“Transcendent Kingdom” follows Gifty, the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, as she reflects on her past and the trauma that molded her. Her older brother, Nana, once a star basketball player, becomes addicted to opioids after an injury and eventually dies. With the loss of her brother, her father’s abandonment and her mother’s depression, Gifty looks to science in search of answers. She becomes a Ph.D. candidate studying neuroscience with the focus on reward seeking behavior and addiction. The novel embodies the findings of a scientific case study on the complex interaction between stress, addiction, and the brain’s reward pathways. The article I chose highlights how drugs affect the brain regions…

Yaa Gyasi skillfully blends the narrative of Gifty’s life with themes from biology and general science, presenting the world through Gifty’s point of view while also exploring intricate and meaningful topics. In “Transcendent Kingdom,” Gifty is a neuroscience student researching the neurological foundation of addiction and depression. Her work focuses on studying reward-seeking behavior in genetically modified mice. She observes their brain activity, specifically how they respond to a reward, and how they react when the reward is denied. In this case, the reward is the drink Ensure. The beginning of experiments like Gifty’s goes back to the 1950’s with researchers James Olds and Peter Milner. The two researchers directed…

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