Blogging on the Brain

So as it turns out, scientists can put their egos aside and collaborate! I came across this article in the New York Times last week, and I almost couldn’t believe what I read – multiple research groups, including the NIH, FDA, and several other medical companies, decided that it would be beneficial to (gasp) share data. This is not something that happens often in the sciences (I can’t speak for other disciplines). There is a general culture of rigorously guarding one’ s data and experiments until releasing them into the world as a publication. One of the researchers, Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, at University of Pennsylvania, is quoted in the article:

“It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

And their data is public immediately. Any researcher can download the entire data set after a simple request form and agreement to terms of use – which openly allows publication of their data. Turns out our kindergarten teachers were right – it’s nice to share, and two heads are, in fact, better than one.

The organization of this group, called ADNI (Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative) is like nothing I’ve ever heard of before – essentially the NIH is taking lead and acting as a mediator between academia and pharmaceuticals, a relationship that is usually less than amicable. Funding has come from the National Institute on Aging, and more than *20* other institutes, companies, and nonprofits, giving ADNI a budget to get up and running for the first six years. There is already talk of renewing for five additional years.

I think this is extraordinary. Already there’s been progress on identifying biomarkers of Alzheimer’s based on imaging and other methods. People involved in Parkinson’s Disease research, specifically the Michael J. Fox foundation, are already talking about applying this model to Parkinson’s research as well. I would like to give a huge round of virtual applause to the individuals who came up with and were able to implement this plan. Could you imagine what we’d be capable of if this was the norm and not the exception? This is what science should be.

Here’s a recent article from the Washington Post related to some of my dissertation work in autism. The article talks about a study in which autistic adults took the hormone oxytocin (primarily known for its role in pair bonding) in a nasal spray, and on a subsequent test performed better at tasks involving social interaction and facial recognition. Pretty cool stuff.

In the past, oxytocin (OT) has been used to treat another main symptom category in autism spectrum disorders: repetitive movements. So this new study in addition to that information is now strongly pointing us in the OT direction as far as research and clinical trials.

Obviously this is just one study, so cautious optimism is suggested – certainly until we can replicate the study in a larger trial (as well as considering the efficacy in children). But hey, cautious optimism is still optimism, right?

I am currently sitting in Baylor’s neuroanatomy lab, giving my first of two finals for the semester. My first thought was incredulity that it’s actually getting close to the end of yet another semester, although the end always seems to creep up on me.

As I’m sitting here, however, other thoughts are coming to mind, mostly about my students. Some of them I’ve had for two semesters now and most likely won’t interact with again. These are the ones I am thinking about now. Two full semesters in which I have (hopefully) taught them about MRIs, CTs, all kinds of neuroanatomy and disorders of the nervous system. My first hope is that I haven’t taught them any misinformation or made a bad impression or made them hate neuroscience because of how much work these labs are, but I feel like that should be the minimum that I hope for.

I realize that most of what these students learned this semester was pretty dry neuroanatomy, but I feel like they don’t fully realize how cool it is that right now, they’re each sitting in front of a pan with a slice or two of brain in it and they (hopefully, at least to some extent) understand what they’re looking at. Not only is that a very rare ability as far as the general public is concerned, but would have been literally impossible as of even 100 years ago.

Clearly I’m beginning to ramble at this point, but I guess I’m just feeling a little sad at losing some of the students that I’ve enjoyed having in class, of course I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the break and a new challenge next semester. I do, however, spend a lot of time around this point in the semester focusing on everything that I didn’t teach or those days when I didn’t have the energy to do my best for them. But I hope that all these students go on to do good things and that I didn’t get in the way too much, and that maybe – just maybe – they’ll remember a little neuroanatomy too.

I need some advice.

I’ve been given the (very exciting) opportunity to lead a reading group next semester on Oliver Sacks’ classic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I love this book. The first time I read this, in fact, was in my very first physiological psychology class in undergrad, and it is, in large part, what made me want to become a neuroscientist.

That being said, I’m sort of at a loss as far as going about a reading/discussion group. The participants will not be getting any credit, won’t be tested, and won’t be there for the purpose of learning neuroanatomy or anything, so I guess I’m having trouble trying to actually pinpoint how to best highlight different aspects of the cases, as well as figuring out what discussion points may come out of those stories. Part of the problem is that Sacks’ writing is so good, I’m not sure what’s left to say at the end of any essay!

So I’ve tried to come up with a few ideas of what I think we should talk about in response to the book (these are still very general, I assume they’ll get more specific depending on the given case for that session).

1. I think one of the most interesting things about the book is that it introduces the idea that things we thought were sort of inherent in our humanity are strongly and specifically based in biological systems in our brains. These specific things (like being able to recognize faces, or know that our limbs belong to us) can be taken away through a simple brain lesion. As far as discussion is concerned, I’d want to talk about maybe what is inherently human, or how many things you can take away before there’s not really a person there anymore. It’s also often hard to read a lot of this without adopting a very reductionistic viewpoint about human behavior – which is something that we could discuss too.

2. Another thing I know Sacks is good at is giving us an idea of how these patients have learned to function despite their injuries/disabilities. I think there are probably lots of lessons to be learned about not only overcoming adversity in general, but it also leads to this sense of awe at how beautifully our brains work when they’re uninjured as well as how they compensate when they’re compromised.

I feel like there was something else I wanted to add in there too, but I seem to have lost my train of thought. I’d be really, really appreciative of any input on this one. Kind of scary that I’ve only been teaching a couple of years and already I feel sort of lost when there’s no clear goal in mind as far as imparting information to be retained. I think for now, my goal for this group is as follows:

To instill in the participants a sense of the beauty and complexity of the brain in healthy as well as injured states, and to investigate the implications of having a strongly biological system underlying our thoughts and behaviors.

I decided to combine days 3 & 4 of the meeting because, quite frankly, there weren’t that many things I was excited about reporting. I’m almost completely certain that was due to my own lack of planning mixed with the distraction of being back in Chicago.

Anyway, the first notable session of Monday was the annual lecture on neuroethics – an area made popular by well-known coma/vegetative state patients like Terri Schiavo. The presentation was from Dr. Steven Laureys from the University of Liege in Belgium (I must admit, a great accent to listen to for an hour) and was entitled: Eyes Wide Open, Brain Wide Shut? (Un)Consciousness in the Vegetative State. He began by talking about the two components of consciousness: wakefulness (necessary but not sufficient), and awareness. He had a very clever graph that showed what disorders result at different points along those two axes. For instance, in the vegetative state you have wakefulness but no consciousness; in coma you have neither wakefulness or consciousness; and in locked-in syndrome (a very scary disorder), you have consciousness but may or may not have wakefulness.

The most interesting portion of his talk (I thought) was going through some of the imaging studies done on people in different states of consciousness. For instance, they used fMRI and/or diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to look at activity in the brains of people diagnosed as vegetative/locked-in/minimally conscious/coma/brain dead (as well as normal controls and normal sleeping controls) to determine the actual differences in activity in the different diagnoses. Not surprisingly, there was a continuum of activity – the lowest was obviously from the brain-dead group, with vegetative patients just above, followed by coma, minimally conscious, and then locked-in almost on par with normal controls.

The most obvious application of this research is its usefulness as a diagnostic tool. Where in the past there has been a lot of argument about whether or not patients are brain dead, vegetative, or minimally conscious, these tests could much more clearly delineate the differences between those diagnoses, as well as clarifying the possible prognoses for individual patients.

On Tuesday, I only had time to attend one session before heading to the airport, and it was kind of a strange one. It was given by Dr. Ben Barres of Stanford University, entitled How do Astrocytes Promote CNS Synaptogenesis? I was interested in attending because we often gloss over the importance of glia in the CNS and spend most of our time studying the neurons themselves. Unfortunately, once he got into the substance of the talk, it got very, very technical and I had a pretty hard time following.

I think the more interesting part of his presentation was when he stopped for a moment to thank one of the postdocs in his lab that had done a lot of this work – he clearly had a lot of respect for this woman and took a moment to address the lack of women in science. As he was speaking, he mentioned that he had written a letter that was published in Nature in 2006 after that infamous Harvard paper was published reportedly showing that boys are better at math and science than girls. Dr. Barres then mentioned that (as many people there already knew – he seems very open about it) he is a transsexual – which of course made the comment about women in science all the more interesting. He gave us a link to a talk he gave about the “dearth of women in science.” I haven’t watched the whole thing yet (it’s a little over an hour and a half long), but I certainly plan to.

The second day of SfN brought a couple of interesting presentations. The first was a talk by T.C. Sudhof of Stanford entitled “From Synapses to Autism: Neurexins, Neuroligins, and More.” I went to the session primarily because autism was in the title, plus the fact that I really didn’t know anything about neurexins and neuroligins, and I thought that maybe I should. As I sat through the talk and scribbled notes down, I felt like I was sort of following everything okay, but now looking back at my notes, I’m feeling a bit lost – I really should make myself do this the same day – sigh. Oh well. Here’s what I can make out from my notes:

Neurocircuitry is incredibly important to keep in mind when attempting to understand the massive processing capacity of our brains. These circuits have properties that depend on three things: 1. Intrinsic neural properties, 2. Synaptic connectivity, and 3. Synaptic properties. Neurexins and neuroligins function as synaptic cell-adhesion molecules, therefore modulating some of these circuit properties. Specifically, neuroligins increase synaptic density – sounds simple, right? Well, like most topics in neuroscience, it gets a lot more complicated really really quickly. Neuroligins do increase synaptic density, but sometimes these synapses aren’t really functional, and if they are, you may see increased excitatory post-synaptic currents (EPSCs) and no change in inhibitory post-synaptic currents (IPSCs), or you may see an increase in IPSCs and no change in EPSCs, depending, it seems, on which alternative splicing took place in the formation of the neuroligin.

So I think the moral of the story was that neuroligins may provide a common link for many of the current theories of autism (candidate genes, neuroanatomy, etc.) thus providing an underlying mechanism to explain at least a portion of the disorder. Cool stuff, but clearly I’m going to have to read up on it…

The second exciting session I went to was concerned with using neuroscience in the classroom, which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Unfortunately, it seemed to be more about how to teach neuroscience than use neuroscientific principles in the classroom. There was, however, one presentation (it was set up as a mini-symposium, which several speakers each talking for about 15 minutes) that caught my attention. The presenter, Dr. Sally Hoskins of City College in NY talked about using a curriculum called “CREATE” (see below) to use primary literature to teach science. I thought this was a very interesting idea, especially after having talked a bit with some people involved in Baylor’s Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) program, and some of the things they’ve been talking about with their “Natural World” course.

So, the first step in this curriculum is to find several papers from the same lab that the students will read in sequence of publication date. I don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to more people in the past, but what a great way to give students an idea of how science is really done! Not only will they see how long it takes to cultivate a line of research, but they’ll actually see a line of research and how the answers to one question almost always lead to more questions to answer!  So I thought that in itself was great. In addition, they outlined 6 steps (CREATE) the students use for each paper. Here they are:

1. C: Consider. Students take the paper and read the lit review section, and make a map of all the ideas and concepts in the paper. Every student’s map turns out differently, and it’s quite a bit of work for the student, as they’ll often have to spend lots of time looking up techniques or other things that they’re not familiar with.

2. R: Read. They’ll read through the paper and draw cartoons of what actually happened in the lab. They’ll also make annotations of the figures before they come to class.

3 E: Elucidate. Students use their maps from step 1 and re-write the question that’s being answered through the research

4. A: Analyze. Students transform any data tables and reorganize the information to aid in interaction with the material and understanding of the data.

5. T: Think of the next experiment. Students are not given the next paper from the lab until they’ve finished all these steps, so each student comes up with what they think the next experiment should be (I love this step).

6. E: Experiment. Students write their proposals for ideas from the previous step, and actually form mock grant panels to eventually pick one proposal from the class that they’d fund. Different groups almost always pick different proposals, again teaching students valuable lessons about grant writing and the differences in results just depending on the people sitting on the board, not necessarily the integrity of the proposal.

These steps are then repeated with the subsequent papers from the same lab. A couple other good ideas they put forth: First, the students never receive the abstract for the article. They found that, if given the abstract, students were much less creative in their reading and interpretation of the data. Second, the class often emails the author of the papers with a short survey – and they’ve actually received many replies! So I kind of love this idea. Now I just need to find a class to try it out on!

First off, I apologize for the massive delay in posts from SfN. As I mentioned before, my access was very spotty, and I found that jumping back into normal life mid-week (I got back late Tuesday night) left little time for blogging. Anyway, I figure I’ll take the next few days to catch up and clear out the archive before the NMC conference next week!

So the highlight of the first day of the conference was the annual “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society” talk, which has in the past  featured people everywhere from the Dalai Lama (who I assume spoke about meditation, etc.), to architects (like Frank Gehry) and choreographers. This year the talk featured two internationally known magicians, Eric Mead and Apollo Robbins, who spoke about how magic utilizes known perceptual/attentional/memory functions to trick people into thinking they’ve seen/heard/remembered something that didn’t (or couldn’t) really happen.

Eric Mead spoke first, and spoke mostly about memory and attention. He brought up a very good-natured audience member and had her memorize several geometric shapes he had drawn on an index card. He then took the card away and had her close her eyes while he took her through a mental visualization of being on the beach with the sun setting, a sail boat going by, and a house behind her. When she opened her eyes, he asked her to name the shapes on the card, and she said there were three items – a circle, a triangle, and a square. In actuality, there had been four items – circle, triangle, square, and star – but his story had only reinforced three of them – the sun (circle), sailboat (triangle), and house (square).

He went on to describe how important it is for magicians to be able to get people to forget important details about what they’re seeing. He used the example of getting something out of his coat pocket without the audience noticing. He said a bad magician would just try to misdirect attention by doing something with his left hand while reaching into his pocket with his right hand. A better magician will put both hands in his pockets like a casual gesture, then pull them out with the required object in his right hand. A good magician will actually make a habit of putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out often, so the audience gets so used to him doing it without anything happening immediately afterward that they won’t even encode it in the first place.

Apollo Robbins – known as “The Gentleman Thief” – was up next. He started with a very entertaining performance with another very good-natured audience member, in which he managed to remove the man’s watch and wallet while doing several other tricks without the volunteer or any of the several thousand people in the audience noticing. It was pretty impressive. He obviously spends a lot of time working with the art of deception, and he often works with ex-thieves to learn their tricks, then consults with police departments to help educate them in how pickpockets and theives really do their work.

He walked through several different ways that thieves (and magicians) work to obtain access to either the participant/victim’s pockets, or their memory and attention. First he talked about proximity – it’s hard to steal a wallet if you can’t get within arm’s reach of the person. So to do that, there are a couple of steps that he demonstrated with a very large man onstage. First, if you approach from the front, drop eye contact, which will automatically make the situation more comfortable. You can also turn to the side and come up next to him, which is much more comfortable than standing squared off in front of him, plus it puts you in closer proximity to his pockets.

The second thing he mentioned were ways to keep people’s eyes where you want them. He actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and he mentioned controlling saccades (the way our eyes move in sort of jerky steps and not in smooth motions, even though we perceive a smooth pan across a scene) as a way to keep attention where you want in. This could be as simple as making a more interesting movement with the hand you want people to be watching – if you move in a straight line, people can anticipate where it’ll end up, and our eyes (and attention) will bounce back to the starting point. If, however, you do something as simple as making that straight line into an arch, people are much more likely to continue following the arch with their eyes, and therefore not see what you’re trying to conceal.

The third (and I think most interesting) thing he mentioned was the difference between misdirection of attention and actual control of attention, and the ability to actually direct the interior dialogue of the audience/volunteer/victim. First of all, he talked about the importance of framing memories. For example, a lot of people think that pickpockets will bump into you and grab your wallet as they do. According to Mr. Robbins, only the crudest and least experienced pickpockets would try this. More often, you’ll find people who work in teams, so let’s say you’re going up an escalator, and the person in front of you drops a bag and bends over to pick it up. You would then back up to avoid running into the person in front of you, and you would bump into the person behind you. What you wouldn’t know is that the person in front of you was working with the person behind you and that when you bumped into the guy, he took your wallet. The difference is that you wouldn’t have even encoded the fact that you bumped into the guy as a possible situation for theft. Pretty cool, huh?

The other way to control attention (more in the magic-show setting than the thievery setting) is to very carefully word the way that you give directions. The example he used was, if you were doing a card trick where you wanted a little time to go by between the start and finish of a trick so the audience would forget some of the details of the first part, you would hand the cards to the volunteer and NOT say “shuffle the cards,” but say “show me how you shuffle.” This will end up directing their thoughts to what may or may not be important about their shuffling ability, and more importantly, won’t give them time to think about the details of the trick.

So it was a very entertaining presentation, and it ended with some discussion between the two magicians, the president of SfN, and one of the leading researchers in perceptual illusions. The basic question was how any of this might be applied to research. During the presentation, Eric Mead had made the point that a lot of what magicians do is very similar to how memory research is done. He mentioned the very well-known work of Elizabeth Loftus, in which she doctored photos to make it look like participants had been in a hot-air balloon as kids, and by the end of the study, almost every single one expressed that they had actual memories of this experience that never actually happened. He then added, while that was great work and everything, that he and most other magicians implant false memories every time they perform – whether it’s getting people to remember that they put a card back in a stack instead of him, or that they shuffled when really he did – they have a step-by-step process that works almost every single time. Whether or not that could actually be applied to research, he wasn’t sure.

It was pretty funny to watch people the rest of the day – even walking out of the main hall – everyone was chatting excitedly about the presentations…and clutching their wallets and purses. And on that note, here’s a little intro video to Apollo Robbins, Gentleman Thief.

I got a lovely surprise this week when, sort of out of the blue, my advisor mentioned he had some funding laying around to send me and my labmates to the annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting! The funny part is that SfN is next weekend, so I’ve been scrambling to register, make housing arrangements, and book flights.

So not only am I excited for the meeting in general (who wouldn’t want to go to a 5-day meeting of 30,000 neuroscientists from all over the world?), but also because the meeting is being held in my very own hometown – Chicago! It’s the first time it’s ever been held in the Windy City (there are very few cities in the US that can handle that sort of volume), and it’s always gorgeous in October so I’m ready to soak up my one weekend of actual fall weather.

I’m also excited to keep up some blogging while I’m out there – it’ll be a little bit of a departure from what I’ve been doing here lately with all the modern thinkers – I’m seriously going to nerd out. Just a preview of some of the sessions I plan on attending:

Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society: Magic, the Brain, and the Mind

Origins of Abstract Knowledge: Number and Geometry

From Synapses to Autism — Neurexins,Neuroligins, and More

Translational Neuroscience: From Bench to Classroom and Back

Writing for an Audience of Millions: Wikipedia and Neuroscience

The Microcircuitry of Autism

And that’s just after looking through the keynotes/featured lectures! So excited.

Fantastic TED talk by Oliver Sacks, one of my personal heroes, on visual hallucinations. If you’ve never heard him speak before, I highly recommend you check it out. He speaks with all the same warmth, curiosity, and knowledge that comes across in his writing, plus you get to listen to his fantastic accent!

Today I gave my Seminar for Excellence in Teaching (SET) on neuroscience and learning for the second time. I gave it for the first time last March, after a horrendous week of computer crashes and lost files, so I expected to be more comfortable this time. That turned out to be true to a certain extent – once I got started I think I had a lot more confidence than last time, but I had other types of uncertainty this time. First of all, I obviously wasn’t as active in preparing as I was last time. I certainly re-read (or at least skimmed) the bulk of the articles I used to build the presentation in the first place and I added some new stuff, but as I walked into the classroom, I found myself worrying I may have missed some huge advancement in the last six months, etc. But it went fine.

I got my feedback, and I’m happy to say it was mostly positive! Most of the criticisms were that the presentation time was too short and people wished we could have gotten into more detail – so that was a plus. Apparently there were one or two people present that either really didn’t like the material or didn’t like me, but I’m trying to focus on the other 18 or 20

So that’s about it for now. After the SET I had to teach a 3-hour neuroanatomy lab and I’m exhausted. I always forget how different “presenting” feels from “teaching.” Much scarier and much, much more tiring. Although I have to admit, it was nice to hear some applause at the end. What do you think the chances are of getting my students to do that after lectures?

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