Tom Wolfe's newest work of fiction, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," focuses mostly on the title character's encounter with the sordid stereotypes of college culture. But Wolfe also drew attention to Dartmouth psychology professor Michael Gazzaniga, whose book "The Social Brain" was referenced in the phonebook-sized novel.
"It's weird to be reading along and see your name all of a sudden," Gazzaniga said.
Wolfe invented the character of professor Starling, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, to teach at the fictional Dupont University, based loosely on a mix of institutions including Duke and Stanford Universities. Starling recommends Gazzaniga's book "The Social Brain" as a reading assignment for Simmons.
Simmons, a bright and naive freshman from the back hills of North Carolina, tries to read the book over Christmas break. During her first semester at Dupont, Simmons loses her virginity to Hoyt Thorpe, a callous, drunken frat boy and man about campus, and her resulting state of shame interferes with her studying.
"To a depressed girl, words on a page become irrelevant, impertinent," Wolfe wrote. "A month ago she had found Gazzaniga's work fascinating."
In the book, Wolfe described Gazzaniga as a professor famed for his studies of patients whose neural pathways between the two halves of the brain have been severed. Simmons grapples with Gazzaniga's comparison between the human brain and the computer.
"Why is it the more a human (brain) knows, the faster it works, while the more an artifact (computer) knows, the slower it works?" Gazzaniga asked in his book.
The depressed Simmons finds no reason to answer the question.
"What on earth did it matter whether the brain worked faster than a computer, or vice versa?" Wolfe wrote from Simmons' perspective. "Who in God's name had the luxury of caring?"
Wolfe himself struggled with depression for years, but unlike Simmons, found Gazzaniga's work enlightening. Shortly after "The Social Brain" was published, Wolfe wrote Gazzaniga a handwritten note saying that it was the best book on the brain ever written.
"It was very gratifying," Gazzaniga said. He laughed and added, "I saved that letter." According to the Valley News, Gazzaniga keeps the note on his desk.
Gazzaniga considers Wolfe's writing to be a firmly entrenched part of American society.
"The joke I like to tell is I got more e-mails over the line in his book than from people that ever bought my book," Gazzaniga said. "That guy is really part of the American culture."
Gazzaniga said he met Wolfe once 20 years ago at a dinner party in New York City. Besides Wolfe, New York Times writer Tom Winters and conservative writer Bill Buckley were also in attendance. Gazzaniga hosted the soiree along with a professor from Princeton University.
"The question we put before the table was, 'Has all the scientific work that has been done aided the working writer?'" Gazzaniga recalled. "The answer was a resounding, 'No.'"
