I’m listening for the second time, maybe the third, to a TED Talk on brain plasticity. My laptop sits open on the kitchen counter while I measure a cup of flour and a half cup of salt. My granddaughter stands on a chair and pours them into a pot. Together we’re concocting a dough, something soft and malleable, something to smother her seizures, something to soothe her brain. I’ve promised her a fun activity, and she sings what she sees to the tune of “London Bridge.”

          Plasticity. The word comes from the Greek plastikos, meaning able to be formed and re-formed without breaking. I’m remembering the gag line from the Mike Nichols film The Graduate: “One word. Plastics.” The miraculous molecules changed childhood, delivering flame-retardant pajamas, Styrofoam food trays, and a pantheon of posable action heroes. My granddaughter rummages through the storage bin, picking out Gumby with his asymmetrical cowlick and his talent for taming Groobees. There’s a Barbie with hinged hips and shoulders, swinging her vinyl ponytail, and GI Joe, with swivel arms and a ball-jointed head, ready for anything. My granddaughter clicks her tongue, concentrating, as she rearranges the moving parts. Plastics also paved the path to Legoland, where every peg fits perfectly into every dotted slot. One day I’ll take her to the Lego theme park. She’s only seven years old, so we still have time. I still have hope.

          Beyond the toys and food containers, the styrene studs and plates and tiles, plasticity is also the promise that my granddaughter’s broken brain can re-form.

          I hand her the whisk and she stirs manically, raising a cloud of flour dust. Meanwhile, the neurologist on my laptop loops back and forth in a hot-pink sheath dress describing the outermost layer of the brain: 100 million neurons of gray matter. The number ebbs during adolescence and again when we turn old and ornery. The thinning patches are like missing rails in the fences that corral our crazies. I’d always assumed our out-of-control moments were caused by the poor quality rather than a low quantity of neurons. I stand corrected.

          I rifle through my spice drawer for something strategic: the cream of tartar. It’s the stuff of mile-high meringues. It empowers egg foam to rise and shine. It inspires whipped cream to swirl skyward. I measure four teaspoons into my granddaughter’s open palm, and she drops it into the pot while the lecturer on the screen clicks through her slides of synapses, the infinitesimally small gaps between neurons. A video simulates a sender neuron lobbing neurotransmitters across the synapse. The simulation makes it look like the neurons are playing beer pong. “Our neurotransmitters come in only two flavors,” says the TED Talker. She describes the “excitatory” ones as tasting like custard, laced with fudge, topped with gooey caramel. The “inhibitory” ones taste like ice chips, unsweetened, uncaffeinated, barely thirst-quenching. Given a choice, our neurons order from the excitatory menu. Every time. Surprise, surprise.

          “I hope you’ve found this helpful,” she says, leaving me with more questions than answers. I want instructions on how to cure my granddaughter’s neurons of their cravings for custard. I want to reward the ones that ask for ice chips. I need to mend my own fences before the crazies take over. I want to know how this neurologist managed to lick enough of those tiny synapses to detect their specific flavors.

          Go ahead and tell me I’m thinking too narrowly, that I’m asking too much. That my questions miss the mark.

          My granddaughter’s EEGs point to too many excitatory neurotransmitters ponging through her gray matter. A pack of insatiable Groobees helping themselves to polystyrene cups of caramel custard. Infantile brain spasms. By age four she has tried all the epilepsy meds. Her seizures are officially labeled “intractable.” But surely, there must be other flavors, other action heroes, new moving parts, new molecules to be formed, synapses to be re-formed.

          Tell me there isn’t plenty left to learn. What about more gray matter? Could it hurt? Could it help?

          I place the pot on the stove and turn the burner to low, adding water and oil and mixing until the ingredients are combined. Then I knuckle and knead the graydough. When it’s soft and stretchable, I layer it over my granddaughter’s scalp, swirling it like meringue above her eyebrows. Her forehead softens into the warmth of the dough. She rolls a ball between her palms, sniffs its earthy-salty smell and smiles up at me. I hand her a mirror and together we admire her mile-high cowlick.

          Go ahead and laugh. Tell me my gray matter is wearing thin. Tell me I’m wasting my cream of tartar. Tell me you’ve got a better idea.