What's on our brains: Behind the scenes of From Our Neurons to Yours
Today on the show we're doing something a little different.
Quite different, actually. Nine seasons in, listeners might wonder: Why do we make this show? How do we prepare for it? What do we hope you get out of it? What even is the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute?
The idea has been brewing for a while, and this time we're doing it: From Our Neurons To Yours is taking you behind the scenes of From Our Neurons To Yours. Producer Michael Osborne joins host Nicholas Weiler to talk about where the show came from, how we get ready to bring you to the frontiers of neuroscience, and yes, what Wu Tsai Neuro is all about.
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Episode credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Mark Bell. Social media strategy is by Julia Diaz, and additional editing by Nathan Collins. 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.
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We want to hear from YOUR neurons! Email us if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Transcript
Nicholas Weiler (00:10):
Welcome back to From Our Neurons to Yours, from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, bringing you as always to the frontiers of brain science. I'm your host, Nicholas Weiler. Today, we're doing something a little different. We're going to take you behind the scenes of the show, why we make it, how we prepare for episodes, and what we hope you take away from our conversations. So this time I'll be answering the questions and joining me to put me in the hot seat is our producer, Michael Osborne, who helped develop the show, has been working with me on it since the beginning. Michael, welcome to From Our Neurons to Yours. I'm going to hand it over to you. I'm a little bit nervous. I think this is going to be fun though.
Michael Osborne (00:55):
Well, good, because I'm going to try and catch you off guard. This is gotcha journalism, essentially.
Nicholas Weiler (00:59):
Excellent. This is what we need here on the show.
Michael Osborne (01:01):
Thanks for inviting me on, Nick. I'm excited to do this episode. I want to start by asking you a question about the audience. We've been working on the show for however many it is, four years, something like that now.
Nicholas Weiler (01:14):
Yeah, almost four years.
Michael Osborne (01:15):
And one thing I've encouraged you to do behind the scenes is, as much as possible, get to know people who are listening. I'd like to hear your sort of theory of the case for who the audience for this show is, and what you hope the emotional experience of the podcast is episode to episode.
Nicholas Weiler (01:36):
Well, I like to joke that anyone with a brain should have a listen, but because we're trying to talk about what it's like to have a brain, what does it mean? What should we know about this thing that gives us our ability to do all the things that we do in our everyday lives, perceive, think, love, learn, all those things. But yeah, there's a more specific audience I think we have in mind, which is, I know that we reach a lot of people who are working in neuroscience, people who are working in different areas of neuroscience. It is a very, very big field. There are people who are doing engineering for brain computer interfaces. There are people who are thinking about the molecules that are involved in building the brain. There are people who are thinking about brain imaging and large scale networks. And so, one of my hopes is that we can bring different stories from the many different frontiers of neuroscience to help unify people who think about the brain.
(02:31):
And then I would say the second category of people who I hope are listening, besides my family, hi mom, is, I do hear from people across the country, actually around the world, people are listening to the show just because they're curious about how their brains work. I've heard from people who use this in a high school classroom to study the brain. I've heard this from people who have used the show to help settle family arguments about why some people's memory is better than others. So I mean, I do really hope that it is useful for anyone who is genuinely curious about how the mind works and what we're learning about the brain.
Michael Osborne (03:08):
And what about the emotional experience? I mean, one thing I have sort of tried to bring to our conversations behind the scenes is that I believe we need to tell a story, and that story is an emotional engine, and that while every episode is different, episode to episode in terms of the content and the subject matter and the guest, I do like to think that there may be a consistent emotional experience of the show. If I were to put that question to you, how would you describe it or what you're going for?
Nicholas Weiler (03:40):
Yeah, interesting. I mean, the emotional arc should be one of... I hope is one of curiosity. How does that work? I'd never thought about that before. And if I did think about it, I wouldn't really know what to think. So I hope that we're coming into this with a, hey, here's some aspect of the brain that maybe you've though about, maybe you haven't, but scientists are starting to come up with a new way of thinking about this that maybe would be surprising, maybe will change how you think about yourself or about what we're learning. One thing I hope that we're doing is challenging people. I hope that, because it certainly challenges me. I'm doing research on all of these episodes and really coming to the limits of what I understand about the brain. And hopefully I'm also taking guests to some limits of what anyone understands about the brain, which is kind of the exciting thing about science.
(04:36):
We can get to questions that really even the experts and our audience, if our audience is not experts, we all share these fundamental questions because literally no one knows the answer. So yeah, a little bit of curiosity, maybe a little bit of confusion. Hopefully at the end, a little aha like, huh, I understand myself or I understand the brain a little bit better.
Michael Osborne (04:56):
I've made the joke to you before that I think the show is at its most effective when it's somewhere between five and 15% confusion, that we actually are trying to calibrate to just a little bit of, I don't quite get it because I think that-
Nicholas Weiler (05:10):
I mean, that's science, right?
Michael Osborne (05:11):
... that's science, exactly.
Nicholas Weiler (05:13):
We don't understand everything.
Michael Osborne (05:14):
If we get to that place, then we're at the question. I'll also say I've heard from listeners that their emotional experience is one of hope and reassurance, that they feel like there are still people out there working on important big questions that are dedicating time, effort and resources. And I think that's, and not to step outside of it too much, but I do think that there's a case to be made. We often live in cynical times and to hear about the exciting work happening at the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute actually is sort of comforting and reassuring. Let's talk about the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. You say on every episode, that's where we're coming from. What is it exactly, both as a physical building and as a idea?
Nicholas Weiler (06:02):
Yeah. I'll start with the idea actually. The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute is something that was developed, I think it's 12 years ago now, 13 years ago now. I should know this number. I'm going to get fired. It was developed at Stanford to try to bring together neuroscientists across the university. And for people who are outside of academia, this may be a little bit confusing, but because of the way that universities are organized into departments and the departments are organized into schools, and Stanford has seven different schools, and dozens of different departments, people tend to get siloed into their areas of expertise, the people they usually talk to, the people in their departments. And this has always been a big thing at Stanford, trying to come up with solutions to get people talking to each other, get people working across those, sort of, artificial lines. Why is it that this person is in neurology and that person is in psychiatry and this other person is in pathology because they study the tissue of the brain or physiology because they study how it works or whatever.
(07:06):
You can name all these different places. And so the Neuroscience Institute was created to be a place that brings all those people together that crosses all of these important but somewhat artificial boundaries that we use to organize academia. So that's what the Institute is. We do a few things. I mean, the Institute gives out grants. The Institute builds community. We've got big events, and we've got a symposium coming up next week on the neuroscience of brain development. We help train students and postdocs, and we have shared facilities that people around the university can use. So basically, there are many different ways that the institute tries to unify the Stanford neuroscience community and keep people collaborating who might not otherwise work together. I could talk about the building a little bit, but there's a couple ways to do that. I mean, one is money, right? Science needs money.
(07:57):
It takes a lot of money to do good science and particularly big ambitious science. And so largely thanks to various philanthropic donors, including our naming donors, Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai, we're able to support research by supporting science that does involve collaborations of people from different departments with new ideas, often things that wouldn't get supported by traditional funding. And that's more important than ever right now because a lot of that traditional funding is gone or is under threat. And so being able to do that and say, look, people work together, come up with a really big crazy idea that might not get funded otherwise, we've got programs that will support that work and make that possible. But then the building is another piece of it. The building, there are only so many people in the building. A lot of them are collaborative people.
(08:51):
We've got people doing engineering work. We've got people doing basic science work. We've got people doing translational work. We've got some of these shared laboratories that I mentioned. But the building is actually... I love our building. I work remotely most of the time, but I'm always so happy when I get to go down there because it's beautiful. It's designed as this hub where we literally have a open circular courtyard with passageways leading to several of Stanford's different schools. So that it is literally a hub that people can come in from different parts of campus to gather and make these connections. So it's sort of like an architectural metaphor, which I really enjoy.
Michael Osborne (09:26):
And the schools it connects with are medicine, engineering, what else?
Nicholas Weiler (09:32):
And humanities and sciences, the cardinal directions of the entrances. We had to make some sacrifices to actual architectural design. They don't quite point in the right directions, but it's pretty nice.
Michael Osborne (09:45):
But as you say, more than coincidental. I mean, I do think that building spaces actually matters quite a lot for how people are literally coming into this entity and this space.
Nicholas Weiler (09:59):
And we've got hundreds and hundreds of faculty who are affiliated with the institute across campus. And so obviously we can't fit all of those people into our building as much as we would like to. It would be the tallest building on campus, but we try to make it a gathering space for everyone to come together.
Michael Osborne (10:12):
I want to focus a little bit on you now. You've let slip a few times on the show that you have a PhD in neuroscience. You've clearly had a journey from being a research scientist into science communication. Fill in some of the gaps there. How did you get from there to here?
Nicholas Weiler (10:31):
Yeah, I was always interested, as I'm sure anyone listening to the show has noted in the sort of philosophical aspects of what it means to have a brain, and that our minds originate from this three pound lump of tissue in our skulls. And I should say mind-body connection is very important. We're hearing a lot about that. So can't be too brain-centric. It's an old habit. But yeah, I got really into neuroscience as an undergraduate and actually in high school I had a fantastic teacher who taught a neuroscience class in our high school and really gave me the bug. I did a PhD at Stanford. I was studying learning circuits in the brain, getting down to the synapses and the molecules at each synapse that seemed to be changing as mice learn new tasks with their little whiskers. How does learning something actually change the circuitry underlying that perception?
(11:28):
We were using a really exciting new technique developed by the lab, working with a great faculty member, Steven Smith, who's emeritus now, but I still hope to have on the show. And yeah, it was great. But the journey to science communication was, there was a point a couple years into graduate school, and I've heard this story from many people in science and particularly who've gone into science communication, where I realized that I was getting worse at talking to my family who are not scientists about what I did because I would be like, "Well, but the type two NMDA receptor does this and it's really important that the ratio of NMDA and AMPA receptors is blah, blah, blah." I could see people's eyes glazing over. And so some other grad students and I decided that we didn't like that. We always wanted to talk about why this was important, why we were doing what we were doing.
(12:18):
So we started a blog and a podcast and wanted to practice how to communicate about science. And again, I really got the bug there. I think I've gotten two bugs at least. And that sort of led me into doing a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz in science communication after I finished my PhD. And then I've been doing it ever since.
Michael Osborne (12:40):
Did your research touch on optogenetics? What is optogenetics, Nick?
Nicholas Weiler (12:46):
Yeah, optogenetics is definitely in the news this week. Very exciting that Stanford Neuroscience has had this amazing moment in the sun with the recognition of the work of Karl Deisseroth. That work actually had just come out, the big 2005 paper introducing optogenetics just a couple of years before I started graduate school. So it was very much in the air. It was what everyone was really excited about. It is basically a technique for doing circuit reverse engineering for neuroscience. I'm not sure if that's exactly the best way to put it, but it allows you to turn neurons, single neurons or groups of neurons on and off using light. Obviously neurons don't usually respond to light unless they're in your retina. And what that lets you do is do what you might call causal neuroscience where you say, "Well, I know that an animal, let's say a mouse is doing this task.
(13:42):
If I turn off this set of neurons, does that stop them from being able to do the task? Or if I turn on this other set of neurons over here, does that cause an animal to do something or does that lead to activity in some other part of the brain?" You can start to have sort of a engineer's toolkit where you can stimulate different parts of circuits or turn them off and really try to understand what is going on. I mean, it's been completely transformative for neuroscience. And so I mean, really no surprise to anyone that Karl received this award because it has completely changed the field. I think everyone though he would get it like five or 10 years ago, but they've got a lot of smart people to work through, I guess.
Michael Osborne (14:20):
Thank you for giving that definition of optogenetics again. That's probably, I don't know, I've lost track of how many times I've asked you to explain it to me, which I have to say is pretty reflective of a lot of the conversations you and I have in our story meetings. I would like to take people into those story meetings a little bit because you are at an interesting place where one, you have a tremendous access to sort of intellectual capital and power. I mean, the brain trust at Stanford is incredible. You yourself have a PhD in neuroscience. I feel like my job is always to say, "I don't get it. Explain it to me again." So I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about our meetings and what happens behind the scene in leading up to a conversation. I mean, how does this show work?
Nicholas Weiler (15:10):
Yeah. I love all of those meetings too. I mean, I started podcasting in part because I had such great conversations with scientists, and then I would distill those down into a 500 or 800 word news story. And I felt like I got pretty good at that, but there was always something missing. The actual conversation that I had had with the researcher was in some ways just more alive, more interesting than when you put it down on paper. So that was sort of the idea behind why podcasting is so much fun. And I almost feel the same way about our story meetings where we're going back and forth and trying to figure out, okay, we're going to be talking with this person in the next week or sometimes tomorrow. And what is the entry point to this story? How do we make this connect with listeners?
(15:58):
How do we help this researcher walk through their story? Because some of the people we talk to are expert communicators themselves, but many people... I mean, these are working scientists. Their job is to do great science. And so I view our role is to try, in a way, helping them communicate that work with a broader audience. And a lot of that comes down to trying to distill the science, really grappling with what have they published in their papers, what else is going on in the field, what are the key pieces of information that a listener will need to know to follow this, at least 80% follow this, as we said before. It's okay if we get a little confused sometimes. I do as well. You'll hear it on the show where I'm like, "Uh-huh, okay."
Michael Osborne (16:42):
It's kind of the point.
Nicholas Weiler (16:43):
And then I move on to my next question. I'm like, "Great. Well, let's move on." But yeah, I mean, I think that's what makes those story sessions so fun, which is that there's the scientific story and then there's the way that we turn that into a podcast story. What is the narrative of this that will allow listeners to follow along and really make some of those discoveries along with us and along with the researchers?
Michael Osborne (17:05):
Selfishly, I'll just say I love my role on this show. I was in a meeting yesterday. It was right after our meeting yesterday and I was trying to do a reset and I said, "Sorry, I'm trying to get kind of centered." I just came out of a conversation with a podcast I help out with at Stanford, and the guy on the call said, "Do you know a lot about neuroscience?" And I thought, I honestly don't know how to answer that question anymore. It is sort of my job to not know a lot about neuroscience and to make sure that I am a surrogate for the audience because we want to bring everybody up to speed as fast as possible so that when we get into an episode, you're able to follow along. And so somebody has to represent the voice of ignorance. At the same time, you and I have been working together for many years and yeah, I absolutely feel like I've learned something.
Nicholas Weiler (17:53):
You're like a world expert in not knowing about neuroscience.
Michael Osborne (17:56):
Right. I want to tell this person, I'm really trying to stay dumb here. Don't ask me that, please. Let's not think about it. I want to ask a question about where the science is today. One of the themes that has come up, I mean, heck, on every episode you say, bringing you to the frontiers of neuroscience. And we've talked about how we may be at a special moment in history, that this may be a kind of unique inflection point. I keep thinking about a moment in the episode we did with Leanne Williams, where she drew an analogy with where we were with cardiology in the mid 20th century. She mentioned Franklin Roosevelt dying and they didn't have all these tests to understand what's going on with the heart.
(18:37):
Now she was talking about that we should be there with the brain. She was talking about that in the context of psychiatry, but I think it applies to neuroscience more broadly. I am interested in hearing you make the case that we are at a special moment in history, that we maybe are at an inflection point with our understanding, not just of the brain, of neuroscience more broadly, the whole body. What's the case for that? Why is there a frontier to bring people to? And how would you describe the contours of that frontier?
Nicholas Weiler (19:10):
Yeah. I mean, obviously that's a big question. I'm only going to answer sort of for myself with what I've heard from people in doing science reporting and this podcast over the last few years. And I'm sure different people would answer differently. But from where I sit, there are a few things that are happening. And I think at the core of a lot of it is actually techniques. And it's funny because I talk with other science writers a lot and everyone finds technique stories very boring, and a lot of people don't want to cover technique stories. They feel very incremental. But actually what a technique does, what a new tool or technology does is it allows you to see things in a new way for the first time. This is actually a philosophy I get from my PhD advisor, Steve Smith, who was very much in this mold.
(19:57):
And he was like, "Hey, you know what? If you can look at something for the first time, you're going to see something no one's ever seen before. It's as simple as that." And so I think science is driven by new ways of looking and new ways of seeing, new ways of measuring. And that itself is not a new thing. The sort of founder of neuroscience traditionally is Ramón y Cajal from the late 19th century who determined, discovered that we have neurons, that they're individual cells and that they connect with one another and even predicted the synapse and the fact that there are circuits where signals flow sort of one directional way from one cell to the next, and to the next. He couldn't actually measure that, but he had a new technique. It was a stain, a dye that could be put on slices of brain tissue that let him actually see tiny gaps between these synaptic partners.
(20:53):
And that just seeing that gave him the insight that this must be how the brain is organized. And so what I think has been happening today is that there are many new techniques, there are many new ways of looking at and understanding the brain that are all coming together in a way that they are starting to give us a more holistic view of the brain than ever before. And I'll list just a few of these and it's happening at multiple levels. And this is one of the reasons why bringing people together from different ways of thinking, different areas of science that have gotten split apart over the centuries, bringing people back together so that we can have all of these different perspectives, and bring them to bear on a unified understanding of the brain is so important. So I'll list just a few. One is what we call sometimes omics technologies, and this is down at the level of molecules and genes.
(21:50):
Over the last maybe decade, we've become able to look at individual cells and understand what genes they're expressing, how those genes are translated into the proteins that are actually the machinery of cells, and even more recently, how all of that happens in the context of the actual tissue. Used to be you have to take the tissue, blend it in a blender, take all the cells and you could do an average of what kinds of genes were expressed. Now you can do that in a slice of tissue and say, okay, these cells over here are doing this, these cells over here are doing that. That's really important for doing the kind of reverse engineering you need to do in neuroscience. How is this thing built? What are the different components? Who's doing what? Which cells are affected by Alzheimer's disease? Which cells are resilient against Alzheimer's disease?
(22:36):
All kinds of questions. So there's the molecular techniques over there, and there are many others, but that's sort of the big picture. At the middle level, we have a number of technologies over the past 10, 20 years, including optogenetics that actually allow scientists to manipulate and study how circuits work together, how activity in one part of the system affects activity in the other, what turning one piece on or off does to the function of the circuit, to the function of the brain. And this is getting more and more refined. We can do this in living animals. We can do this in animals that are awake and doing activities, to really understand what's going on there. There are also a bunch of new technologies for doing really big recordings throughout the brain. We get the scope of the whole brain, things like neuropixels, electrodes, which are these long electrodes that have multiple different electrode sites along the electrode that allows you to record what's going on in many different parts of the brain at the same time.
(23:39):
And all of this gives us a better picture of the whole scope of brain activity rather than just looking at one piece at a time, which is traditionally what you do in science because you're trying to understand how all the pieces work. Now we're getting the tools and getting the perspective to understand how do all those pieces fit together. And then the last thing I'll say is, in brain imaging and brain stimulation, we also have tools to actually start to apply some of this knowledge to human beings, to actually improving clinical outcomes for neurological disorders, psychiatric disorders. We now understand how the circuits and networks of the brain are involved in disorders like depression. To some extent, obviously we don't understand everything by any means, but we understand that that is the thing we need to be focused on, not some chemical soup of serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain, like just add a little more serotonin and you should be fine.
(24:42):
That seems to work, but we don't really understand why until we get to the, how does that affect the circuits that are producing the cognitive and emotional functions that are being distressed in depression. So we can take it all the way from the molecules to the circuits and networks to humans, and really start to have some tools to make that fundamental understanding of the brain impactful for patients and people in their everyday lives. And then there's AI.
Michael Osborne (25:10):
You just had to throw that little bomb in there. I mean, but I actually think it's a very good answer that the global message here is visibility. We are talking about an organ in a system that's very hard to see into, especially when you want to look into it and don't want to cause damage along the way. And combined with AI, computational abilities and our ability to process very, very different kinds of data sets, I think, does all add up to a case to be made that there's something powerful and transformative underway, writ whole, which is I think ultimately the question.
Nicholas Weiler (25:51):
Yeah. I was thinking about your question about inflection point and I think that's right. You could also think of it as it's an accumulation of things. It's an acceleration that's powered by all of these different developments in different areas of neuroscience coming together to start giving us a bigger picture and the ability to actually intervene in a meaningful way.
Michael Osborne (26:12):
It's not for us to say in the present moment whether we are at a turning point in history or not, but I think that a case can be made and I do think that there is an accumulation of curiosity and of capability that is pointing in that direction. I think the last question I want to ask you, I hope ties together some of these things. And it's really about kind of the philosophical thrust of the show, that there is a funny way in which I think we move from biological, technological, physical questions and observations kind of easily into philosophical and metaphysical ideas that I wonder, one, was that part of your initial attraction to the field as a scientist, then later as a science communicator? I think also we land often in a place where we don't have answers yet, which is part of the kind of right amount of confusion that we want to bring to an audience.
(27:19):
But I'd like to hear you speak to sort of what excites you, not just in terms of the capabilities, but in terms of some of the deeper questions. There's a lot of, right now we happen to be in a moment where people are really thinking about things like consciousness and theories of the mind in maybe new ways. And is that part of the mix for you too?
Nicholas Weiler (27:40):
Absolutely. I mean, definitely what drew me to the field is thinking about what does it mean to be human? How do we perceive the world? Why is it that we have an experience of the world at all? And no matter what you're talking about in neuroscience, it's very easy to get into a philosophical discussion. Because, again, we have this organ that is the engine of our mental lives and our behavior. And so everything we learn about it can inform that picture of ourselves and that understanding, I guess not only of ourselves, but one another, maybe more importantly, that we all have these brains. We're working with the brains that we have, and we're doing our best to improve them and use them to the best of our capability. But even when you learn about a new NMDA receptor subtype, it is in service of trying to understand how do we learn?
(28:35):
How did evolution create this crazy organ that is able to respond to the world in such an adaptive way? And I think it also helps. I mean, for me, one of the lessons of neuroscience is also, I mean, it's humility, it's empathy, right? Understanding that we are all sort of subject to the biology that we were born with and that our environments and experiences have gifted us for better or for worse. And so trying to understand that and trying to understand one another from that perspective, I don't know. There's a humanism to neuroscience that I find really valuable.
Michael Osborne (29:21):
I think that's a great place to end Nick. Before I hand it back over to you, I just want to say, and I think you'd agree with me, we really do genuinely love hearing from listeners. We believe that there's a lot of promise to this show. We want to take it into new directions and hear your thoughts for how we can improve it. So if you have ideas for how to make a better podcast, please reach out to us. The link is in the show notes. Nick, thank you for letting me put you in the hot seat, and serve as interviewer on this episode. I'll hand it back to you.
Nicholas Weiler (29:50):
Yeah, it's been fun to be on the other side of the questions for a change. Thanks, Michael. And I'll second that. I get so much energy and so many ideas hearing from listeners. And if you're one of who I haven't responded to yet. I'm sorry, you're on my list. I have lots of email responses to get back to people. So yeah, I'll just do the credits. From Our Neurons to Yours is produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios with sound design by Mark Bell. I'm Nicholas Weiler. Until next time.