over to ask why they hadn't flown my family in and given me a spa day, as they did with Jill. ("Mom, isn't it enough that I was on the show?" I asked.) I was truly fine about that. I got several hours on the plane to read without having to jump up and get someone a glass of water. And when I got home, the house was actually clean. For about a minute. And just last weekend, I got into a conversation with a stranger who recognized me from all the publicity and said he had been inspired to buy a plane ticket to visit his grandchildren for a "mental tuneup." So far, so good.