Chapter 8

Your Brain’s Chemical

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My first attempt at decoding the word neurotransmitter (and
the many drugs that affect neurotransmission) came during
that crystalline moment immediately following my mom’s
diagnosis, when we sat in the rental car in a parking lot
outside the Cleveland Clinic. I was trying to sound out the
drug names on the various pill bottles in our possession after
our visit to the pharmacy.
The brand names were bizarre clusters of vaguely word-
like phonemes—consonant-vowel-consonant followed by
vowel-consonant-vowel combined in mellifluous, pleasing
sequences. They looked like they could be words, should be
words, as though one were reading the pages of a book
written in English in a parallel dimension. Na-men-da. Sin-e-
met. Ari-cept. How naturally they might slip into our daily
conversations.
“Bro, what are you doing tonight?”
“Namenda.”
“Me neither. Let’s go to the Sinemet.”
“I don’t know if Aricept that.”
The generic, scientific names were obviously less tailor-
made for a television audience, leaving an anxious