From Our Neurons to Yours

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Why we get dizzy | Kristen Steenerson Oct 26, 2023

Show notes

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.

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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.

How we understand each other | Laura Gwilliams Oct 19, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Exercise and the brain | Jonathan Long Jun 22, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Aging and Brain Plasticity | Carla Shatz Jun 08, 2023

Show notes

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.

Brain stimulation & "psychiatry 3.0" | Nolan Williams May 25, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Brain Fog | Michelle Monje May 11, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Assembling the brain | Sergiu Pasca Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

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

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.

Parenting Lessons from Frogs and Spiders | Lauren O'Connell Apr 13, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Virtual Touch | Allison Okamura Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

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

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