From Our Neurons to Yours

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Electronic skin and the future of wearable technology | Zhenan Bao Jul 04, 2024

Show notes

The skin is full of contradictions. It’s soft and sensitive, but also tough and resilient, even self-healing. It’s both the barrier that protects us from infections and our most intimate connection with the outside world.

Today’s guest, Zhenan Bao, has spent the last two decades reverse engineering the skin’s many remarkable properties in order to create wearable electronics that are just as soft, flexible, and versatile as the skin itself.

Bao envisions a world where stick-on devices could help heal injuries, manage anxiety, and even enhance our perceptions, and soft, implanted devices could give neurosciences new insights into the workings of the body and brain.

In today’s episode, we talk about what makes the skin such an intriguing problem for an engineer like Bao; some of the many applications of her technology for medicine, neuroscience, and mental health; and its potential to enhance or extend our perceptions.

Bao is K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford and founding director of eWEAR — the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative.

Learn More

Bao Lab website

Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR)

Advancing toward wearable, stretchable electronics | Stanford News (2024)

Soft ‘e-skin’ that talks to the brain | Stanford News (2023)

The Science of Skin | STANFORD magazine (2023)

Skin Inspired Electronics: Changing the Future of Electronics with Zhenan Bao (2023)

Dr. Zhenan Bao Keynote - Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health & Wellness Symposium (2022)
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

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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.

How a new kind of brain plasticity could help make sense of addiction | Michelle Monje and Rob Malenka Jun 20, 2024

Show notes

This week, we're diving into recent research that sheds light on a new form of brain plasticity involving changes in the insulation of nerve fibers — called myelin. It turns out that myelin plasticity is implicated in a number of serious conditions, from epilepsy to drug abuse and addiction.
We're excited to bring back two previous guests on the show to share their insights on this previously unknown form of plasticity: Stanford psychiatry professor Rob Malenka (S1 E1 - Psychedelics and Empathy), a pioneer in the study of synaptic plasticity and addiction, and neuro-oncologist Michelle Monje (S1 E12 - Brain Fog), who made some of the very first observations of myelin plasticity in the brain, essentially founding this field.
Together, they discuss their recent findings on the role of myelin plasticity in opioid addiction and its implications for understanding addictive behaviors.

Get ready to nerd out as we uncover a new angle on our brain's remarkable capacity for change.
Learn More
Myelination in the brain may be key to ‘learning’ opioid addiction | Stanford Medicine (2024)
Adaptive and maladaptive myelination in health and disease | Nature Reviews Neurology (2022)
Brain plasticity promotes worsening of epileptic seizures, study finds | Stanford Medicine (2022)

The Brain Learns in Unexpected Ways | Scientific American (2020)

Brain boosting: It's not just grey matter that matters | New Scientist (2015)
Neural activity promotes brain plasticity through myelin growth, researchers find | News Center | Stanford Medicine (2014)

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!

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.

Our plastic brains: learning, memory and aging with the one and only Carla Shatz (Rerelease) Jun 06, 2024

Show notes

-- We're re-releasing our conversation with Carla Shatz, one of our favorites from the archive, which comes up all the time on the show in the context of brain plasticity and aging. Enjoy, and see you next time! -NW --
When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible.
You may have heard of a concept called neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to change or rewire itself. This is of course central to learning and memory, but it's also important for understanding a surprisingly wide array of medical conditions, including things like epilepsy, depression, even Alzheimer's disease.
Today's guest, Carla Shatz, is a pioneer in understanding how our brains are sculpted by our experiences. She's credited with coining the phrase neurons that fire together, wire together. Her work over the past 40 years is foundational to how we understand the brain today.
So I was excited to talk to Shatz about our brain's capacity for change, and I started off by asking about this sort of simple question, why exactly do we have this learning superpower as kids to do things like pick up languages and why does it go away?
Shatz is Sapp Family Provostial Professor of Biology and of Neurobiology and the Catherine Holman Johnson director of Stanford Bio-X.
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!

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.

Programming Announcement May 30, 2024

Show notes

Hi everyone — quick programming announcement. As we head into summer, we'll be moving to an every-other-week cadence as we prepare more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience. I'm very excited about what we're working on for you, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu with your thoughts, praise, critiques, or just to say hello.
That's all for now. See you next time!

Send us a text!

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.

Neuroscience and AI: What artificial intelligence teaches us about the brain (and vice versa) | Surya Ganguli May 23, 2024

Show notes

The powerful new generation of AI tools that has come out over the past few years — DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest — have blown away our old ideas about what AI can do and raised questions about what it means for computers to start acting... intelligent?

This week, we ask what the rise of these systems might teach us about our own biological intelligence — and vice versa. What does modern neuroscience have to say about how AI could become as flexible, efficient, and resilient as the human brain.
Few people are better positioned to speak to the intersection of neuroscience and AI than today's guest: Surya Ganguli.

Ganguli's lab produced some of the first diffusion models — which are at the foundation of today's AI revolution — and is now working to understand how complex emergent properties arise from biological and artificial neural networks.
Ganguli is a member of the Neuroscience Theory Center at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and an associate professor in Stanford's Department of Applied Physics.

Further Reading

Interpreting the retinal neural code for natural scenes: From computations to neurons (Neuron, 2023)
Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning (arXiv, 2023)
Cortical layer-specific critical dynamics triggering perception (Science, 2019)
- Stanford team stimulates neurons to induce particular perceptions in mice's minds (Stanford Medicine, 2019)
What DALL-E reveals about human creativity (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2023)

Visit us!
Want to learn more about AI and Neuroscience? Join us at Wu Tsai Neuro's annual symposium on October 17, 2024, which will showcase the frontiers of biological and artificial intelligence research. (More details coming soon!)

Episode credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

Send us a text!

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.

How we remember, why we forget | Anthony Wagner May 16, 2024

Show notes

At some point in our lives, we all struggle with memory — learning a new name, remembering that book you were reading just yesterday or that word on the tip of your tongue.
So what can neuroscience teach us about why we remember, why we forget, and how we might even improve our memories?
To answer this question, I spoke with neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, a memory expert in Stanford's Department of Psychology.
Learn More
Wagner lab website

Recent lab publications
Anthony's new book: Brain Sciences for Lawyers, Judges, and Policymakers (2024). Jones, O. D., Schall, J. D., Shen, F. X., Hoffman, M. B., & Wagner, A. D. Oxford University Press. Order

Stress thwarts our ability to plan ahead by disrupting how we use memory, Stanford study finds (Stanford News 2020)
Stanford researchers link poor memory to attention lapses and media multitasking (Stanford News, 2020)

Send us a text!

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.

Psychedelics Part 2: How do drugs alter our perceptions? | Boris Heifets May 09, 2024

Show notes

Today, we're going to talk about how psychedelics alter our perception of reality and what that says about... reality!
Welcome to part two of our conversation with Stanford anesthesiologist and psychedelics researcher Boris Heifets!
Last time, we talked with Boris about the question of why psychedelics help people with mental health disorders.
This week, we're going to dive into a different question, which is to explore how psychedelics work in the brain. How are they able to alter something as fundamental as our perceptions of reality — and could understanding these effects teach us about the nature of our everyday perceptions?
Learn more:

Review: Therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics and entactogens (Heifets and Olsen, 2024)
As psychedelics near approval, there’s no consensus on how they work (STAT News, 2023)
How do psychedelics work? (Carhart-Harris, 2019)
Heifets Lab website

Send us a text!

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.

Psychedelics, placebo, and anesthetic dreams | Boris Heifets (part 1) May 02, 2024

Show notes

Psychedelics are a hot topic in psychiatry today. They’re producing dramatic reversals for patients with severe depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. But scientists still have fundamental questions about why these drugs are so effective.
For example, is the "trip" even necessary? Some think it is not and are working to design drugs with similar brain chemistry but no psychoactive effects — “Taking the trip out of the drug.”
Others suspect that many of the benefits of psychedelics can be attributed to hype and expectation: People expect to get better, so they do.
Normally scientists control for placebo using a blinded study where patients don't know if they're getting the real treatment or a sugar pill. But how are you going to do this with mind-altering substances? Patients are probably going to figure out pretty quickly whether they got a sugar cube with or without LSD.
Today's guest, Stanford anesthesiologist Boris Heifets, has come up with a particularly clever strategy to tease apart the psychedelic experience, biochemistry, hype and placebo.
Listen for the whole story!

Learn more:

The Heifets Lab at Stanford Medicine
The Early Days of a Psychedelic Resurgence? (Stanford Medicine Magazine, 2024)

Depression, ketamine & anesthesia:

Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression (Nature 2023 - paywall)
Ketamine’s effect on depression may hinge on hope (Stanford Medicine, 2023)

Anesthetic dreams and trauma recovery:

Case report 1: dreaming & knife attack (A & A Practice, 2022 - paywall)
Case report 2: dreaming & PTSD (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2024)
Could anesthesia-induced dreams wipe away trauma? (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
Video: Mothers with PTSD following their sons' deaths talk about dreaming of their sons under anesthesia (Heifets Lab, 2024 — content advisory)

Related episodes:

Send us a text!

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 our brains are bad at climate change | Nik Sawe Apr 25, 2024

Show notes

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about the neuroscience of climate change with neuroeconomist Nik Sawe.
If you follow the science or the news, you know how big of a risk climate change is. Storms, coastal flooding, heat waves, extinctions, mass migration — the list goes on.
But — as you can probably also appreciate — it’s really hard to properly perceive that risk. It’s much easier to focus on today’s emergency, this week’s looming deadline, this quarter’s economic forecast — where the risks are objectively much smaller, but feel more pressing.
This is where neuroscience comes in: Why are our brains so bad at perceiving this existential, long-term risk to our society and our planet? And are there ways we could work with our brains' limitations to improve our decision-making around environmental issues and the future more broadly?
To answer this question, we spoke with Nik Sawe, a neuro-economist who uses brain imaging to study environmental decision making in the lab of Brian Knutson in the Stanford Department of Psychology. Nik is also a policy analyst at the think tank Energy Innovation, where he is working on policy avenues to reduce carbon emissions in the industrial sector.
References

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.

Send us a text!

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.

Famous & Gravy: Mind Traveler | Oliver Sacks Mar 14, 2024

Show notes

This week we’re doing something a little different. My good friend Michael Osborne, who produces this show also has his own podcast, called Famous & Gravy – Life Lessons from Dead Celebrities.
I recently guest-hosted an episode about one of my all time scientific and writerly heros, Oliver Sacks, which we're releasing for both our audiences. I hope you enjoy!
---

We've concluded Season 3 of From Our Neurons to Yours! Stay tuned for more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience in Season 4 — from psychedelics to cancer neuroscience to hypnosis — which we’ll share in just a few weeks.

---
Who was Oliver Sacks?

Oliver Sacks, born on July 9, 1933, was a British-American neurologist, author, and professor known for his groundbreaking work in neuroscience and his compelling narratives exploring the human mind. His unique ability to blend science with storytelling made him a beloved figure in both the medical and literary worlds.
Sacks' career in neurology began in the 1960s, where he studied and treated patients with various neurological disorders. His observations and insights into the complexities of the brain led to significant advancements in the field.
As an author, Oliver Sacks gained widespread acclaim for his books, including "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985) and "Awakenings" (1973), which was adapted into a successful film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. His writings, characterized by empathy and curiosity, explored the human condition through the lens of neuroscience.
Throughout his life, Sacks remained committed to understanding and humanizing neurological conditions. He championed the importance of empathy and compassion in medical practice, advocating for a holistic approach to patient care.
In addition to his literary contributions, Oliver Sacks was a revered educator, teaching at prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and the New York University School of Medicine. His lectures and writings inspired countless students and professionals in the field of neurology.
Oliver Sacks' legacy continues to resonate, shaping our understanding of the brain and its complexities. His work transcends disciplines, reminding us of the profound connections between science, humanity, and storytelling.
Episode Credits
Famous and Gravy was created by Amit Kapoor and Michael Osborne. This episode was produced by Evan Sherer with production assistance from Claire McInerney. Original theme music by Kevin Strang.

Send us a text!

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.

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