From Our Neurons to Yours

Today: the clocks in your body.

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.

Listen to the episode to learn more!

Further reading
Wyss-Coray lab
Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience

Organ aging study in Nature:

• Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease (Nature, 2023)

Study coverage:

• Stanford Medicine-led study finds way to predict which of our organs will fail first (Stanford Medicine)
• Your Organs Might Be Aging at Different Rates (Scientific American)
• Tony Wyss-Coray: The Science of Aging (Ground Truths with Eric Topol)

Related reading:

• You can order a test to find out your biological age. Is it worth it? (NPR)
• What’s Your ‘Biological Age’? (New York Times)
  
  

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 the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience. 

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. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn More

• Poston Lab at Stanford Medicine
• Lewy Body Dementia Research Center of Excellence at Stanford
• Understanding Parkinson's Disease: Stanford's Dr. Kathleen Poston on latest advances (CBS News Bay Area - Video)
• A biological definition of neuronal α-synuclein disease: towards an integrated staging system for research (The Lancet - Neurology, 2024)
• International Working Group Proposes New Framework for Defining Parkinson Disease Based on Biology, Not Symptoms (Neurology Live article)

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 Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn more:

• About Lisa Giocomo’s research
• 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. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn more:

Rodriguez's OCD Research Lab (website)
Rodriguez at the World Economic Forum (video - WEF)
International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) (website)
Rodriguez pioneers VR therapy for patients with hoarding disorder (video - Stanford Medicine)
The rebirth of psychedelic medicine (article - Wu Tsai Neuro)
Researcher investigates hallucinogen as potential OCD treatment (article - Stanford Medicine)

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. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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!)

Learn More

Eshel Lab website

Stanford Medicine study reveals why we value things more when they cost us more (Stanford Medicine, 2023)

Striatal dopamine integrates cost, benefit, and motivation (Eshel et al., Neuron, 2024)

The Economics of Dopamine Release (Stanford BioX Undergraduate Summer Research Program lecture)

Youtube video of classic James Olds rat brain stimulation study


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. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn more
Henderson's Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab

BrainGate Consortium – "Turning thought into action"

Commentary on Neuralink's brain-interfacing technology by Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar Paul Nuyujukian (WIRED, 2023; NBC Bay Area, 2024)

Brain Implants Helped 5 People Recover From Traumatic Injuries (New York Times, 2023)

• Related publication: Nature Medicine, 2023

Brain to text technology is about more than Musk (Washington Post, 2023)

• Related publication: Nature, 2023

The man who controls computers with his mind (New York Times Magazine, 2022)

Software turns ‘mental handwriting’ into on-screen words, sentences (Stanford Medicine, 2021)

• Related video: Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2021
• Related publication: Nature, 2021

Learn about the work of the late Krishna Shenoy

Krishna V. Shenoy (1968–2023) (Nature Neuroscience, 2023)

Krishna Shenoy, engineer who reimagined how the brain makes the body move, dies at 54 (Stanford Engineering, 2023)

Using software engineering to bring back speech in ALS (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2023)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links
Baumer's Pediatric Neurostimulation Laboratory
Northern California Epilepsy Foundation

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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".

Enjoy!

Links

• Livewired (book)
• Incognito (book)
• Wednesday Is Indigo Blue (book)
• Neosensory (website)
• Synesthete.org (website)
• Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman (podcast)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.”

—Macbeth

Links

• Learn more about the de Lecea laboratory
• Why Does My Sleep Become Worse as I Age? (New York Times, 2022)
• Losing sleep in adolescence makes mice less outgoing as adults (Stanford Scope Blog, 2022)
• Sleep and the Hypothalamus (Science, 2023)
• Hyperexcitable arousal circuits drive sleep instability during aging (Science, 2022)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links
Dr. Gordon's research website
What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the Internet (TED talk)
An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have (Aeon)
The Queen does not rule (Aeon)
Local links run the world (Aeon)
The collective wisdom of ants (Scientific American)
Deborah Gordon: Why Don't Ants Need A Leader? (NPR)
What Do Ants Know That We Don't? (WIRED)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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."

Learn More

Dr. Steenerson's Stanford academic profile

Dr. Steenerson's Stanford Healthcare profile (Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Otolaryngology)

The wearable ENG, a dizzy attack event monitor (DizzyDx)

References

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Our guest this week is Neuro-linguist Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science based in the Stanford Department of Psychology.

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.

Learn more
Laura Gwilliams' research website and Stanford faculty profile

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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. 

Learn More

Organism-wide, cell-type-specific secretome mapping of exercise training in mice (Cell Metabolism, 2023)

• Understanding how different cell types respond to exercise could be key step toward exercise as medicine  (Wu Tsai Human performance Alliance, 2023)

An exercise-inducible metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity (Nature, 2022)

• ‘Anti-hunger’ molecule forms after exercise, scientists discover (Stanford Medicine)
  
  
• Why Does a Hard Workout Make You Less Hungry? (New York Times)
  
  
• An exercise molecule? (American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology blog)

Mechanistic dissection and therapeutic capture of an exercise-inducible metabolite signaling pathway for brain resilience (Innovation Award from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute)

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn More

• In conversation with Carla Shatz (Nature Neuroscience)
• Carla Shatz, her breakthrough discovery in vision and the developing brain (Stanford Medicine Magazine)
• Making an Old Brain Young | Carla Shatz (TEDxStanford)
• Carla Shatz Kavli Prize Laureate Lecture
• Stanford scientists discover a protein in nerves that determines which brain connections stay and which go (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Additional Reading

• Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way (Stanford Medicine)
• FDA Clears Accelerated TMS Protocol for Depression (Psychiatric News)
• Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study (Stanford Medicine)
• An experimental depression treatment uses electric currents to bring relief (NPR) 
• Jolting the brain's circuits with electricity is moving from radical to almost mainstream therapy. Some crucial hurdles remain (STAT News)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

References

• Fernández-Castañeda A, Lu P, Geraghty AC, et al. (Iwasaki A, Monje M) Mild respiratory COVID can cause multi-lineage neural cell and myelin dysregulation. Cell. 2022;185(14):2452-2468.e16. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.06.008
• Monje M, Iwasaki A. The neurobiology of long COVID. Neuron. 2022;110(21):3484-3496. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2022.10.006

Read more about Monje's work

• One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood (The Atlantic)
• Brain fog after COVID-19 has similarities to ‘chemo brain,’ Stanford-led study finds (Stanford Medicine)
• In ‘chemo brain,’ researchers see clues to unravel long Covid’s brain fog (STAT News)
• Even Mild Covid-19 Can Cause Brain Dysfunction And Cognitive Issues (Forbes)

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Further Reading

• Reverse engineering human brain by growing neural circuits in the lab | Wu Tsai Neuro
• Human brain cells transplanted into rat brains hold promise for neuropsychiatric research | News Center | Stanford Medicine
• Sergiu P. Pasca: How we're reverse engineering the human brain in the lab | TED Talk
• Assembloid models usher in a new era of brain science | Stanford Medicine
• Human Brains Are Hard to Study. Sergiu Paşca Grows Useful Substitutes. | Quanta Magazine

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn more
O'Connell's research group, the Laboratory of Organismal Biology

Further reading
Frogs in Space (Stanford News, 2022)
Meet a Great Dad From the Animal World: The Poison Frog (KQED, 2022)
Stanford researchers study motherly poison frogs to understand maternal brain (Stanford News, 2019)

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Learn more

• Okamura leads the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics for Medicine (CHaRM) Lab  at Stanford
• Check out videos at the CHaRM Lab YouTube channel 

Further Reading

• Researchers create a device that imitates social touch, but from afar (Stanford Engineering)
• Medical 'mixed reality' applications take center stage (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute)
• Researchers building glove to treat symptoms of stroke (Stanford Medicine)
• Stanford’s Robot Makers: Allison Okamura (Stanford News)
• Stanford students learn to enhance computers and robots with touch (Stanford News)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Hi listeners, we're shifting to a biweekly release schedule after this episode. See you in a couple weeks!
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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.

Links
Wyss-Coray lab website
Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience

Further Reading

• Q&A: Can we rejuvenate aging brains? (Scope Blog, 2022)
• Gift from Phil and Penny Knight launches scientific endeavor to combat neurodegeneration (Stanford News, 2022)
• Young cerebrospinal fluid may hold keys to healthy brain aging (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2022)
• Blocking protein’s activity restores cognition in old mice (Stanford Medicine, 2019)
• Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising (Stanford Medicine, 2017)
• Infusion of young blood recharges brains of old mice, study finds (Stanford Medicine, 2014)
• Scientists discover blood factors that appear to cause aging in brains of mice
  (Stanford Medicine, 2011)
• Young blood revives aging muscles, Stanford researchers find (Stanford Medicine, 2005)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links

• Stanford Artificial Retina Project
• Chichilnisky Lab

Further Reading

• Using machine learning to identify individual variations in the primate retina (Stanford Neurosurgery)
• New ways to prevent — or even reverse — dementia, paralysis and blindness (Stanford Medicine)
• An artificial retina that could help restore sight to the blind (Stanford Engineering)
• Researchers want to heal the brain. Should they enhance it as well? (Stanford News)
• Another retinal implant project at Stanford: Implanted chip, natural eyesight coordinate vision in study of macular degeneration patients

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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. 

Links

• Gibson Lab
• Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Science
• Stanford Division of Sleep Medicine

References

• Rhythms of life: circadian disruption and brain disorders across the lifespan
• Circadian disruption and human health: A bidirectional relationship
• The arrival of circadian 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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

What makes addiction a disease?

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 chairs the Stanford Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis, and has served as Senior Policy Advisor, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy among other prominent policy roles.

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.

Links
Stanford Network on Addiction Policy
Stanford Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis
The NeuroChoice Initiative

Further Reading
Social aversion during opioid withdrawal reflects blocked serotonin cues, mouse study finds
Brain imaging links stimulant-use relapse to distinct nerve pathway
Stanford-Lancet report calls for sweeping reforms to mitigate opioid crisis

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links
Kaltschmidt Lab website

Regional cytoarchitecture of the adult and developing mouse enteric nervous system.
Hamnett R, Dershowitz LB, Sampathkumar V, Wang Z, De Andrade V, Kasthuri N, Druckmann S, Kaltschmidt JA. Curr Biol. 2022 Aug 31:S0960-9822(22)01307-0. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.030. Online ahead of print. PMID: 36070775

Other recent publications

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links
Q&A: Evolution of octopus and squid brains could shed light on origins of intelligence

Stretchy, conductive electrodes that can keep up with an octopus

Andrew Fire lab (Stanford Medicine)

Ivan Soltesz lab (Stanford Medicine)

Marine Biological Laboratory Cephalopod Initiative

Acknowledgements

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links

Muwanga's research profile

The Tawfik lab at Stanford Medicine

The Airan lab at Stanford Medicine

Stanford headache specialist demystifies migraine auras (Stanford Scope Blog, 2017)

Migraine Treatment Has Come a Long Way (New York Times Well Blog, 2022)

References

Ahn, A.H. and Basbaum, A.I. Where do triptans act in the treatment of migraine? Pain. 2005 May; 115(1-2): 1–4.

Charles, A., Baca, S. Cortical spreading depression and migraine. Nat Rev Neurol 9, 637–644 (2013).

Weatherall, M.W. The diagnosis and treatment of chronic migraine. Ther Adv Chronic Dis. 2015 May; 6(3): 115–123.

Hoffmann, J.,  Baca, S. M., and  Akerman, S. Neurovascular mechanisms of migraine and cluster headache. J Cereb Blood Flow Metab. 2019 Apr; 39(4): 573–594.

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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.

Links

Heifets & Malenka, "MDMA as a Probe and Treatment for Social Behaviors." Cell (2016)

Heifets, et al., "Distinct neural mechanisms for the prosocial and rewarding properties of MDMA." Science Translational Medicine (2019)

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute NeuroChoice Initiative

More on Malenka's work

"5 Questions: Robert Malenka on Ecstasy research" (Stanford Medicine, 2016)

"Being a Neuroscientist: A conversation with veteran Stanford brain researcher Rob Malenka" (Stanford Medicine Scope Blog, 2018)

"Social aversion during opioid withdrawal reflects blocked serotonin cues, mouse study finds" (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2022)

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.

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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. 

Send us a text!

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 want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.