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year at Berkeley in Diamond’s lab), made it easy for me to decide that I wanted to apply to graduate school as soon as I finished my undergraduate degree.
    In between studying for classes and working in the lab, there was François. It turns out that he not only tuned pianos but played the piano and had a near obsessive fascination with the harmonies of the Beach Boys. So I had found a French guy with California in his heart. He had tapes of all the Beach Boys albums and I would often find him in his living room listening intently to them through his headphones as he tried to painstakingly transcribe all the complex chords they used to create their sound. He was doing this with such glee and concentration that I hated to interrupt his sessions. I too was a big Beach Boys fan, but I had never fully appreciated the complexities of their harmonies before François. I thought the Beach Boys were just fun and easy to dance to, but François, with his trained musical ear showed me his favorite chords and riffs in that music I knew so well, and opened it up in a very different way for me.
    One of the many things we enjoyed doing together was playing piano duets. At first, François had only one piano in his apartment, but because he worked at the biggest piano store in town, he eventually borrowed a second piano so that we could practice and play our duets in his apartment, where I was spending increasing amounts of my time. And because I loved playing classical music, we played classical duets—Bach, to be precise.
    But the really fun part was when we went to the piano shop at night after it had closed. There in the empty store we performed our duets on the big beautiful eight-foot concert grand pianos that were used for performances in the local theaters. I always played the Bösendorfer (I loved the sound of those low notes), and he played the Steinway. We played as loud and long as we wanted, and the beautiful tones of these pianos (expertly tuned by François himself) made even the mistakes sound good. I consider these evenings as some of the loveliest times I spent with François.
    In addition to playing classical music together, we listened to a lot of it. One of my favorites was the Bach solo cello suites. I listened to François’s record of Yo-Yo Ma playing these pieces over and over again. It turns out that François noticed how much I loved them, and that Christmas I received the most precious gift that I had ever received before or since: a cello.
    I was flabbergasted.
    For someone who had dated only a little bit in her first two years of college, I was getting a crash course on romance from François that I didn’t want to end. I decided that the myth was absolutely true: The French are the most romantic people in the world!

    THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC !
    Do you ever wonder what happens in your brain when you hear that piece of music you can listen to over and over and over again? The one that may even give you chills just listening? Robert Zatorre and his colleagues at the Montreal Neurological Institute showed that when people listened to music that gave them a strong emotional and physiological response (the Beach Boys for François, and Bach for me), the brain showed significant changes in the areas involved in reward, motivation, emotion, and arousal: the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex (the bottom part of the prefrontal cortex), ventral medial prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and midbrain were all activated. So as François and I delved into playing and listening to music together, we were also activating the reward and motivation centers in our brains (see Chapter 8). No wonder I loved France so much!

    So my French-enriched environment gave me a new language, a new persona, romance, adventure, and—of course, I have to add to the list—great food and wine. It was during this time and with François that I also really developed my love of French cuisine. My parents, and in fact my whole family, are