That Neuroscience Guy - Special Episode - Society for Neuroscience 2025

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss some cutting edge ideas and technologies in neuroscience from the 2025 Society for Neuroscience conference. 

Hi, my name's Olive Kirk Olson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, and in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. All right, well, I'm coming to you from the floor of the Society for Neuroscience Meeting, 2025 in San Diego. I'm here to check out what's new and the latest thing in neuroscience. And I've found five things that I think are really cool that you might be interested in. So I'm going to share them with you now.

Hopefully enjoy the podcast. Okay, one of the things I've seen here at neuroscience that I thought was really cool was a tool. So when I started my master's studies, we did a lot of stuff with motion capture or what people call mocap. And basically, it's a way to digitize the body. Now, you might be familiar with mocap because in Hollywood, they use this to digitize people. in animation movies and things like that. But we use it in science quite a bit to map the human body and what it's doing. For instance, during my master's work, we were really interested in reaching. So if you reach to grab an object, what's going on in the brain, but also what's going on with

the body? So we wanted to look at the limb in detail as it was moving through space to see what was changing and when. Now, this was. something that was technically hard to do and also really expensive. For instance, a traditional mocap system starts at about $100,000 and then they just get more expensive. It's got a lot to do with your capture volume. How big of a space do you want to capture things in and what information do you want to capture? But I stumbled upon a couple of grad students and their supervisor where they're doing free motion capture. So you could do this at home. So for those of you that are students, teachers, or if you're just interested in neuroscience,

you could build your own motion capture system for $60. That is true, and it's research grade data. So you could catch yourself walking, you could catch yourself reaching for things, you could catch yourself doing just about anything, or you can catch other people too. And you can analyze that data. It comes out as a file that you could open and excel if you wanted to, although they also provide free and analysis software. So check out free mocap.org, free mocap.org. The $60, that's just webcams. That's what they use. So you need to buy a couple of webcams. Obviously, you can buy fancier

webcams if you want to, but you can get away with pretty simple ones. The ones they use in the demo that I took part in cost $60 for three cameras. And like I said, they provide software to help you capture the data and to help you analyze the data. I think this is really cool, this idea of taking these really complex and expensive neuroscience tools and making them freely accessible to the public. So try it out. You might have some fun with free mocap. Okay, another thing that I found that was really cool at the Society for Neuroscience meeting

was to do with chronic traumatic encepolophath. or CTE. Now, if you're not familiar with CTE, there's a really good movie with Will Smith in it that you could probably Google and watch. But essentially, it's a swelling of the brain. And this happens classically in football players, although it happens in other sports.

And what's sad about it is as the brain swells, and it's typically associated with repeated concussions, these people undergo massive changes in their life. They get violent at home, they get depressed, they get angry. And in some cases, and more than one, it ends up with suicide because these people know that they're not themselves anymore. And it's a result of playing sports. Now, of course, the NFL and football in general has taken a lot of measures to protect people. But at the end of the day, our heads aren't meant to be bashed that way.

over and over again. Now, the problem with CTE historically is it's only being detected post-mortem. So after the person has died, they do an autopsy, and then they look at the brain, and they can see the swelling of the brain. And of course, the problem with this is if you diagnose it post-mortem, you can't detect the onset of it, and you can't intervene and help treat this person. You only know that it exists after they've died. So here comes this poster. It's out of New York University, a bright young aspiring neuroscientist named Manuel was the lead investigator. And they're looking at MRI scans, and they're using software they've developed, and they're specifically looking for ventricular enlargement.

So the ventricles of the brain. And they can detect it. So this is one of the first studies ever that has been able to detect CTE in people that are still. alive and they do it with a three-minute MRI scan. Now MRI scans are tricky to get, but of course, if you're playing a head contact sport where you're susceptible to concussions or you have a significant other that's playing a head contact score, I believe in the near future this technology will get deployed and you will be able to know if you or someone you love is sort of on the way to getting CTE, and that, of course, leads to a cessation of sport. So there you go. CTE

detection in people that are still in live, using MRI, and looking for ventricular enlargement. I think it's a game changer. Okay, again from the Society for Neuroscience meeting, what else is cool? Now, I've already given you one tool, which was free mocap, but there's another one that I thought you should be aware of. You know, a lot of people look at, you know, research and they think it's incredibly difficult to do and it isn't you know you could do this yourself if you want to study what's going on in your brain I'm going to tell you how to do it in the free tools that are available so first and foremost you can buy a muse headband at best buy you know I'd get a muse s the newer one and it's a simple way for under $500 to measure your own

brain activity. Now, that's the newest muse. If you actually look around, you can buy a new muse, or you can buy a used muse. And what I would tell you is that if you check to make sure the battery still works, because on the older muses, sometimes the battery fails, you might be able to get your EEG data collection system for under $200. So how do you get the data? Well, the next thing that's free, and there was a demonstration of this here, is there's an app, called Mind Monitor. It's on the iOS App Store and the Google Store, and for $20, you have software that allows you to record your brainwave data on your phone. All right, so you've got your mobile EEG system, you've got this software that allows you to record the data. What do you

do with it? Well, here's the cool part. Mind Monitor itself outputs spectral power. So the power in the delta range, the theta range, the alpha range, and the beta range. on a Muse headset. And these you can study. For instance, if you're tired, delta power will go up. If you're focused, alpha power will go down. If you're concentrating, frontal theta power will go up. So you could just use the output of mind monitor and just look at it and excel even, or, you know, Google sheets, and you can look at your brainwave data and attempt to interpret it. And if you want to go a bit further, You could even use EEG Lab. EEG Lab is the largest open source EEG analysis software package in the world.

And it used to be tied to Matlab, which is hard to get, but now there are standalone versions of EEG lab that will run on your computer. So you could download EEG Lab and you could use that to do even more complex analysis on your own brainwave data. Now EEG Lab is tricky, but they have a YouTube. channel. There's tutorials on how to do this. So again, in line with the free mocap stuff that I saw here, you know, when I started doing this back in 2003, that was my first year as a PhD student. Collecting EEG data was incredibly difficult and analyzing it was even more so. But realistically, for under $500, you can collect your own brainwave data and analyze it and become a neuroscientist. So again from the Society for Neuroscience meeting, another cool thing that I saw has to do with enhancing motor learning, so learning new motor skills through brain stimulation.

So there are two, well, there's actually more than two, but there's two, the two most common technologies out there are transcaneal alternating current stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation. TDCS or TACS and essentially what you do with these technologies is you are passing electricity through the brain so you put it's just two wires connect to a battery that's that's over simplified but that's the basic idea and what you do is you put current in one end and it passes through the brain so from the positive terminal to the negative terminal and that impacts the brain now I'm start by saying that this technology is still in its infancy and there's still a lot of debate as to what it's doing whether it works or not. So bear that in mind. It's a whole disclaimer and please don't go get a big battery in two wires and try this. If you want to try

it, it's actually fairly cheap. So you can just go on Amazon probably and put in TACS or TDCS and see what happens and see if there's a stimulator. Make sure you get one that's for the brain. But in terms of this poster, it was a grad student, and they were presenting their work. And what they had done is they had applied transcranial alternating current stimulation before someone went to learn a motor skill. And they specifically targeted the alpha frequency band with it, because you can target, you know, a different frequency of brain activity. And they found that it works. So they found that by providing.

trans cranial alternating current stimulation, they found that they could enhance motor skill learning. So that's kind of cool. Imagine that you want to get better at golf. Before you go to the golf course, you just need to wire up your brain and put some electricity through it. Now, I have to come back to the fact. This is a very preliminary technology,

and there's a lot of debate as to whether it works or not and how well it works. but this was a, you know, a presented result with statistical significance. So that might be the future. Brain stimulation to get better at sports and other things. The final thing I saw at SFN that I thought was pretty cool was a poster by a graduate student who's working with a colleague of mine at Iowa State University. And I'm just going to throw it out there. they have captured a potential neural signature using EEG for curiosity.

So we all get curious and we know we know what curiosity means. And they, using EEG, believe they have captured a brain signature associated with curiosity. So the way they did this was kind of cool. They basically created a database of 3,000 trivia questions that they pulled from the internet. And then they had people, and they broke them into categories. So I think there was 10 categories. I don't remember exactly. And then they had people pick five categories that they were really interested in and one category that they weren't.

And the idea, a very simple manipulation for curiosity, but the idea was the ones that you're interested in are the ones that you pick that you want to know about. and then the ones that you're not interested in are the ones that you're not curious about. And I actually tried their demo, and it makes sense. You know, I picked sports and history and science is my top three that I liked, and I ranked entertainment the lowest

because I don't care about entertainment news or trivia. So that's how they do the curiosity manipulation. And then what they did is they measured brain activity while people were reading the questions, and during a recall phase. So there's two parts of this result. The behavioral result is that people had far greater memory performance for things they were curious about.

So we tested if they still remember the answer to the trivia question and what it was, then if things they weren't curious about, and this is common sense, it's a well-studied phenomenon. We know this just at university or high school. Classes that students like, they tend to remember the content, classes that they don't like, they tend to not remember the content

and so that's you know they replicated that but what's cool is during the encoding phase and the answering phase they got different patterns of the EEG activity in the brain depending on whether you're curious or not so during the encoding phase and this is the cool result is they got strong correlations between the EEG activity

for questions where they were curious and they remembered the answer versus both low curiosity phase. So in other words, using EEG, they were able to take a snapshot of the human brain and capture curiosity and show that that brain activity impacts memory performance. I think that's kind of cool. I wish they had that when I was a kid. All right, that's all I have from the Society for Neuroscience meeting. There's obviously so much more here, but I thought I'd just give you five things that I find really interesting. So there they are. I hope you find them.

interesting as well. Don't forget the website, That Neuroscienceguy.com. We have links to our Etsy store and Patreon where you can support us. I've talked about it way too much. There's social media, Instagram, and of course, Threads and X at that Neurosci guy. Let us know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life and of course the podcast itself. Thank you so much for listening and please subscribe if you haven't already. I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast. My name is Olive Kruglson, and I am that neuroscience guy.