Ologies with Alie Ward - Field Trip: An Airport Full of Neuroscientists

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

I’m at the airport and there are hundreds of brain scientists everywhere. So I swallowed my dignity/anxiety and approached strangers about the neuroscience they do. The result is a bushel of info on cravings, sleep, consciousness, addiction, dopamine, monogamy, Ozempic, toxins in your brain and so much more with: Georgia Kirkpatrick, Isabella Montana, Dr. Marissa Co, Chancey Garrett, Noah Millman, Pique Choi, Dr. Barbara Sorg and Elizabeth Plunk. Oops, we just made a bunch of new friends. All thanks to poster tubes, a.k.a: nerdurdurs. A donation went to the Society for Neuroscience at SFN.orgMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD), Environmental Toxicology (POISONS + TRAIN DERAILMENT), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS), Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS), Somnology (SLEEP), Traumatology (PTSD), Addictionology (ADDICTION), Oneirology (DREAMS), Personality Psychology (PERSONALITIES), Discard Anthropology (GARBAGE), Conservation Technology (EARTH SAVING), Forensic Ecology (NATURE DETECTIVE), Oceanology (OCEANS), Environmental Microbiology (TESTING WASTEWATER)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi. It's that lady with a microphone walking around your airport terminal. Quite literally. I'm Allie Ward. This is allergies. This is a weird one, and I love it. So if this is your first ever episode of allergies, please know this one breaks the format quite a bit instead of me hunting down some perfectologist for some niche topic for a one-on-one interview

in a studio. I recorded half this episode while I was waiting for a flight from San Diego to Portland for my other job. I'm a science correspondent for the CBS show called Innovation Nation. So I get to the airport, I see a lot of passengers at TSA and their gates, and they're holding these long cardboard tubes. And I stopped one of them and I asked if they were all going to like an architecture convention or if they were comic book artists, and she told me there was a neuroscience convention

in town, and everyone carrying a cardboard tube was a neuroscientist headed home carrying their large rolled up research poster that they just presented. So there's hundreds of neuroscientists everywhere I looked. It was like spring break, but for nerds, and I loved it. People who study food cravings and addiction and dopamine and motivation and consciousness, just low-key geniuses everywhere I looked, and I had 90 minutes until my flight. And so I did what anyone would do, and I got out an old purse full of professional recording equipment, and I repressed all of my dignity and social anxiety, and I asked strangers

to talk to me. And I should note, earlier that day I'd been in San Diego shooting a story about ice baths, and so my morning began with like sheer terror and discomfort, and I think it gave me like a well-fuck-might-as-well kind of moxie that this episode required. So the first minute or two as I'm walking around has muffly audio stick with the journey. It improves greatly as soon as people start talking into microphones. Also super quick, thank you to everyone supporting at patreon.com slash oligies for as little as a dollar a month.

Thank you to everyone who rates and subscribes and also reviews. I read all of them, including one that was left by Chris Wailett, who said, I have been stung by bees 12 times today. And they said, hey, Allie, I started listening to oligies at the beginning of last year. Your melatology and entomology episodes inspired me to pursue my passions, and I'm now assisting with honey bee ecology research. I'm on a field work trip in California, and I've been stung by lots of bees today. Thanks for inspiring me and keep on oliging.

Chris, I'm glad you're there. Okay. Trade tables up, sit back and enjoy information on why people are buying black market ozempic, cocaine relapses, water filters, mammalian monogamy, some stats on cocktails, how to be a good mom, why sleep deprivation sucks, vaping with rats, and why asking smart strangers on smart questions can make a layover just fly by with this special field trip, Neuroscientist Airport Ambush. Here's what we're doing.

We're already rolling. Yes, then we're in. We're in. Okay. Wish me luck. I was wondering if I could ask you just a couple of questions about what your poster is. This person was like, no comment, please.

Are you allowed to talk about any of your work? Not yet. Oh, that's cool. So, yeah, no, the research is top secret and also just like, no. So I'm zero for one right now. It feels great. So sweaty. 100% making a scene in a very crowded San Diego airport terminal.

It's fine. Can I ask you a question? Do you listen to podcasts at all? I do. Have you heard of one called Allergies? Yes. It's a different Allergy like I've heard so. Yeah.

Okay. So I hosted. Oh, you really? Yeah. Oh my God. And I was took a chance. And I was wondering if you have like two minutes just finding what you do. Yeah.

Hallelujah. All right. Let's get officially started with this episode and better audio. My name is Georgia Kirkpatrick and I use she, her pronouns and MS, PhD, undergrad. I'm five, six months out from my PhD. Oh my God. Congratulations. What do you study?

So I study the reward system in the context of drugs of abuse and highly palatable foods. Wow. Yeah, it's fun. Is this the dopamine center or what is the reward system called in our brains? Yeah. I study the dopamine system circuitry. So I look at the prefrontal cortex specifically. So the prefrontal cortex, side note, it's that bulge right at the front of your brain.

You know how like U-Haul trucks have the attic space at the top? You can shove more blankets and stuff. That's the part of your brain we're talking about. It's that wrinkly hump behind your eyes. And according to the paper, stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. This brilliant Jell-O intelligently regulates our thoughts and actions and emotions. And according to British psychologist and an expert on memory, Alan Batale, your prefrontal

cortex is like a mental sketch pad. He called it, we call it working memory. So it's the PFC. You can abbreviate that because you've got one. It also makes sure that we're paying attention and that we just generally don't fuck things up. So what if you're what we call neuro spicy? You might be wondering, what if my brain juices make life hard?

So according to the 2019 paper published in the journal Cell, dopamine and cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex, they say dopamine enables successful cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex. Cognitive control. I don't even know her. What is that? Cognitive control is the ability to orchestrate behavior in accord with our goals. Cognitive control is called getting shit done.

To learn more about this and why this episode is coming out a day later than I wanted because of my own brain, you can see the three part episode we did in 2022 on ADHD with Dr. Russell Barkley. I'm going to link it in the show notes so you don't have to scrawl this on your mental sketch pad. But on the topic of impulsivity and goals and why am I like this? I was just at lunch talking about whether or not we get addicted to sugar or if we just really like it.

Yeah. There's a huge debate in the field actually because when you're trying to apply like addiction specifications from like the DSM-5, food doesn't necessarily meet all of them because you have to have food to survive. Yeah. There is a difference between liking and wanting for sure. And we do kind of crave sugar in similar ways that we crave drugs of abuse. And so we do see some of those same effects that happen to the brain.

But that could just be increasing seeking behavior so that we go out and get those highly caloric foods that our brains just haven't figured out how to deal with in a really calorically dense environment. Yeah. I mean, it's so much easier to eat some sour patch kids than it is to pick 20 tangerines. Exactly. I literally just ate Swedish fish because I couldn't find food I could eat. I've done that so many times.

Are you allowed to say what your poster is about or is it not out yet? Yeah. So it's unpublished data, but I can definitely talk about it. This poster is actually about a junk food diet. So looking at high fat, high sugar. And I study a structure called a perineurononet that's kind of involved in when they're altered, they help drive seeking behavior so that we want to go out and get those foods. Okay.

Trust me, if our flights weren't about to board, I would have asked her to unroll this poster and read it to me like a bedtime story, but rather you can read up on George's research via her April 2022 published paper. Acute high intensity interval exercise attenuates incubation of craving for foods high in fat. And if you're driving through North Dakota right now and you're like, I cannot pour through a journal article, I'm going to give you just a couple of highlights, which include that the goal of the study was to determine whether or not forced exercise can knock down high fat food craving.

And the results suggest that high intensity exercise can prevent craving foods high in fat and it can also reduce maladaptive food seeking behaviors that contribute to overeating. So how about that? My stopping jogging and my never going outside and also eating an entire net full of those baby bell cheeses for dinner could all be related y'all, I'll say that if you're feeling right now personally attacked by me, like I am, try to think of what activities make you happy while you do them, whether it's running around and chasing a frisbee or belly dancing or climbing a hill, pole dancing in the garage, wind sprints to classical music.

I don't know, find something you love and try to do it. Oh my God. And do you have a Twitter and Instagram? Yeah. So my Instagram is at the belly dancing neuroscientist. Amazing. What a niche. Oh my gosh.

That's fantastic. I am on Twitter at gcrickpat9. Love it. Oh my gosh. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. You're the first person who said yes. But I'm only so glad you're my mother.

It was such an honor to meet you. She's a neuroscientist who studies the reward center of the brain. I know it's so exciting. Do you want to talk about what you're studying at all on a podcast? You don't have to. She's a curious nurse. She's taken to a very small part of it. Hi, I'm Isabella Montano and I use she, her pronouns.

Amazing. And now you are a cognitive neuroscience student. Yes. I'm an undergraduate student. It's my second year at Reed College and I did some cognitive neuroscience research this past summer. Oh my God. And what brought you to the Society for Neuroscience Festival?

I know it's a conference, but I want to call it a festival. The principal investigator of our study, there's four of us that are part of it, Lucy Angelica and Bonte. We decided to just come and present what we have. It's very, very preliminary, but it's all unconsciousness and it's really cool and I'm so excited to share it. It's unpublished data. We were the ones to start this project.

We have three different paradigms. We hook up people to EEG and we have them like complete certain tasks and we eventually want to look at the data from all three different paradigms and see like where those differences are because we think that consciousness may be somewhere there. What are the three different paradigms? There's inattentional blindness, backwards masking and dichoptic color fusion. Tell me more. It's hard to explain, but it's like a participant comes in and looks at a monitor that has these

like three different paradigms. So for inattentional blindness, the participant is told to complete a specific task. But then there are like images of faces and houses flashing and sometimes participants don't notice the faces and houses because they're so focused on the task and like we believe consciousness may be somewhere there. So it's pretty cool. I mean, that's amazing. How do you even define consciousness or is that kind of like a willy-nilly description

as we learn more? It's, yeah, there's definitely no one definition. It was funny because during the conference people would come up and be like, so what is consciousness? And we're like, we have no idea. There are people that write so many books on this. They write, you know, articles and everything and it's just, we don't know. I mean, I guess we're trying to figure out like the biological basis of it.

Oh my gosh. Just my personal Instagram is at IsabellaMontano underscore, nothing fancy. Thank you so much for letting me go up to you at an airport like a weirdo. The gentleman that's sitting there, he's also a scientist. Oh, he is. Do you think he'd mind if I asked him? He might. He's also a PhD candidate.

Oh, sweet. Most likely he's probably open to it. I'll go slide in Oilers. Wish me luck. I'm just cruising around this crowded airport wearing a mask, carrying a mic, just a normal day for a person who will do anything to interact with a living scientist. Excuse me. Hello.

I saw all these people with tubes and I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions just about your work. Sure. Yeah. Hi. My name is PQ Choi. My pronoun is he, him. So are you allowed to talk about your PhD research?

I understand you're defending soon. Oh, yes. Yes. I study how the catecholamine neurons in the ventral lateral modula modulates feeding behavior by its projection to the lateral hypothalamus. Literally, what does that even mean? Yeah, sure. So whether you're exercising in an empty stomach, so your blood glucose level drops in an extreme

fashion or your diabetic patients who gave yourself a higher dose of insulin so that your blood glucose drops extremely, your brain has the ability to detect it and make your body go search for food to replenish your energy and that's the neurosurgery tree of that function is what I study. I believe in humans and rats, if you go under anywhere between 70 to 60, your brain can detect the low blood glucose and you'll feel hungry and want to get food. So according to the 2018 paper, activation of catecholamine neurons in the ventral modula reduces CCK-induced hypophagia and CFOS activation in dorsal modulary catecholamine neurons,

which was coauthored by the late Dr. Sue Ritter, whose lab PQ works in catecholamine neurons within the A1 and C1 cell groups in the ventrolateral modula potentially increase food intake when activated by glucose deficit. So allow me to translate if you are one of us who was not carrying a poster tube in this airport. So two parts of the brain kind of work in opposition, promoting hunger and satiety and when your glucose is low, like between 80 to 100 while you're fasting or even lower, the hunger chunk area of the brain blocks the, I'm good, apparatus so that you don't

accidentally stop feeding before your blood glucose gets up. So low blood sugar can cause you to keep eating after you have to. And for more on insulin and how that works, you can see the excellent diabetology two parter with the superb Dr. Mike Natter for more on that, I'll link in the show notes. But what if you could press a button and just end your cravings? Some people are doing that, but instead of a button, it's a syringe. And if you've been hearing the term ozempic bandied about, it's a medication that's working really great for folks with diabetes and PQ tweeted about it yesterday and said, should

I be excited that if I ever run into a Hollywood actress, we can talk about GLP one receptors or should I be worried that this will have a huge impact on rich people's relationship to food and the diabetes patients who actually need the drug? So first off, I had to look up GLP one and a GLP one is a glucocon like peptide and those are hormones in your gut that have a really powerful effect on insulin and blood glucose and how fast your stomach empties and your food intake, how hungry you are. And GLP ones can suppress food intake because of how they enhance your insulin signaling. Okay.

But what if your appetite varies by circumstances? Does anyone know why we get the munchies when we get high? I do not know. I think it depends on what you're smoking. No, man. I got to tell you, it's like I'm a locust. If I get high, I'm like, what else do we have to eat? I don't know why it happens.

I was like, fine, this poor stranger doesn't want to talk to me about it. I'm just going to look it up later. And I found the 2019 paper, vapor cannabis exposure promotes genetic plasticity in the rat hypothalamus, which was published in the journal Nature. And in it, some scientists described how they made these clear compartments and they popped a rat in there and hot boxed it and then offered the rats some tantalizing snackies in the form of chocolate flavored insure. And they found that the vaporized cannabis turned on signals, including the hormone ghrelin,

in amounts comparable to humans who had been fasting for many hours, leading to, quote, hedonic feeding behavior, a.k.a. them munchies. So yes, scientists is like, we does make you hungry. And for more on rats, though, and their snack preferences, and yes, they have them. You can see the urban rodentology episode we did. And I'll link it in the show notes. We also talk about how sewer rats in New York like different food, depending on the local restaurants on their block, which is precious.

Also when I looked at the university associated with the hot box rodent study, it was in Washington and the city of Pullman. And I was like, wait, did PQ go there? And guess what? PQ was one of the coauthors on the paper about getting rats high. He was. I was in the presence of greatness and he knows more than he lets on. And I love him for that.

When do you defend? I'm aiming for early next year. Oh my gosh, Dr. Choi. Are you going to change your handles on all of your social media to doctor as soon as you defend? Please say yes. Yes, probably. I'm going to call you Dr. Choi.

Also PS, I checked Dr. Choi's Twitter bio at PQ Choi and it still says PhD candidate, but he'll be Dr. Choi in probably like five minutes. So I'm sticking with it. Okay, so I passed by Georgia on my way to the next gate over where I saw some people in the distance holding cardboard tubes. They were everywhere. We also call cardboard tubes dirters if you listen to the Vampirology episode part two. But these little gaggle of people were staring at me from afar.

Were they laughing? I don't care. Hi. I understand there's some nerds over here. Oh yeah. Yes. I knew it. I could tell by the posters.

So I host this podcast. It's called Allergies. I'm Allie Ward. Oh my God. Are you a neuroscientist? Can I talk to you? Sure. Yes.

This is, I've never been so sweaty in public. Yeah. Because I'm like creeping up like a goblin being like, talk to me about your poster. It's just like the Portland area. Oh it is. We were all going to Portland. Oh my God. You guys are going to be on my flight.

It's going to be so awkward if we're sitting next to each other, but that's okay. I have a middle seat. Hi. I'm Marissa. Marissa Coe and she, her. Is this your poster? Yeah. It's in here.

So I'm studying a transcription factor, which is a protein that influences gene expression in the brain during development. I've always just been interested in how brains are built using genes because, you know, all the cells in your body have the same repertoire of genes, but those are used in different ways in different cells. So I want to know what particular genes are involved in brain development. And then what is the title of your poster? Oh, um, what was my title, uncovering genotype, phenotype relationships across the TBR1 allelic

spectrum. Oh, what a banger. Is there anything when you were doing the research that you were like, Oh my God, holy shit. I figured this thing out. Hmm. Sort of, it's preliminary. So I, I try not to get my hopes too high, but it is exciting to see something in the

microscope that you weren't expecting for the first time. Like that's really exciting in science. You know, you stain for different protein markers of different cells and I stained for one marker and it was just something I wasn't expecting at all. And I was like, Whoa, this is very unexpected and I don't know how to explain it still, but it's cool. When that happens, do you run out into the hallway and you're like, I got to tell somebody about this.

Yeah. Sometimes someone's around to hear it. Anywhere people can follow you to learn more about what you do. Yeah. Um, I'm on Twitter at Marissa coconut. Any advice for aspiring neuroscientists? Um, just stick with it. Find a life outside of the lab.

Do you have a hobby that's like saved your brain when you're working on brains? Oh gosh, I picked up knitting during the pandemic and I also like ignore rock climbing like 90% of neuroscientists. Why do so many neuroscientists rock climb? I didn't expect to get this out of a costing neuroscientist at an airport. Um, I think it's the puzzle aspect of it. There's a lot of thinking involved in solving the, the routes. So I think that appeals to a lot of scientists.

Oh my God, you heard it here first. This is amazing. Thank you so much, doctor. This is by far the weirdest ology interview I've ever done and I'm going to look for someone with a poster. Oh, does someone told me to come talk to his, I think roommate over there. Okay. I'm going to be like trick-or-treating for me.

This is exciting. Play on numbers as well as there are one world suffered and while members are open to board here at gate 50. Okay. So my flight was boarding. That background baby was still crying, but I cried that day. I cried today. It's okay to have emotions, but I'm not giving up yet.

I might talk to one more person with a poster. They can't leave it at me. Well they can and they have, but I was the B boarding group and so I had a few minutes before I stood in line on the jetway to get to my middle seat after a long day of sitting in 36 degree water for money. So I talked to a guy who was familiar with this show and he was holding a tube. Noah Milman, he, him. Are you allowed to talk about what's on your poster?

I think so, maybe. I think so. Hopefully. So you're a neuroscientist, correct? In training, yes. Yes. If you're studying it, you're an ologist. Them's the rules.

Okay. What factor in neuroscience do you study? Development. Ooh, what kind? Sleep and its role in social behavior. Oh, shut the fuck up. Give me the TLDR. TLDR is if you disrupt sleep in a specific period of development in prairie voles, the

males do not form pair bonds in adulthood. No, how young in development? Second postnatal week of life to the third postnatal week of life. And are you talking like rousing them in the middle of their sleep? It's a cage-shaking apparatus that just disrupts REM sleep. Now does that factor into like oxytocin? The prairie voles have been used in the study of oxytocin, but this current study is not specifically targeting or quantifying that.

So a prairie voles, I'd note, is this round furry little rodent, and it looks like a hamster. And the species has been studied a bunch for its long-term monogamous mating behaviors. Because so many humans just want the kind of love that only these grassland rats have. Why don't sleepy ones settle down and start a family their aunts want to know? It's possible that they're missing out on normal sleep and velment, which is very like the level of REM sleep is normally high there. And we don't quite know the mechanism, but we think that REM is necessary for social behavior.

Still working on the specifics. Are they dicks too? Are they just like uninterested? Well, they, I can't say they're dicks. I know, no one can. My bad. They don't prefer their partner or stranger, whereas the control animals do spend a lot of time with their partner, and they are monogamous.

Yeah, I can't comment on the previous description. We can't make character judgments on a prairie vol. Do you sleep any differently now that you're studying this? Sleep is important, and I do have a pretty solid sleep hygiene going. Good for you. I don't know if it's related to prairie vols though. But just in general, like being a neuroscientist, I feel like you can't skimp on the sleep. You know that about the brain, right?

Totally. It's really important for quality of life and my emotions and my emotional regulation. So I can, I can see the feedback. I haven't slept in eight days. So you've been at this conference grind and you have to like pack all your social interactions in with all these people. Yeah. You're required.

I just started sleeping recently, and it's great. What changed your mind to sleep? I said, fuck this. I'm sick of running myself ragged for because of the hustle culture. Hustle culture is bad. It's so bad, and it tells you if you're sleeping, you're not working hard enough, and that's just garbage. And so it was like an act of rebellion, and it's free.

I love that about it. And I've felt a lot better, and I'm less of a dick. It's great. How much do you sleep? Lately, like nine or 10 hours sometimes, if I feel like it. Wow. I have like years to catch up. So I'm doing it.

That's amazing. I'm like, no one can stop me other than obligations at an alarm clock. So thank you for your work in sleep hygiene because it's important, very important. What about, no, anywhere people can follow you or follow your work? I am a graduate student in behavioral neuroscience at OHSU. Okay. It's a really cool program. Everyone's really lovely, and if you want to look into it, you can look it up on Google.

Love it. How did this guy just end up getting an interview out of me? We'll never know. But I did need answers about why he was wearing a hat embroidered with a chaotic looking dill pickle. Portland pickles. Portland pickles. Go pickles.

Go pickles. Get sleep. Go pickles. Get sleep. Go pickles. I'm getting a tattoo. How do you want to talk about neuroscience? Sure, I'll try it.

Yes. My name's Chansey Garrett. He, him. What kind of neuroscience do you do? I do alcoholism research, basically. And I plethora of other things, but mainly my lab focuses on alcoholism and treatments and genetics and behavior and all that. So I work at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Portland, Oregon, part of OHSU.

And I'm a research assistant under the lab of Virginia Cousin Carlson. So this lab is the largest national primate center. It houses around 5,000 monkeys, and about 2,000 at any given time are involved in medical and scientific research. And Chansey works in husbandry, taking care of the breeding populations, and the lab he's involved with published the 2021 paper, Synaptic Effects of IL-1 Beta and CRF in the central emigraela after protracted alcohol abstinence in male rhesus macaques. And I know it's grim to consider research on animals, especially primates.

And it's also grim to learn that just in the U.S., more than 140,000 people each year die from excessive alcohol use. It's the third leading cause of death, the first being tobacco use, and the second being poor diet and physical inactivity combined. So smokes, snacks, sitting, and booze, all this delicious chilling in excess can come at a cost. I'm sure that people ask you this a lot, but has it changed the way that you look at the use of alcohol at all?

Not necessarily. I think people have told me that have a lot more experience in life than me, that alcoholism is a problem when you or others around you think that it's a problem, or you have behaviors that tend to have detrimental effects to your well-being in life. And I think people that do have this issue, it's on my poster, I have 140,000 or more people a year die because of excessive alcohol use, and it's a major issue that really needs money and focus. Yeah, but I'm sure the money is not going to come from any of the alcohol companies for

sure. Is it true that alcohol anesthetizes the brain starting at the frontal lobe, or was that something that they told us in 1993? Oh, it definitely... So I'm not an expert at this, I will say, but I do know that it generally throughout the whole brain, it increases your GABA input into your neurons, so it kind of like slows down the processing generally, and it has a major effect in the cerebellum. So that's why you tend to wobble and stagger when you walk.

Do your friends introduce you as a neuroscientist? Sometimes, yeah. Do people ever try to make you do things because you're a neuroscientist? Like, hey, you figure out how the remote works, you're the neuroscientist! If anybody, I'd say my mom. I think she... I have made her proud in life, and she thinks that I can handle a lot, but that's not always the case, especially with remotes.

Oh, come on, remotes are hard. Do you want to give a shout out to your mom? Yeah, my mom is Marnie Stewart, she lives in Missoula, Montana. She's the best mom in the world. So I got on the flight, but when I de-planed, my extraordinary friend and colleague and Innovation Nation producer Stephanie Hemango had nabbed me another subject. Her seat neighbor happened to be Dr. Barbara Sorg, a senior scientist and a chair of neuroscience at Portland's Legacy Research Institute, and she very casually studies coke-addicted rats,

or agents in the prefrontal cortex, to disrupt consolidation of the memories associated with cocaine, thereby suppressing drug-seeking behavior and relapse. And you know, when you say that addiction is...it's kind of coded in memories, how much of addiction is biological and how much is chemical? I would say all of it's chemical because that's all the same, it's all driven by chemistry. Can you reroute your brain? We hope so. My hope is that you could reroute it, and that's what, you know, some of the news that

you hear about psychedelics, that they might be able to somehow rewire your brain. And we are doing a little bit of work with that right now, but we are hoping that that is something we'd learn how to do for the benefit of the individual. Is there a part of the brain that houses more memories that are related to addiction, or no? That's a good question. In many parts of the brain, kind of distributed, processing, but the hippocampus is really important, the prefrontal cortex you hear about is important for decision-making and

kind of executive function. So those are some key areas. What about predisposition toward addiction? Are some people, just because of their neurobiology predisposed, do you think? Yeah, I do. How many years have you been in this field? Oh, 25. A long time.

A long time? Has it changed a lot with recent technologies? Have you seen what we're... I see it changing a lot, yeah. Part of this meeting is trying to catch up with the latest technologies and what's doable. Some of those technologies are, how do you take this from an animal where you can, you know, surgeries on their brain, but you can't do that in humans. So how do you get those treatments to get into the brain, which it turns out to be pretty

tricky. So the techniques are driving the field. What's interesting, too, that psychedelics are a place where people might be looking back. I know that there's a fraught history with it in terms of the research being stuck kind of too soon. Okay, so this aside would be hours long if I tried to cover it all. But the fun parts are, in the 1940s, a Swiss chemist accidentally tripped so many balls

after absorbing synthesized LSD that he created. And then a few days later, he went on a very intentional trip to be like, what have I created? What was that? And then a decade later in the 50s, this groundbreaking story in Life Magazine exposed the whole world to the wonders of indigenous psychedelic medicine in Mexico. And then around the same time, the mid-1950s, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous experimented with LSD and he was a big proponent of the use of psychedelics to help people suffering

from alcohol use disorder. And so psychedelics started being considered for all kinds of ailments, but then it fast forward to people tuning in, turning on, dropping out from things like the Vietnam War and let's just say Richard Nixon once called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. But today is not the olden days. Some of that research was done 50 years ago. And they just kind of pushed it under the carpet and just rolling it all back out now is really great.

I mean, I'd love to see this because things that work for people, I mean, we don't have a lot of solutions right now. So I say, you know, keep going with caution, of course. And I don't always see that. We invited you guys to our house, but we understand you're only hanging out for a day. Oh my gosh, are you kidding, rain check. But first we'll give to a worthy cause and this week's recipient is the Society for Neuroscience at sfn.org who organized the conference that brought me in contact with so manyologists

in one giant airport terminal and donations to sfn boost efforts to build a more inclusive and global neuroscience community. They help with educational and training initiatives and they enabled 272 neuroscience trainees to travel to this conference in 2022 to present at the dedicated poster session and to meet more neuroscience professionals there. So the donation also helps support public neuroscience outreach via brainfacts.org. So thank you sponsors for making that donation possible. Okay, so I landed home and then I got a Twitter DM from someone who wished that she was there

in the airport. So after learning a little bit about her field, I said, let's hop on the horn and chat boy howdy. And she's a PhD candidate studying toxicant exposures and neurodevelopmental outcomes. So poisons and what they do to our brains at the University of Rochester Medical Center. So meet Elizabeth Plunk, she, her. Were you in the airport the same time as me? No, but my flight was the next day and I was just like, there's no way she's flying two

days in a row. I've missed my opportunity. Not at all. As it turns out, how many posters were on your flight? Do you remember? Was there a lot? There were a lot. I don't know how many, but there were some.

Someone was saying that because it's so hard to fly with posters, they just need to do them digitally. But as someone who likes to spot scientists in the wild, I'm like, that poster tube is clutch. I'd never encountered so many people are doing alternatives. You can get your poster printed on cloth so you can fold it up and put it in your luggage. I mean, there's pros and cons to every option. You have to turn that poster in like three weeks before and a lot of times we're not

ready to turn it in three weeks before. I don't know. I guess maybe it's going to be old fashioned, but I really like the rolled up poster, putting it up, having the gloss on it. I love it. What was your poster about? So I'm a toxicology student in a neuroscience lab. So my poster was on a short chain PFAS chemical and how it affects brain development, but

specifically the cerebellum. And can you explain what is a PFAS? I would love to explain it. So PFAS stands for per-empoly fluorochal substances. So it is a class of chemicals. The per-empoly fluorochal means that there's a carbon chain and it has fluorines all on it. And then at the very end, there's some other kind of chemical group and then substances.

There's over 9,000 of them. They've been around since the 1940s. And because they have the carbon and the fluorines on them, they don't degrade. Our bodies don't break them down. The environment doesn't break them down. So they're also called forever chemicals because the ones that have been created are still with us and they're continuing to be created and continuing to still be with us. We just happened to cover this in last week's environmental toxicology episode, which is

about forever chemicals and all sorts of stuff, as well as a ton of info about the Ohio train derailment. Oh, and we had on a discard anthropologist to talk about garbage, Dr. Robin Nagel. And she mentioned that pretty much any living creature has traces of forever chemicals. Are we finding that's true, even if they don't even have a cerebellum? Yes, because it's able to get to the brain. It's able to be in the serum. It binds to a protein that's in your blood.

There's over 9,000 of them and I'm only studying one of them. And one of the papers that kind of drove that decision was scientists had polar bears that had naturally died and they were looking at the brains and blood and these polar bears had them in their brain and their blood. And so they're traveling through the water. They're very mobile in the water and the soil, so groups of people, of plants, of animals have been touched by it. And for more on this, you can see the 2019 paper, Levels and Trends of Polyan Perfluoro-Local

Substances in the Arctic Environment in a delightfully named journal, Emerging Contaminates. Also if you haven't listened to the Orsonology episodes about bears, one thing you would have learned is that Arctic means bear. So in the Arctic Circle, they got polar bears. Antarctic means no bears here, no bears in the Antarctic, but no matter where the bear, they have forever chemicals. So we all have that in common on planet Earth. Do we have any idea what they're doing to our bodies?

Yes, we do know. So again, there's over 9,000 of them and they haven't all been studied. So I'm studying one that has never been studied in neurodevelopment. So I will learn and we will learn what it is doing to the brain, but we know that the ones that have been more popular in industrial uses, it has been associated with all sorts of cancers, with thyroid disease, with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD. So a lot of organs are affected. They've also been shown to weaken our immune system.

There's been studies looking at levels of these chemicals in your blood and your response to COVID. And so we know that they are weakening our immune system, but there's over 9,000 of them and we can't study every single one of them. Where does the one that you study come from or where do most of them? Why they are used and why they were created was originally for industrial reasons. If you've heard of Teflon, the nonstick pans, that's what the pans are coated with to make them nonstick.

I always joke with my friends, like what's a guitar strings, tampons, pizza boxes and waterproof mascara have in common and they have PFAS in them. So because of the two, the chemical group at the end and the carbon and fluorine, that makes them great at waterproofing things, stain proofing things, water repelling things, as well as quenching fires. And so they're found in consumer goods, waterproof makeup. Your pizza box, why does the cheese on your pizza box just slide right off? Why does it do that?

And it's because it has a chemical on it, separating it. But the one that I'm studying, it's called perfluorohexanoic acid, so it's got a real ugly name. Perfluorohexanoic acid. But it is a huge component in aqueous film forming foam. So the things that firefighters use to put out fires. In your fire extinguisher, also the military uses it, airports use it to reduce the likelihood of fires on the outside of airplanes or on the outside of naval craft carriers.

And so it's used to prevent fires, to prevent chemical assault, but it ends up in the water and it ends up in the soils. And so areas around these military bases or airports, it's just at higher levels in the soil, which is where we grow our food and it's where cows and chickens eat. And then it ends up in our water. And so it's in tap water, it's in a lot of things. Everything. Literally everything.

Can you filter it out? Can you do water filters, suck it up, or is it just too tiny? So a traditional filter does not, like I have a Brita filter, that does not. There's a group in North Carolina that is working on, instead of filtering it out of like breaking it apart. And I think that they have been successful in creating this type of filter, but they're so expensive. Like a regular consumer would not be able to house this like facility in their home.

Also as we recorded this with Elizabeth, I had just cracked open a nice frosty LaCroix and I just learned today that they do have PFAS in it. PFAS in your bubbles. So heck and darn, we're all going to die. I mean, this is one of those things where if you are maybe like a little bit opposed to germs on you, and maybe you've gotten over that. And then you find out about PFAS and you're like, oh, I got this whole other thing to worry about.

You do. I'm just a student. I am forming my opinions on things, but I really don't think it's the consumer's responsibility to read the label on everything, trust the label on everything. Purchase this $10,000 water filter for your home. I really think it's the big corporations that are creating it who are maybe not responsibly using it. I said it yesterday and it's horrible, but I think it's like not our responsibility,

but it is our problem. I try to live my life knowing everything I know, like I cannot prevent exposure to this. And I try not to scare people because it is everywhere, but you can't avoid your exposure. Even polar bears can't. Right. If they can't do it, we can't do it. We can't. No polar bear is cracking open on LaCroix right now.

Yeah. Now, what about you in particular? What drew you to this field? When did you first hear about this chemical and were you just interested in studying neuroscience in general or did toxicology lead you toward neuroscience? So I didn't take a neuroscience class until the spring, this spring, and I'm a third-year graduate student, so I was in undergrad. I went to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and I majored in biology because

I did not know what I wanted to do and there were a lot of very broad classes. And my last year, I was actually going to go to occupational therapy school and I heard that toxicology was the hardest course on campus. And on the first day of the lecture, I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to be a toxicologist. And through that semester, like it was an introduction course, but we did have a lecture that included studying PFAS chemicals. We were introduced to them in the context of like our carpets have it, the furniture

has it, and I didn't really understand how big of a problem that was. So I ended up in applying for toxicology programs and I came to the University of Rochester and I had always been interested in neuroscience, but my undergrad did not have any neurocourses. And so I always kind of thought I can't be a neuroscientist. I'm just going to like by proxy be a neuro, I'm going to be a neurotoxicologist and study how we can mess up the brain. And I found my mentor, Anya Mayevska, she's my PI and she is a neuroscientist, a fantastic neuroscientist and she gave me the freedom kind of to create my own project.

And I'd been hearing about PFAS chemicals like in the news, I'd been reading a lot of papers on them. So it only made sense to me to study them because I think they're so important to study. And I was able to like marry that interest and I've always wanted to learn about neurodevelopment. I have an affinity for knowing about that. And so I got to create a project that mirrored my interest. And how do you even detect PFAS? Is it not something you can see under a microscope, but when you're doing the toxicology work,

I imagine that's one reason why it's so difficult, but how are you even detecting one out of 9,000 of these? Yes. And this is a huge problem in the field. So I'm happy you're bringing this up because you have to know what you're going to measure. You can't just throw a test on it and it's going to tell you what's in there. You have to know what you want to find. So a lot of people use mass spectrometry to measure it.

So how does that work? But you're able to have a biological sample and you put the proper primers in the machine to know, I want to detect this chemical specifically. And when you do that, you can get the levels or the concentrations back on your system. Okay. Well, what if you don't know if it exists? And so there's some chemical engineers right now who are kind of discovering new PFAS and they're publishing it.

So you, like as a scientist, you're able to go read and say, okay, now there's way more than 9,000. And maybe I need to plug this one into my study or I need to start looking and asking questions about this one that's showing up in the soil and the water and see in my biological samples if it's there. And why did you pick the perfluorohexic, blah, blah, blah, blah, perfluorohexanoic acid? The tongue twister. So I picked it because I knew I wanted to study neurodevelopment.

And this one is a short chain PFAS. And these short chains were created because we knew the long chain ones were bad. And so they're just like, we're going to make these shorter and put it in things. And it's going to be fine because it's shorter. People will pee right out. And I started reading studies. The polar bear study found it in the brain and I'm just like, okay, if it was found in the brain of a polar bear, let's look at human studies.

And there were several studies conducted in Europe on postmortem tissue that found this one in brains of humans who had died natural deaths. And so that just piqued my interest. And there were no studies on how it affects neurodevelopment, none at all. And so that is terrifying as a person, we know it is in our brains and we do not know what it does. Yeah. So they found it in the brains, but there was another paper that came out that was also

showing it in breast milk and how since the 90s, every year when samples are taken, it's doubling and doubling and doubling. So we know babies are exposed while brain development is happening. And we know people who have lived happy, healthy lives are dying and it's in their brain. So I'm just like, what happened? I need to know. Like what are you doing here? Here being everywhere, according to research from Elizabeth Sposter characterizing microglia

and the developing cerebellum. What does the cerebellum do for us and our bodys? Yes. So the cerebellum, it's Latin for the little brain. It's the very beautiful part in the back of your head. Traditionally, it is known for helping with motor coordination. But in the past few decades, scientists have been starting to realize that it's also involved in cognitive functions.

It's involved in a lot of other things, not just coordination and motor movement. And in the past 20 years, people have been looking at neurodevelopmental diseases and have found that alterations in the cellular architecture of the cerebellum have been associated with different neurodevelopmental diseases. The reason for that is not known, but these patterns are being seen. And so I don't think we know everything that the cerebellum does, but it's very important in a lot of things. When you talk about your poster, how far are you down the road of figuring out the interaction

of this chemical and our neurodevelopment? So I am just a third year. All of my things are preliminary data, but I have a great mentor who's helping me produce science that is rigorous and responsible. But I'm hoping within the next year, I'll be able to publish something that has the correct sample size, has the correct statistics to go with it. And I'm doing a very, I think it's a very fun project. I'm doing a very general cerebellum.

How are the genomics of the cerebellum? How are all the cells affected in the cerebellum? That's what I'm working on right now, but then I'm going to dive into a specific cell type to understand what's happening to microglia. So I'm planning on taking a deep dive into microglia, but if there's another cell type that it appears to be way more affected and it deserves our attention, I will shift gears towards that. And just in case you're like, I must know the abridged facts.

So microglia means small glue. And these little babies, which comprise 10 to 15% of your brain are the immune cells of the noggin and of the spinal cord. So right now, I don't know what you're doing. Maybe you're having a boba. Maybe you're trying to remember if you forgot deodorant today, but your microglia are up there. They're kicking ass.

They're cleaning up plaque. They're getting rid of damaged neurons and they're saying hell no to brain infections. So let's keep those microglia healthy so they can keep this whole ship running. Do you have any advice for anyone who is maybe thinking about toxicology is terrified of toxicology being the scariest course on campus, or is it going into neuroscience? Yes, I have so much advice or two. Toxicology is awesome. I love it.

It does give me general anxiety, but it's okay. I think just as a person, it's great to know these things, but also as a scientist, it's so interdisciplinary. I'm getting the opportunity to study neuroscience because of toxicology. I am one of the few in my program studying neuroscience. Other people are able to study pulmonary, the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the reproductive system. I think that that's super exciting and that is a pro to the field of toxicology.

And then neuroscience. I also love neuroscience. It's so cool. Using our brain to understand the brain. And so I would say, I mean, neuroscience is a lot scarier to me. I think we, as a society, put neuroscience kind of in a different kind of field, or at least I did. And so I think just from my experience, you don't have to have experience.

If you are curious and you are excited, you can study it. It is not unobtainable. And we're all rooting for you. What about the hardest thing about what you do? I guess, well, it is the hardest, but also the best part is like every day I get to learn something new, but studying specifically what I study, that is the hardest part. But also I think grad school is hard. I've been very lucky.

I'm a fantastic mentor. I have a fantastic family. I have a fantastic group of friends, but I think sometimes it can be isolating. And so I think some of the hardest days of graduate school are when your path is just so individualized. Was there ever a moment when you were working, when you discovered something or had like an a-ha moment where you were like, oh my God. Yeah.

Every time I analyze my data and one of my lab mates, McKenna, she has the keys for everything. So I blindly analyze it. And whenever she decodes it and sends it back to me and then I'm able to graph it, every time that happens, no matter what the results are, that is the most exciting. I love it. It's that dopamine reward system is just lighting up. And I love it. The months and months of work, I finally get to know what the answer is.

And then for a split second, you're the only person in the world who knows it. Which of course, I'm a loudmouth, so within seconds, every one of my lab knows, but there's like a split second that it's just like, I did that and now we know this. And I love it. I mean, keep at it. My brain is like, please, please, please forget this out because who knows what I've got rattling in there. And what about you?

Where can people find you or follow you or learn more? So I have a Twitter and it's very simple. It's Elizabeth underscore plonk. I'm on LinkedIn and it's just Elizabeth's plonk and I'm happy to talk to anyone about anything I do. I love it. You are the best. I'm so glad that you tracked me down.

It was a little embarrassing, but I thought I should just shoot my shot. I mean, text your podcast, cut or grow out bangs as you will. Yeah. I've just asked the smartest people in the country all gathered around one airport hot dog place, not smart questions. And then boom, look what you've learned. Big thanks to my Innovation Nation producer, Stephanie Hemango, for cheering me on and saying, yes, go do this as she watched my luggage.

And I will include links to all theologists' socials on my website at alleywar.com slash allergies slash field trip airport, which will be linked in the show notes here along with the cause of the week, sfn.org, and the more episodes you might enjoy, including small g's episodes, which are shorter versions that are safe for kids in classrooms. Those are in the feed and they're also at alleywar.com slash small g's all collected. Links to sponsors are also in the show notes. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram and I'm alleyward on both and I'm alley underscore oligies on TikTok.

So you can say hello. You can also join Patreon at patreon.com slash oligies, where we have discussion threads each week about the episodes and I love to see what you all think and chime in. So that's patreon.com slash oligies, oligiesmerch is available at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you, Susan Hale for managing that and so much else. Thank you, Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling. Aaron Talbert admins the oligies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Faltes.

Emily White makes our professional transcripts and Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Mercedes Maitland work on small g's, the kid-friendly shorter versions. Kelly R. Dwyer makes our website, she can make yours too. The giant-brained heartthrob, Jarrett Sleeper did additional editing on this episode alongside lead editor and chief, Sweetie P.D., Mercedes Maitland, who's wonderful. She has her own Maitland audio that's linked in the show notes too. Nick Thorburn did the music. He's in a band called Islands and if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you

a secret. And this week, it's another life hack from Dad Ward, okay? Listen, I'm trying to drink more water, just regular water, not carbonated PFOS seltzer, okay? I'm using a thermos, it's a metal thermos, and I also have all these tiny magnets that I bought for a magnet board. I use them all the time. They're like the size of a mini-altoid, but they could pick up a car.

They're so strong. So I have this metal, you're like, where are you going with this? I have this metal thermos, and I just realized the magnets will stick to the thermos, and I can put a bunch of magnets in one area of the thermos, and then as I drink water, I can move the magnets to another area of the thermos to count how much water I've had. This also works on your refrigerator, but sometimes you're not always near your refrigerator. Anyway, a good way to track water. Do you love it?

It was free advice. Okay, that's it for me today. Thanks for hanging out on this field trip episode. Patrons, let's talk on the discussion thread and talk to me about some more field trips that you want to go on or what you thought of this one. First one ever. Yeah? Okay.

All right, bye-bye. What time's your flight?