Radiolab - Damn It, Basal Ganglia

Episode Date: August 9, 2011

The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was studying what happens when the basal ganglia gets short-circuited in mice...until one fateful day, when things got really, really weird.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From.

W. N. Y. C. See? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Jada Boomran. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab.

The podcast. Yes. And today at the podcast, we're going to present a story that... The whole thing is an accident, really. Yeah. This is a good thing. We were on tour a few months ago doing the symmetry thing. San Francisco. And right as we were there, we got an email from a woman who lives there

telling us this nutty story. Something odd had happened to her, and she wanted to share it with us, so he met her in the lobby. I missed, I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again? Sure. My name is Liza Schoenfeld, and I'm a research technician at the Glaston Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Now, Liza is just getting started with her scientific career. I finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago. And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad schools. And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain.

Part of your brain called the Basel Ganglia. Basil Ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying. Just so we understand, basil and ganglia, so basil is not the thing from which Pesto is made in your case. No. What does Basil mean? I'm going to have to ask someone else about that. Okay, let's go on to ganglia. So ganglia, you know, collections of neurons.

Big collections. So basil ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain. It's actually this big hunk deep in the center. And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement. Well, when I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia? Yeah. When I wink, am I using my basal ganglia? Yeah.

When I make an expression in my face, am I using my basal ganglia? Definitely. What about if I'm reading The New Yorker? I don't think so. Apologies to the New Yorker and its employees. The point is this part of your brain is really basic. And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this. particular basal ganglia trick.

Using this really cool technology called optogenetics. Maybe trick isn't quite the right word. What they'd done is they'd found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia. So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains. They could actually turn its basal ganglia,

or parts of it, on or off. And this is in a live mouse? This is in a live mouse. So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse, running around, having a great mouse time. You turn the light on. We can get him to freeze. In mid-strive?

Yeah. So you hit the laser and boom, the mouse stops? The mouse is like this. So you use light to like puppetize the mouse. Yes. If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try. Move feet. Move!

As long as that light is on? Come on, move! You can't do it. Liza is holding the strings. Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much. I'm kind of like, I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting. It's like where you squirting.

We're at liquid from one tube to another. I'm working on my pipetting skills these days. Grunt work. Work at the thumb muscles. Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb wrestling competition right now. So at a certain point, she was like, enough of this. It's time for me to apply to grad school. Yeah, I applied to five.

University of California, San Diego, University of Washington in Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University, and Harvard. Okay, so you're going big. Yeah, go bigger, go home. Right. Exactly. So she heads off to her first interview. University of Washington went great.

I loved it. I went to Penn, University of Pennsylvania. Went down to UCSD in San Diego. It's a beautiful place, great scientists. It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world. So far so good. Did you ever go back to San Francisco, where we are now? This is where things get strange.

Yes, so my last interview, my very last interview, was at UCSF. And she says about a week before that interview, I got really sick. So I think it was some kind of stomach flu, but it was pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything. Throwing up? Yeah, all sorts of. I don't know. I had some bad dim sum the weekend before that could have been in.

Yeah, that's it. So she goes to the doctor. He gives her some pills to fight the nausea. And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview. So I went, you know, there's a nice introduction. They give you a breakfast. At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine. Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice. They tell her about their work. I have to think of a couple witty questions. I ask my questions. What's a witty question in this context? Would we even laugh? A witty science question? It's a witty science question.

Okay, never mind. Anyhow, she's raring to go, and she heads in to meet her first basal ganglietian of the day. And he studies, one of the things he studies is dopamine. In the basal ganglia. He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I know. But we had a good conversation about dopamine, and at this point in the day, I was feeling okay. No nausea. Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to.

Her name is Allison Dope, and she's pretty well known. Her name is Allison Dope? Alice in Dope. Wow, and she studies dopamine? She studies songbirds. Songbirds. Which is what Liza really wanted to study. So birds have basil ganglase too.

So she's pretty fired up. And kind of at the beginning of that interview, my face started to feel a little bit strange. And I was wearing glasses that day. So what I thought was happening was that my glasses were, you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose. And you have to kind of tighten the muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking. I just kept on feeling like, God, why can't I stop? tightening that. It was kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay.

Then we went to lunch, and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch, my head just started spontaneously turning to the right. Like I would be trying to sit here and face you, and I would just turn over here and face Robert. That's such a funny thing. It's strange. Was your neck moving and you're like, no neck? Don't do that neck. Yes, this is exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, all right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him. And instead, I'm just turning over here, turn it over here, turn it over here. Oh, you're turning a fairly wide art. Yeah. You are turning

away from the professor. So I remember, I remember at what point in lunch turning my chair like this so I could sit there, toss to him. A permanent side long glance. Yeah. But she figured, it's not that painful, so it must just be a cramp or something. And I'm kind of thinking, oh, So I slept funny last night. I must have slept on a weird angle in my pillow. Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just got to tighten the glasses.

Yeah, everything under control. So then I, after lunch, was going to go to my third interview. It was with Allison Doep's husband, who also studies songbirds. So he's familiar with the basal ganglia, too. They meet up to walk over to his office together. And so I explained to him on the walkover, I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad? He says, sure, I may track one down.

But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back. Involuntarily. Yeah, my head's snapping back. So suddenly your eyes are pointed up at the sky. And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly. Like you're doing right now? Like I'm doing right now? So you're in a state of deep surprise.

Yes, constant deep surprise. High eyebrow. I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying, and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull him back down, then then, then, the mouth, then all this area starts to go. The lower face. Yes.

What is it doing? It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile. Would you mind demonstrating? I'll demo it. Okay, so I've got the neck. It's like this. Crane back. The eyebrows are like this.

Total surprise. A huge is a little like this. Crazy Frankenstein face. This is not the obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview. No. Yeah, it's not going well at that point. And I'm very... Is Michael now noticing that something is...

Yeah, I think at that point he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience. And I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth, like, try and just calm down a little bit. And it was pretty painful, too. I mean, it was, like, imagine like a Charlie horse in your face. Oh. Yeah. But she gets through the interview. I actually do okay.

You know, he asked me tough questions about science, and I can answer him, I think. And I leave the interview, and then I met by the woman who's the head of the admissions weekend. And she took one look at Liza. And she said, I don't know if you should do the rest of her interviews. And with her as my student host. And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad. Just to say, hey, dad, I'm in the middle of my interview. And someone kind of funny is happening with my face.

I can't control it. And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't, I can kind of talk, but it's pretty bad. Pretty bad. Is your dad a doctor? No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, I'm losing. control of my face, and as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong.

And then my student host comes rushing back in, running, and he looks at me, and he tries to put on a calm face, and he says, so now we need to go to the emergency room. So they throw into a taxi. And in the taxi, it went from, I can't control my mouth to a complete, I mean a complete, a palsy to the torque. I did not look good. As we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up. They rush her inside. And they have me in a gurney, in a room, in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes.

Doctors swarming all around her. An oxygen mask. EKG leads all over my chest. They do an IV. And as she's lying there on the table, and she's thinking, like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body?

And I just, I couldn't, I remember frantically sending messages, like, you've got to cut this out now. But she wasn't in control. And it turned out. that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mice and seized control of their basal ganglia? The compasine that I took. That nausea drug?

Was actually affecting dopamine systems in my basal ganglia. In other words, that drug had been doing to her? Pretty much when she'd been doing to those mice. One to two percent of people who take compasine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me. During all those interviews. And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed in the vesicles?

How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems-level people who studied the behavioral output of the basal ganglia, that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia. So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docks, and they are failing in issue-to-ish. Yeah. Did you get into San Francisco State? UCSF. Are you CSF?

No. No. Oh. Damn it, Basil Gangl. We should probably tell everybody that Liza is obviously doing okay. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl, of all things. And actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better.

She could breathe, her face had unclenched. And when we asked her, how has this little adventure changed you? She said, well, I'm still working with those mice, because when we talked to her grad school hadn't started yet. And now, when I go into that room with a little laser, I go in now and I just really, I empathize with that. Come on, little, Casper, this would just be for a compliment. You can do it.

Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that. Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington. And thank you to Brenna Farrell for production help on this podcast. And that is our podcast. There it is. I'm Robert Krollwitch. I'm Chad Abumrod.

Thank you for listening. Samantha from Sacramento, California. I'm a radio lab listener. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. at www.flone.org.

Thanks.