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10 Jan 2023
Announcing: From Our Neurons to Yours!
00:01:39
Announcing: From our Neurons to Yours, the new podcast from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University.
On this show, we criss-cross scientific disciplines to bring you to the frontiers of brain science, one simple question at a time.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? Recently, there's been growing excitement in the scientific community about revisiting the potential medical benefits of psychedelic drugs that have been off limits for decades. Scientists are discovering or rediscovering applications of psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and other compounds for treating people with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute has several leading experts paving the way in this field, including today's guest, Robert Malenka. Beginning in the 1980s, Malenka pioneered neuroscientists' understanding of how our brain circuits to change with experience by uncovering fundamental mechanisms of synaptic plasticity. More recently, his laboratory at Stanford has explored the brain's so-called "reward circuitry," including its role in social behavior and empathy and its response to drugs such as MDMA.
Malenka is Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute where he co-directs the NeuroChoice Initiative, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding human decision making and the science of addiction.
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
If you've ever had a migraine, you know that the symptoms — splitting headache, nausea, sensitivity to light — mean you're going to want to spend some time in bed, in a dark room.
Migraines are flat out debilitating, and the statistics back this up.
Migraines are the third most common neurological disorder. They affect as many as a billion people around the world, making them one of the world's 10 most disabling diseases according to the World Health Organization. But for all the misery for those who suffer from migraines, it's been a long haul for scientists to figure out what actually causes these episodes, and more importantly, how to provide relief.
We spoke this week with Gabriella Muwanga, a Stanford graduate student who studies what's actually going on in the brain during a migraine. And for good reason — Muwanga has suffered from regular migraines herself since childhood and hopes to contribute to finding better treatments for them in the future.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
What can octopus and squid brains teach us about intelligence?
One of the incredible things about octopus's is that not only do they have an advanced intelligence that lets them camouflage themselves, use tools and manipulate their environments and act as really clever hunters in their ecosystems, they do this with a brain that evolved essentially from something like a slug in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago.
Our brains share virtually nothing in common with theirs. The question for scientists is what can studying a creature with a completely different brain from our own, teach us about the common principles of what makes a brain, what makes intelligence? What does it mean for this creature to have an intelligence that is something like our own?
To learn more, we spoke this week with Ernie Hwaun and Matt McCoy, two interdisciplinary postdoctoral scholars at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford who study cephalopod intelligence from completely different angles.
Ernie Hwaun's research has been supported through a Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Interdisciplinary Scholars Award and ONR MURI grant N0014-19-1-2373.
Matt McCoy's research has been supported through a Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Interdisciplinary Scholars Award, the Stanford Genomics Training Program, and several programs at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, including a Grass Fellowship in Neuroscience, a Whitman Early Career Fellowship, and the Cephalopod Initiative.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
You may have heard the idea that the gut is the second brain, but what does that really mean?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that there are something like 100 to 600 million neurons in your gut. That's a lot of neurons. That's about as many as you'd find in the brain of say, a fruit bat, or an ostrich, or a Yorkshire Terrier.
And it turns out, this network of intestinal neurons, termed by scientists the "enteric nervous system," can actually have a lot of impact on our daily lives – not just in controlling things like our appetite, but may contribute to our mental well-being — and potentially event to disorders ranging from anxiety to Parkinson's disease.
To learn more about this fascinating "second brain", we spoke with Julia Kaltschmidt, a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute faculty scholar and an associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford Medicine.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
I think we all know at this point that addiction is another major epidemic that is sweeping our country and the world, but there are few topics that are more misunderstood than addiction. In fact, some people question whether addiction is even truly a disease.
To delve into this question of why neuroscientists and health policy experts do think of addiction as a disease, I spoke to Keith Humphreys, the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, who is a leading expert on the addiction epidemic.
Humphreys is also leader of the NeuroChoice Initiative, a project of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Initiative dedicated to understanding decision making — from brain circuits to individual choice to group tendencies — with a particular focus on the science of addiction and how neuroscience can contribute to addiction policy.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We take this for granted, but our eyes are amazing.
They're incredible. We process the visual world so automatically and so instantaneously, we forget how much work our eyes and our brains are doing behind the scenes, taking in light through the eyeball, transforming light into electrical signals in the retina, packaging up all that information, and sending it on to the brain, and then making sense of what it is we're seeing and responding to it.
In fact, new science is showing that the eye itself, meaning the retina, is actually doing quite a bit of the fancy image processing that scientists used to think was happening deeper in the brain.
Of course, our eyes are not perfect. Millions of people suffer vision loss or even blindness. Often, this is because the tiny cells in the retina that process light die off for one reason or another, but here's something that may surprise you. While it sounds like science fiction, the possibility of engineering and artificial retina, a bionic eye, is closer than you might think, and that brings us to today's guest
EJ Chichilnisky is the John R Adler professor of neurosurgery and a professor of opthalmology here at Stanford, where he leads the Stanford Artificial Retina Project. His team is engineering an electronic implant to restore vision to people blinded by incurable retinal disease. In other words, they are prototyping a bionic eye.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We've probably all heard of circadian rhythms, the idea that our bodies have biological clocks that keep track of the daily cycle, sunrise to sunset. Maybe we've even heard that it's these biological rhythms that get thrown off when we travel across time zones or after daylight savings.
So on one hand, it's cool that our body keeps track of what time it is, but today our question is just how important are our circadian rhythms to our health and wellbeing? Do we need to be paying attention to these daily rhythms and what happens if we don't?
So we asked Stanford circadian biology expert, Erin Gibson.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and Christian Haigis, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Hi listeners, we're shifting to a biweekly release schedule after this episode. See you in a couple weeks! --- Most of us probably know someone who developed Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia as they got older. But you probably also know someone who stayed sharp as a tack well into their 80s or 90s. Even if it’s a favorite TV actor, like Betty White.
The fact that people age so differently makes you wonder: is there some switch that could be flipped in our biology to let us all live to 100 with our mental faculties intact.
Scientists now believe we can learn something from people whose minds stay sharp — whose brains stay youthful into old age that could lead to treatments to slow down aging for the rest of us.
That brings us to today’s guest. Tony Wyss-Coray is the Director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Wyss-Coray's lab is renowned for experiments showing that young blood can rejuvenate old brains, at least in laboratory animals. We talked with him about this work and the prospect of achieving more youthful brains into what we now consider old age.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Recently on the show, we had a conversation about the possibility of creating artificial vision with a bionic eye. Today we're going to talk about technology to enhance another sense, one that often goes underappreciated, our sense of touch.
We humans actually have one of the most sensitive senses of touch on the planet. Just in the tip of your fingers, there are thousands of tiny sensors, which scientists call mechanoreceptors that sense texture, vibration, pressure, even pain. Our sense of touch also lets us track how our bodies are moving in space. In fact, our refined sense of touch may be part of our success as a species. We humans use touch for everything. Building tools, writing, playing music, you name it. And on an emotional level, touch is fundamental to our social lives. Touch lets us connect with each other and the world around us.
But of course, we increasingly live in a technological world where we're often separated from the physical connections that are so important to us. Think about having a conversation on Zoom where you can't put your hand on a friend's arm to emphasize a point. Some scientists and engineers now think we should be building technology that reconnects us with the physical world rather than separating us from it. This is a growing area of research in robotics and virtual reality, a field called haptics.
That brings us to today's guest. Allison Okamura is Richard W. Weiland Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, and a deputy director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Her lab — the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics for Medicine (CHaRM) Lab — is dedicated to extending or augmenting the amazing human sense of touch through technology.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Parenting Lessons from Frogs and Spiders | Lauren O'Connell
00:19:20
Today we’re going to talk about frogs — and spiders — as parents.
What today’s show is really about is “pair bonding” — that’s the scientific term for the collaborative bonds that form between two parents — as well as the bonds between parents and their offspring.
It turns out that if you look across the animal kingdom, strong family bonds are way more widespread than you might imagine. Frogs have them. Spiders have them. Fish have them.
We wanted to learn more about the neuroscience behind these familial bonds across the animal kingdom — and what this could teach us about our own experience as partners and parents.
Plus, I just wanted to talk about frogs this week!
Stanford biologist Lauren O’Connell and her lab travel around the world, studying poison frogs, wolf spiders, butterfly fish and other animals that — it turns out — are pretty amazing parents.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Nearly one in five Americans lives with a mental illness. Unfortunately there’s a limited set of options for treating psychiatric disorders. One reason for that is that these disorders are still defined based on people’s behavior or invisible internal states — things like depressed mood or hallucinations.
But of course, all our thoughts and behaviors are governed by our brains. And there’s a lot of research that makes it clear that many disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, and probably depression, may have their origin during early-stage brain development. The problem is that we still don’t know which brain circuits specifically are responsible for these disorders — or how they got that way.
Studying human brain circuits as they develop is — obviously — challenging. But what if we could rewind the clock and follow the development of neurological circuits in real time? Believe it or not, new technologies may soon make this possible.
Today's guest is Sergiu Pasca, Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Pasca and his team have developed techniques to create tiny models of a patient's brain tissue in the lab — models called brain organoids and assembloids. They can watch these models grow in lab dishes from a few cells into complex circuits. And they can even transplant them into rats to see how they integrate into a working brain.
While all this may sound like science fiction, these techniques are fueling a revolution in scientists' ability to observe human brain development in real time, trace the origins of psychiatric disorders and — hopefully — develop new treatments.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
One of the strangest and most disconcerting things about the COVID 19 pandemic has been the story of long COVID.
Many COVID long-haulers have continued experiencing cognitive symptoms long after their initial COVID infection — loss of attention, concentration, memory, and mental sharpness — what scientists are calling "brain fog". For some patients, the condition is so serious that it can be impossible to go back to their pre-COVID lives.
Today’s guest, actually had an early intuition that COVID-19 could trigger a neurological health crisis.
Michelle Monje is a pediatric neuro-oncologist here at Stanford who treats kids with serious brain cancers. She also runs a neuroscience research lab that studies how the brain develops during early life. For the past decade, she has been focused on how chemotherapy triggers a cascade of inflammation in the brain that leads to so called “chemo-fog” — a very similar set of symptoms that we now see in many people with long covid.
In this episode, Monje helps us understand what brain fog is, what seems to be causing it, and how her team and others are trying to develop treatments that could help with other conditions linked to inflammation in the brain, such as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Brain stimulation & "psychiatry 3.0" | Nolan Williams
00:24:52
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technology that uses magnetic fields to stimulate or suppress electrical activity in brain circuits. It's part of a transformation in how psychiatrists are thinking about mental health disorders that today's guest calls psychiatry 3.0.
Nolan Williams has recently pioneered a new form of TMS therapy that has just been approved by the FDA to treat patients with treatment-resistant depression. That actually describes a lot of people with serious depression — somewhere between a third to a half. At some point talk therapy doesn't work, drugs don't work, and for most people, there's not much else to try.
TMS has been used for depression before, but Williams' team has taken a new, more targeted approach. It's called SAINT, which stands for Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy. Basically, it uses MRI brain imaging to precisely target intensive TMS stimulation to tweak the function of specific circuits in each patient's brain.
Remarkably, after just one week in Williams' SAINT trial, 80% of patients went into full remission. The stories these patients tell about the impact this has had on their lives are incredible.
We talked to Williams, who is a faculty director of the Koret Human Neurosciences Community Laboratory at Wu Tsai Neuro, about what makes this approach unique and what it means for the future of psychiatry.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible.
You may have heard of a concept called neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to change or rewire itself. This is of course central to learning and memory, but it's also important for understanding a surprisingly wide array of medical conditions, including things like epilepsy, depression, even Alzheimer's disease.
Today's guest, Carla Shatz, is a pioneer in understanding how our brains are sculpted by our experiences. She's credited with coining the phrase neurons that fire together, wire together. Her work over the past 40 years is foundational to how we understand the brain today.
So I was excited to talk to Shatz about our brain's capacity for change, and I started off by asking about this sort of simple question, why exactly do we have this learning superpower as kids to do things like pick up languages and why does it go away?
Shatz is Sapp Family Provostial Professor of Biology and of Neurobiology and the Catherine Holman Johnson director of Stanford Bio-X.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Webby award-winning producer Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We all know exercise has all sorts of benefits beyond just making us stronger and fitter. It lowers and inflammation. It buffers stress and anxiety. It clarifies our thinking. In fact, regular exercise is one of the few things we know with reasonable confidence can help extend our healthy lifespan.
But for all the evidence of the benefits of exercise, it's a bit surprising that we don't know more about how exercise does all these great things for our bodies and our brains.
Today's guest, Jonathan Long, recently discovered a new molecule produced when we exercise a compound called Lac-Phe. Lac-Phe appears to be linked to a number of health benefits from regulating appetite to boosting learning and memory.
Long is a chemist by training — and an institute scholar of Sarafan ChEM-H, the Institute for Chemistry Engineering and Medicine for Human Health, our sister institute here at Stanford. So I started our conversation by asking him how his background as a chemist informs how he thinks about studying exercise and human health.
NOTE: Thanks to everyone who's tuned in to our first season! We're going to take a break for the summer to get ready for next season, but we'll have more tales from the frontiers of brain science for you in the fall.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Welcome back to our second season of "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast where we criss-cross scientific disciplines to take you to the cutting edge of brain science. In this episode, we explore how sound becomes information in the human brain, specifically focusing on how speech is transformed into meaning.
In our conversation, she breaks down the intricate steps involved in transforming speech sounds into meaning. From the vibrations of the eardrum to the activation of specific neurons in the auditory cortex, Gwilliams reveals the remarkable complexity and precision of the brain's language processing abilities. Gwilliams also delves into the higher-level representations of meaning and sentence structure, discussing how our brains effortlessly navigate interruptions, non sequiturs, and the passage of time during conversations.
Join us as we unravel the mysteries of speech comprehension and gain a deeper understanding of how our minds process language.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Welcome back to "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast where we criss-cross scientific disciplines to take you to the frontiers of brain science. This week, we explore the science of dizziness with Stanford Medicine neurologist Kristen Steenerson, MD, who treats patients experiencing vertigo and balance disorders.
In our conversation, we'll see that dizziness is not a singular experience but rather a broad term encompassing a variety of different sensations of disorientation. We learn about the vestibular system, a set of biological "accelerometers" located deep within the inner ear that detect linear and angular acceleration, helping us perceive motion, orientation, and our connection to the world around us.
We also discuss a wearable medical device Dr. Steenerson and colleagues at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute are developing a wearable device to measure the activity of the vestibular system by tracking a patient's eye movements. With the ability to study this mysterious system in unprecedented detail, we're on the verge of learning more than ever about this misunderstood "sixth sense."
Popkirov, Stoyan, Jeffrey P. Staab, and Jon Stone. "Persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD): a common, characteristic and treatable cause of chronic dizziness." Practical neurology 18.1 (2018): 5-13.
Harun, Aisha, et al. "Vestibular impairment in dementia." Otology & Neurotology: Official Publication of the American Otological Society, American Neurotology Society [and] European Academy of Otology and Neurotology 37.8 (2016): 1137.
Brandt T, Dieterich M. The dizzy patient: don't forget disorders of the central vestibular system. Nat Rev Neurol. 2017 Jun;13(6):352-362. doi: 10.1038/nrneurol.2017.58. Epub 2017 Apr 21. PMID: 28429801.
Allison S. Young, Corinna Lechner, Andrew P. Bradshaw, Hamish G. MacDougall, Deborah A. Black, G. Michael Halmagyi, Miriam S. Welgampola Neurology Jun 2019, 92 (24) e2743-e2753; DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000007644
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Where ant colonies keep their brains | Deborah Gordon
00:17:48
Welcome back to "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University.
In this episode, we explore the collective intelligence of ant colonies with Deborah Gordon, a professor of biology at Stanford, an expert on ant behavior, and author of a new book, The Ecology of Collective Behavior.
We discuss how ant colonies operate without centralized control, relying on simple local interactions, such as antennal contact, to coordinate their behavior. Gordon explains how studying ant colonies can provide insights into the workings of the human brain, highlighting parallels between different types of collective behavior in ants and the modular functions of the brain.
Listen to the episode to learn more about the intelligence of ant colonies and the implications for neuroscience.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Welcome back, neuron lovers! In this week's episode of From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about the neuroscience of sleep. Why is slumber so important for our health that we spend a third of our lives unconscious? Why does it get harder to get a good night's sleep as we age? And could improving our beauty rest really be a key to rejuvenating our bodies and our minds?
To learn more, I spoke with Luis de Lecea, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, who has been at the forefront of sleep science since leading the discovery of the sleep-regulating hormone hypocretin 25 years ago.
De Lecea's research aims to understand the mechanisms behind sleep regulation and develop interventions to improve sleep quality and efficiency. With support from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro, De Lecea is collaborating with Stanford psychiatry professor Julie Kauer and colleagues to understand the role of sleep centers in neurodegeneration.
In our conversation, de Lecea explains the role of the hypothalamus and the sleep hormone hypocretin in regulating sleep and we discuss how lack of sleep can cause damage to cells and organ systems, leading to effects similar to premature aging.
As usual, Shakespeare put it best:
“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast.”
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about the sound of rain — does that sound taste like chocolate? Or does the sound of a saxophone feel triangular to you?
For about 3% of the population, the sharp lines between our senses blend together. Textures may have tastes, sounds, shapes, numbers may have colors. This sensory crosstalk is called synesthesia, and it's not a disorder, just a different way of experiencing the world.
To learn about the neuroscience behind this fascinating phenomenon and what it tells us about how our brains perceive the world, we were fortunate enough to speak with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur here at Stanford. Eagleman has long been fascinated by synesthesia and what it means about how our perceptions shape our reality.
We also discuss Eagleman's work with Neosensory, a company that develops technology to help individuals with hearing loss by translating sound into vibrations on the skin. The episode highlights the adaptability and plasticity of the brain, offering a deeper understanding of how our perceptions shape our reality.
In addition to his research, Eagleman is a prolific communicator of science — the author of several books including Livewired and Incognito and host of the PBS series "The Brain with David Eagleman" and the new podcast series "Inner Cosmos".
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Cover art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Imagine an electrical storm in your brain, a power surge that passes through delicately wired neural circuits, making thousands of cells all activate at once. Depending on where it starts and where it travels in the brain, it could make your muscles seize up. It could create hallucinatory visions or imaginary sounds. It could evoke deep anxiety or a sense of holiness, or it could even make you lose consciousness.
This kind of electrical storm is what we call a seizure. If your brain is prone to seizures, we call it epilepsy.
This week we're joined by Fiona Baumer, a Stanford pediatric neurologist and researcher, to dive into this misunderstood and often stigmatized disorder. In addition to treating children with seizure disorders, Dr. Baumer conducts research at the Koret Human Neurosciences Community Laboratory at Wu Tsai Neuro. There she uses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) paired with EEG, to stimulate and read out patterns of activity moving across the brain in children with epilepsy.
In our conversation, we discuss what neuroscience has taught us about where seizures come from and how new technologies are giving us insights not only into potential treatments for the disorder, but also providing a window into some of the brain's hidden patterns of activity.
We're taking a break over the next few weeks. We'll return with new episodes in the new year.
In the meantime, if you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries.
Join us as we talk with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological disorders and restore communication for those who have lost the ability to speak.
We also discuss the legacy of the late Krishna Shenoy and his transformative work in this field.
Commentary on Neuralink's brain-interfacing technology by Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar Paul Nuyujukian (WIRED, 2023; NBC Bay Area, 2024)
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Welcome to "From Our Neurons to Yours," from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Each week, we bring you to the frontiers of brain science — to meet the scientists unlocking the mysteries of the mind and building the tools that will let us communicate better with our brains.
This week, we're tackling a BIG question in neuroscience: why do we do what we do?
Specifically, we're talking about dopamine, and why the common understanding of this molecule as a "pleasure chemical" in the brain may be missing something fundamental.
Join us as we explore the distinction between 'liking' and 'wanting', between reward and motivation, and how this could help us more deeply understand how dopamine shapes our behavior. Tune in to gain insights into addiction, Parkinson's disease, depression and more.
Don't miss out on this thought-provoking discussion with Neir Eshel, a psychiatrist and leading Stanford expert on dopamine and behavior. (Including a conversation about a recent paper published with Rob Malenka, who we spoke with back in our very first episode!)
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler, at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
In this episode of "From Our Neurons to Yours," we're taking a deep dive into the neuroscience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the recent discovery that the anesthetic ketamine can give patients a week-long "vacation" from the disorder after just one dose.
Join us as we chat with Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, a leading expert in the field, who led the first clinical trial of Ketamine for patients with OCD. She sheds light on what OCD truly is, breaking down the misconceptions and revealing the reality of this serious condition.
Dr. Rodriguez, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford Medicine, discusses her research on ketamine for OCD, current hypotheses about how it works in the brain, and her approach to developing safer treatments. Listeners are encouraged to seek help if they or a loved one are struggling with OCD.
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we sit down with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo to explore the intersection of memory and navigation.
This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items.
This ancient technique reveals something very fundamental about how our brains work. It turns out that the same parts of the brain are responsible both for memory and for navigating through the world.
Scientists are learning more and more about these systems and the connections between them, and it's revealing surprising insights about how we build the narrative of our lives, how we turn our environments into an internal model of who we are, and where we fit into the world.
Join us to learn more about the neuroscience of space and memory.
About the story of Henry Molaison (patient H. M.), who lost the ability to form new memories after epilepsy treatment removed his hippocampus.
About the 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine, awarded to John O’Keefe and to May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Giocomo’s mentors) for their discovery of the GPS system of the brain.
About Memory Palaces, a technique used since ancient times to enhance memory using mental maps.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Today on the show, a new understanding of Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson's disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders — right after Alzheimer's disease. It's familiar to many as a movement disorder: people with the disease develop difficulties with voluntary control of their bodies. But the real story is much more complicated.
This week, we speak with Kathleen Poston, a Stanford neurologist who is at the forefront of efforts to redefine Parkinson's disease and related disorders based on their underlying biology — not just their symptoms. As Poston says: "The biology is the disease."
Join us to learn about exciting advances in our ability to detect the brain pathology driving these disorders much earlier, even before symptoms arise, and how this is opening doors for early intervention and — hopefully — prevention.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
We're talking again this week with Tony Wyss-Coray, the director of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience here at Wu Tsai Neuro.
Last year, we spoke with Tony about the biological nature of the aging process. Scientists can now measure signs of aging in the blood, and can in some cases slow or reverse the aging process in the lab. We discussed how this biological age can be quite different from your chronological age, and why understanding why people age at different rates has become a hot topic for researchers who study aging.
Since we last spoke, Professor Wyss-Coray and his lab have published some exciting new work that takes this idea from the level of the whole body down to the level of specific organs and tissues. We can now ask: are your brain, your heart, or your liver aging faster than the rest of you? The implications of this idea could be profound for both neuroscience and medicine more broadly.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontie
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
This week we’re doing something a little different. My good friend Michael Osborne, who produces this show also has his own podcast, called Famous & Gravy – Life Lessons from Dead Celebrities.
I recently guest-hosted an episode about one of my all time scientific and writerly heros, Oliver Sacks, which we're releasing for both our audiences. I hope you enjoy!
--- We've concluded Season 3 of From Our Neurons to Yours! Stay tuned for more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience in Season 4 — from psychedelics to cancer neuroscience to hypnosis — which we’ll share in just a few weeks. ---
Who was Oliver Sacks?
Oliver Sacks, born on July 9, 1933, was a British-American neurologist, author, and professor known for his groundbreaking work in neuroscience and his compelling narratives exploring the human mind. His unique ability to blend science with storytelling made him a beloved figure in both the medical and literary worlds.
Sacks' career in neurology began in the 1960s, where he studied and treated patients with various neurological disorders. His observations and insights into the complexities of the brain led to significant advancements in the field.
As an author, Oliver Sacks gained widespread acclaim for his books, including "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985) and "Awakenings" (1973), which was adapted into a successful film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. His writings, characterized by empathy and curiosity, explored the human condition through the lens of neuroscience.
Throughout his life, Sacks remained committed to understanding and humanizing neurological conditions. He championed the importance of empathy and compassion in medical practice, advocating for a holistic approach to patient care.
In addition to his literary contributions, Oliver Sacks was a revered educator, teaching at prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and the New York University School of Medicine. His lectures and writings inspired countless students and professionals in the field of neurology.
Oliver Sacks' legacy continues to resonate, shaping our understanding of the brain and its complexities. His work transcends disciplines, reminding us of the profound connections between science, humanity, and storytelling. Episode Credits Famous and Gravy was created by Amit Kapoor and Michael Osborne. This episode was produced by Evan Sherer with production assistance from Claire McInerney. Original theme music by Kevin Strang.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Why our brains are bad at climate change | Nik Sawe
00:23:42
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about the neuroscience of climate change with neuroeconomist Nik Sawe.
If you follow the science or the news, you know how big of a risk climate change is. Storms, coastal flooding, heat waves, extinctions, mass migration — the list goes on.
But — as you can probably also appreciate — it’s really hard to properly perceive that risk. It’s much easier to focus on today’s emergency, this week’s looming deadline, this quarter’s economic forecast — where the risks are objectively much smaller, but feel more pressing.
This is where neuroscience comes in: Why are our brains so bad at perceiving this existential, long-term risk to our society and our planet? And are there ways we could work with our brains' limitations to improve our decision-making around environmental issues and the future more broadly?
To answer this question, we spoke with Nik Sawe, a neuro-economist who uses brain imaging to study environmental decision making in the lab of Brian Knutson in the Stanford Department of Psychology. Nik is also a policy analyst at the think tank Energy Innovation, where he is working on policy avenues to reduce carbon emissions in the industrial sector.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Psychedelics, placebo, and anesthetic dreams | Boris Heifets (part 1)
00:30:27
Psychedelics are a hot topic in psychiatry today. They’re producing dramatic reversals for patients with severe depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. But scientists still have fundamental questions about why these drugs are so effective.
For example, is the "trip" even necessary? Some think it is not and are working to design drugs with similar brain chemistry but no psychoactive effects — “Taking the trip out of the drug.”
Others suspect that many of the benefits of psychedelics can be attributed to hype and expectation: People expect to get better, so they do.
Normally scientists control for placebo using a blinded study where patients don't know if they're getting the real treatment or a sugar pill. But how are you going to do this with mind-altering substances? Patients are probably going to figure out pretty quickly whether they got a sugar cube with or without LSD.
Today's guest, Stanford anesthesiologist Boris Heifets, has come up with a particularly clever strategy to tease apart the psychedelic experience, biochemistry, hype and placebo.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Psychedelics Part 2: How do drugs alter our perceptions? | Boris Heifets
00:23:36
Today, we're going to talk about how psychedelics alter our perception of reality and what that says about... reality!
Welcome to part two of our conversation with Stanford anesthesiologist and psychedelics researcher Boris Heifets!
Last time, we talked with Boris about the question of why psychedelics help people with mental health disorders.
This week, we're going to dive into a different question, which is to explore how psychedelics work in the brain. How are they able to alter something as fundamental as our perceptions of reality — and could understanding these effects teach us about the nature of our everyday perceptions?
Episode credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
At some point in our lives, we all struggle with memory — learning a new name, remembering that book you were reading just yesterday or that word on the tip of your tongue.
So what can neuroscience teach us about why we remember, why we forget, and how we might even improve our memories?
To answer this question, I spoke with neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, a memory expert in Stanford's Department of Psychology.
Anthony's new book: Brain Sciences for Lawyers, Judges, and Policymakers (2024). Jones, O. D., Schall, J. D., Shen, F. X., Hoffman, M. B., & Wagner, A. D. Oxford University Press. Order
Episode credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Neuroscience and AI: What artificial intelligence teaches us about the brain (and vice versa) | Surya Ganguli
00:27:38
The powerful new generation of AI tools that has come out over the past few years — DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest — have blown away our old ideas about what AI can do and raised questions about what it means for computers to start acting... intelligent?
This week, we ask what the rise of these systems might teach us about our own biological intelligence — and vice versa. What does modern neuroscience have to say about how AI could become as flexible, efficient, and resilient as the human brain.
Few people are better positioned to speak to the intersection of neuroscience and AI than today's guest: Surya Ganguli.
Ganguli's lab produced some of the first diffusion models — which are at the foundation of today's AI revolution — and is now working to understand how complex emergent properties arise from biological and artificial neural networks.
Visit us! Want to learn more about AI and Neuroscience? Join us at Wu Tsai Neuro's annual symposium on October 17, 2024, which will showcase the frontiers of biological and artificial intelligence research. (More details coming soon!)
Episode credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Hi everyone — quick programming announcement. As we head into summer, we'll be moving to an every-other-week cadence as we prepare more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience. I'm very excited about what we're working on for you, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu with your thoughts, praise, critiques, or just to say hello.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Our plastic brains: learning, memory and aging with the one and only Carla Shatz (Rerelease)
00:21:56
-- We're re-releasing our conversation with Carla Shatz, one of our favorites from the archive, which comes up all the time on the show in the context of brain plasticity and aging. Enjoy, and see you next time! -NW --
When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible.
You may have heard of a concept called neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to change or rewire itself. This is of course central to learning and memory, but it's also important for understanding a surprisingly wide array of medical conditions, including things like epilepsy, depression, even Alzheimer's disease.
Today's guest, Carla Shatz, is a pioneer in understanding how our brains are sculpted by our experiences. She's credited with coining the phrase neurons that fire together, wire together. Her work over the past 40 years is foundational to how we understand the brain today.
So I was excited to talk to Shatz about our brain's capacity for change, and I started off by asking about this sort of simple question, why exactly do we have this learning superpower as kids to do things like pick up languages and why does it go away?
Shatz is Sapp Family Provostial Professor of Biology and of Neurobiology and the Catherine Holman Johnson director of Stanford Bio-X.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Webby award-winning producer Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
How a new kind of brain plasticity could help make sense of addiction | Michelle Monje and Rob Malenka
00:22:54
This week, we're diving into recent research that sheds light on a new form of brain plasticity involving changes in the insulation of nerve fibers — called myelin. It turns out that myelin plasticity is implicated in a number of serious conditions, from epilepsy to drug abuse and addiction.
We're excited to bring back two previous guests on the show to share their insights on this previously unknown form of plasticity: Stanford psychiatry professor Rob Malenka (S1 E1 - Psychedelics and Empathy), a pioneer in the study of synaptic plasticity and addiction, and neuro-oncologist Michelle Monje (S1 E12 - Brain Fog), who made some of the very first observations of myelin plasticity in the brain, essentially founding this field.
Together, they discuss their recent findings on the role of myelin plasticity in opioid addiction and its implications for understanding addictive behaviors.
Get ready to nerd out as we uncover a new angle on our brain's remarkable capacity for change.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Electronic skin and the future of wearable technology | Zhenan Bao
00:23:35
The skin is full of contradictions. It’s soft and sensitive, but also tough and resilient, even self-healing. It’s both the barrier that protects us from infections and our most intimate connection with the outside world.
Today’s guest, Zhenan Bao, has spent the last two decades reverse engineering the skin’s many remarkable properties in order to create wearable electronics that are just as soft, flexible, and versatile as the skin itself.
Bao envisions a world where stick-on devices could help heal injuries, manage anxiety, and even enhance our perceptions, and soft, implanted devices could give neurosciences new insights into the workings of the body and brain.
In today’s episode, we talk about what makes the skin such an intriguing problem for an engineer like Bao; some of the many applications of her technology for medicine, neuroscience, and mental health; and its potential to enhance or extend our perceptions.
Bao is K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford and founding director of eWEAR — the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
How VR could help treat depression with "radical behaviorist" Dr. Kim Bullock
00:21:36
Today, we're going to talk about virtual reality and how it could be used to treat depression.
We're talking with psychiatrist Kim Bullock, the founding director of Stanford's Neurobehavioral Clinic and Virtual Reality & Immersive Technologies (VRIT) program.
Dr. Bullock — a physician certified in Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatry, and Lifestyle Medicine — calls herself a "radical behaviorist." Like other practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), she sees the troublesome thoughts and emotional states of many psychiatric disorders as just another form of behavior, which can be reshaped through self awareness and practice — much like you might work at avoiding junk food or not biting your nails.
Of course, one of the biggest challenges is the practice part. It's no easy task for patients to practice experiencing the world in a more positive, healthy way. This is why Bullock is eager for practitioners of CBT and related forms of psychotherapy to embrace virtual reality technologies — which enable psychiatrists to prescribe precisely calibrated "experiences" to treat cognitive & behavioral disorders.
We started by discussing early results from a clinical trial for a virtual reality-enhanced intervention major depressive disorder, which Dr. Bullock recently launched with support from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Neuroscience:Translate program.
Join us to learn more about how VR is transforming the world of psychotherapy!
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Unraveling Timothy Syndrome: the new science of human brain development | Sergiu Pasca
00:30:31
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about using new techniques for growing human brain tissue in the lab to solve a rare neurological disorder.
Host Nicholas Weiler sits down with Sergiu Pasca an innovative Stanford scientist who has developed groundbreaking technologies to grow human brain tissue in the lab, creating "organoids" and "assembloids" that model brain disorders like autism and schizophrenia.
Pasca describes the process of turning patient skin cells into embryo-like stem cells and then into functional brain cells that can live and develop for over two years, and even be transplanted into rat brains to study their growth and development.
It may sound like science fiction, but these techniques represent a major step toward understanding and treating complex neurological conditions such as Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic disorder whose biology Pasca has spent the past 15 years unraveling.
Join us for fascinating glimpse into the future of developmental neuroscience and potential for new therapies for our remarkable self-assembling brains.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Today, we're talking with Stanford neuro-oncologist, Michelle Monje. This is actually the third time we've had Michelle on the show, in part because she's been a pioneer of three exciting frontiers in neuroscience — so far!
This week, we're going to talk about cancer neuroscience. Michelle founded this new field with her discovery that deadly brain tumors not only link up physically with the healthy brain tissue surrounding them, but the cancers actually need the brain's electrical activity to grow and spread.
It turns out that many cancers — not only in the brain — depend on nervous system innervation for their survival. Understanding this dependent relationship better may present an exciting new line of attack for oncology.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Depression's distinctive fingerprints in the brain | Leanne Williams, Stanford University
00:28:11
Getting help for depression can be like purgatory. Setting aside for a moment the stigma and other barriers to seeking treatment in the first place, finding the right combination of medication and/or therapy can be a months- or years-long process of trial and error. And for about one third of people, nothing seems to work.
Today we're talking with Dr. Leanne Williams, the founding director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness and Vincent V.C. Woo Professor in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Williams and her team have recently used brain imaging and machine learning techniques to identify six distinct "biotypes" of depression — each of which may require a different approach to treatment. Beyond setting the stage for more targeted therapies, better understanding the biology behind the disease could finally cut through the stigma of one of the world's most common brain disorders.
Episode Credits This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Why new Alzheimer's drugs don't work | Mike Greicius, Stanford University School of Medicine
00:25:48
In the past few years, Big Pharma has released not one, but three new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
Aducanemab (2021), Lecanemab (2023), and Donanemab (2024), are the first treatments to effectively clear the brain of amyloid plaques — the sticky protein clumps whose build-up in the brain has defined the disease for decades. The problem? They may not help patients at all.
Today’s guest, Stanford neurologist Mike Greicius, considers the new amyloid-clearing drugs a major disappointment — and worse, says they likely do more harm than good for patients.
Despite this critique, Greicius, thinks that the next few years will be an exciting time for novel Alzheimer’s therapies, as growing biological understanding of Alzheimer’s risk and resilience bear fruit with promising new approaches to treatment.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Memory Palaces: the science of mental time travel and the brain's GPS system | Lisa Giocomo (Re-release)
00:25:50
Today we are re-releasing an episode we did last year with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo exploring the intersection of memory, navigation and the boundaries we create between ourselves and the world around us.
This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items.
This ancient technique reveals something very fundamental about how our brains work. It turns out that the same parts of the brain are responsible both for memory and for navigating through the world.
Scientists are learning more and more about these systems and the connections between them, and it's revealing surprising insights about how we build the narrative of our lives, how we turn our environments into an internal model of who we are, and where we fit into the world.
Join us to learn more about the neuroscience of space and memory.
Before we get into this week’s episode, we have a favor to ask. We're working to make this show even better, and we want to hear from you. We're in the process of gathering listener input and feedback. If you'd be willing to help out, send us a short note and we'll be in touch. As always, we are at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu
About the story of Henry Molaison (patient H. M.), who lost the ability to form new memories after epilepsy treatment removed his hippocampus.
About the 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine, awarded to John O’Keefe and to May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Giocomo’s mentors) for their discovery of the GPS system of the brain.
About Memory Palaces, a technique used since ancient times to enhance memory using mental maps.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
The cannabinoids within: how marijuana hijacks an ancient signaling system in the brain | Ivan Soltesz
00:37:33
Given the widespread legalization of cannabis for medical and recreational uses, you'd think we'd have a better understanding of how it works. But ask a neuroscientist exactly how cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD alter our perceptions or lead to potential medical benefits, and you'll soon learn just how little we know.
We know that these molecules hijack an ancient signaling system in the brain called the "endocannabinoid" system (translation: the "cannabinoids within"). These somewhat exotic signaling molecules (made of fatty lipids and traveling "backwards" compared to other transmitters) have been deeply mysterious until recently, when new tools made it possible to visualize their activity directly in the brain.
So what is the "day job" of the endocannabinoid system — and how does it connect to the dramatic highs that come with taking THC or the medical benefits of CBD?
To unpack all this, we're talking this week with neuroscientist Ivan Soltesz, the James Doty Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience at Stanford, and a leading expert on the endocannabinoid system.
"Marijuana-like brain substance calms seizures but increases aftereffects, study finds" (Goldman, Stanford Medicine News, 2021)
"Retrograde endocannabinoid signaling at inhibitory synapses in vivo" (Dudok et al, Science, 2024)
Vote for us! We are a finalist for a prestigious Signal Award for Best Science Podcast of 2024! Share your love for the show by voting for us in the Listener's Choice category by October 17. Thanks in advance!
Get in touch: We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
The BRAIN Initiative: the national vision for the future of neuroscience is now in doubt | Bill Newsome
00:39:23
Earlier this year, President Obama's signature BRAIN Initiative, which has powered advances in neuroscience for the past 10 years, had its budget slashed by 40%.
Over the past decade, the BRAIN Initiative made roughly $4 billion in targeted investments in more than 1500 research projects across the country and has dramatically accelerated progress tackling fundamental challenges in neuroscience. As we head into the next federal budget cycle, the future of the initiative remains uncertain.
Today we take stock of how the BRAIN Initiative transformed neuroscience over the past 10 years, and what the outlook is for the future of the field.
To give us an unparalleled behind the scenes view, we are fortunate to have Bill Newsome with us on the show. A world renowned expert in the brain mechanisms of visual perception and decision-making, Bill co-chaired the original BRAIN Initiative planning committee in 2013 (the same year he became the founding director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute here at Stanford). Don't miss this conversation!
Get in touch We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Seeing sounds, tasting colors: the science of synaesthesia with David Eagleman (re-release)
00:21:52
Today, we are going back into the archives for one of my favorite episodes: We are talking to neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, David Eagleman. We're talking about synaesthesia — and if you don't know what that is, you're about to find out.
Special Note We are beyond thrilled that From Our Neurons to Yours has won a 2024 Signal Award in the Science Podcast category. It's a big honor — thanks to everyone who voted!
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Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about the sound of rain — does that sound taste like chocolate? Or does the sound of a saxophone feel triangular to you?
For about 3% of the population, the sharp lines between our senses blend together. Textures may have tastes, sounds, shapes, numbers may have colors. This sensory crosstalk is called synesthesia, and it's not a disorder, just a different way of experiencing the world.
To learn about the neuroscience behind this fascinating phenomenon and what it tells us about how our brains perceive the world, we were fortunate enough to speak with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur here at Stanford who has long been fascinated by synesthesia and what it means about how our perceptions shape our reality.
Get in touch We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
The power of psychedelics meets the power of placebo: ketamine, opioids, and hope in depression treatment | Boris Heifets & Theresa Lii
00:35:10
Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression.
We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelics trial? What do we know about how placebo actually works in the brain? And should we view the placebo effect as a feature rather than a bug in psychiatric treatment?
Join us as we examine the complex interplay between psychoactive drugs, the brain's own opioid system, and the healing power of hope in mental health care.
Get in touch We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is host
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
How to live in a world without free will | Robert Sapolsky
00:40:46
Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament."
In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control.
Before we get into it, it's worth saying that where this is heading, the reason to care about this question is that Sapolsky's argument has profound moral implications for our understanding of justice, personal responsibility, and whether any of us deserve to be judged or praised for our actions.
Get in touch We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Does good sleep insulate the brain against Alzheimer's? | Erin Gibson
00:39:25
We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease.
To unpack this complex relationship, we're thrilled to welcome back Erin Gibson, assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford School of Medicine and Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate.
We'll explore whether age-related sleep changes are potential contributors to brain degeneration or valuable early indicators of otherwise invisible brain disorders, possibly opening doors for early intervention.
We'll also learn about Gibson's research, supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro, which investigates how myelin—the insulation of our nerve cells—could be a key missing link in understanding the relationship between sleep and brain health.
Join us for an enlightening discussion that might just change how you think about your nightly slumber and its profound impact on long-term cognitive function.
Get in touch We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and research assistance by G Kumar. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Stimulating the brain with sound | Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan
00:30:43
As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve.
Today we're going to be talking with neuroscientists who aim to solve this problem with sound. And not just any sound: ultrasound.
Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan from the Stanford Department of Radiology are developing ultrasound technology in a couple of different ways to essentially reach into the brain to treat brain disorders that are otherwise hard to access. These uses of ultrasound haven't yet reached the clinic, but could be entering clinical testing in people in the next few years.
Get in touch We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neu
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
What the other half of the brain does | Brad Zuchero
00:35:00
We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia science was founded here at Stanford in the lab of the late, great Ben Barres.
No one is better suited to take us through this history and lead us to the frontiers of the field than today's guest, Brad Zuchero.
A former Barres lab postdoc, and now an emerging leader in this field in his own right, Brad gives us an overview of our growing understanding of the various different kinds of glia and their roles in brain function, and shares the exciting discoveries emerging from his lab — including growing evidence of a role for myelin in Alzheimers disease.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
What ChatGPT understands: Large language models and the neuroscience of meaning | Laura Gwilliams
00:42:31
If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word.
But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human brain, we talked about how similar they are? What if we could use these large language models to help us understand how our own brains process language to extract meaning?
There's no one better positioned to take us through this than returning guest Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science Institute, and a member of the department of psychology here at Stanford.
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's
Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
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