That Neuroscience Guy - Q&A: Humor, Alcohol, and More

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Do tall people perceive time differently? What does alcohol actually do to your brain? In the second That Neuroscience Guy Q&A, I answer your burning questions about neuroscience. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. On today's episode, we're doing Ask a Neuroscientist again. This is a chance for you to ask me a question, and I'll do my best to answer it using my knowledge of neuroscience and the human brain. The first question I'll answer this week is, how much of our day is automated? Well, probably a lot more than you would think. As neuroscientists have learned more about what goes on in our brain during our daily life, we've come to realize a couple of things. For instance, in terms of decision making,

it seems like we spend most of our day kind of on autopilot. We go with a well-learned response to a given problem that we're faced with. And rarely do we engage the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that helps us solve analytical decisions, or what is referred to as engaging cognitive control. Interestingly, when we're in autopilot, there's another thing that happens, which is the brain's default mode network is engaged. The default mode network is essentially a pattern of neural activity that you see when we're doing nothing. So as much as we think there's a lot going on, it seems like we spend a lot of our day just going with our gut hunches and engaged in sort of a default brain state.

What is the short-term impact of alcohol on the brain? Well, in brief, we get impaired, but what does that really mean? Impairment in terms of the brain effectively means that your brain isn't performing as well as it should. In particular, the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that engages in cognitive control, is impaired, and that's why we make bad decisions after consuming alcohol. The impact on the other part of the brain is kind of what you'd expect it to be. Our brain systems process things a bit more slowly, and that processing can be more variable, and our attentional systems are impaired, so we might not be able to focus on something

that we need to focus on. This is why driving under the influence is a very bad idea. Your brain is not responding in a way that allows it to react and make effective decisions, and that's why accidents can happen and other poor outcomes. Interestingly, research has shown that the state that you're in when you're impaired by alcohol, at least in a lot of ways, is similar to that as just being simply cognitively fatigued. In other words, when your brain is really tired. So just as we have laws against drinking and driving, we should really have laws about driving your car when you're too tired as well. Why is the timing of comedy so important? Why is the timing of comedy so important?

Humor in the brain is a very interesting topic, and we'll probably do a full episode on it later. But to answer this question, expectation plays a big role in the way our brain processes things. So, for instance, if a comedian sets up a joke and there is a period of time where it's actually optimal to respond because the brain is expecting a response. And if it's too quick, you might not process it quite the same way. But then again, it's also if the comedic response is too long to complete the joke, the brain's sense of expectation might dial down the processing. So there is an optimal time to

respond and it has to do with the way your brain handles sensory information. Your attentional system, in other words, gets bored, and the joke's not as funny as it could be. Here's a great question. Why do we make bad decisions? Well, we've kind of unpacked this on a previous episode, but in brief, the simple rule of decision-making is we have to make sure that we're always checking our rational decision system in the prefrontal cortex, and we also have to keep an eye out on our emotional system to make sure it's not biasing values. thing, of course, is other factors. For instance, alcohol and other substances that impair us will lead to poor decisions. And it doesn't even have to be that. It could just be cognitive fatigue.

My final thought on this would be that there's another thing, which is a dumb decision could come from a poor assessment of the values in front of us. If you think back to the podcast on decision making, decisions are based on assessing values of the choices available to us. And if we assess these values poorly or give too much importance to a value that we probably shouldn't, then we'll end up making a bad decision. This question kind of made me laugh, but I'll answer it. Do tall people experience time the same way as short people, given how much longer, relatively speaking, it takes their nerves to conduct signals to the brain?

Is it measurable? Is there a difference in the reflex? Generally, no. For most of us, our height is similar enough that we process things the same as humans. similar enough that we process things the same as humans. The time difference in the signaling isn't sufficient enough to cause us any major problems. However, you would imagine, and you could hypothesize it in some of the dinosaurs, for instance, that were extremely large, this might be potentially an issue, but I would guess a very small one. No pun intended. I found this one kind of humorous. What's a neuroscientist? That's a really great question, actually. A lot of people have their own views about neuroscience, and they don't realize that

there's sort of three principal levels that we think of. There is cellular neuroscience, where the person in question doing the research focuses in on single cells or just small groups of cells. And they're really interested in the mechanisms of how these cells work and how they contribute to larger phenomenon. But the research is literally focused on a single cell. If you go up a level, people talk about systems neuroscience. A good example of systems neuroscience would be thinking of sensory information. For instance, people that study vision or people that study hearing. And then there's cognitive neuroscience, people that study the parts of the brain that lead to cognition, phenomena like memory, attention, learning, and decision-making.

And there's more and more types of neuroscience out there. I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine who is an environmental neuroscientist. He's extremely interested in the impact of the environment on the brain and how it shapes cognitive processing. Computational neuroscience is an exciting and emerging branch where people are interested in developing artificial intelligence and computational algorithms that try to mimic the processing that the human brain accomplishes. I'd also say there's other

types of neuroscience that are coming online each and every day, but those are the major ones. line each and every day. But those are the major ones. Why does COVID-19 in some instances result in a loss of smell? Researchers at Harvard have found out that within the human olfactory system, the sensory neurons don't express a gene that encodes a specific protein which the COVID virus uses to enter human cells. Instead, it's expressed in cells that provide support to the olfactory system. For instance, blood vessel cells. When these cells are targeted, then the underlying support system is no longer present, and as such, the person in question loses their sense of smell. The good news is there's no neural damage, at least that's the current understanding, so that following

recovery people should be able to regain their sense of smell. Why is Facebook so addictive? We touched on this in a previous episode, but in brief, our brain uses the midbrain dopamine system to convey messages of reward or pleasure. And every time you get a like on social media, it triggers that little response. And this is also why it's so addictive. But at the end of the day, those likes are creating an addiction because at a deep level, your brain's dopamine system is responding to them. My name is Olive Krigolson, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. If you'd like to ask me a question, feel free to email me at thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com or post one on my Twitter feed

at That Neuroscience Guy. Thanks for listening listening and I'll see you on the next episode.