 Ginger Campbell is going to come out and do why neuroscience matters and unfortunately I haven't had a chance to write a limerick But I hope that's okay. I'll do one post script. So we'll do it. So please welcome ginger Campbell Okay Karen slides will be working eventually So I'm going to be talking about some some basic discoveries from neuroscience and my goal is To tell you some cool stuff, but also to make you get interested in learning more and most importantly I want to convince you that Neuroscience literacy is becoming an essential Scientist science literacy for the 21st century So first I want to just thank those of you in the skeptic community who have supported my show over the years I Had a promo on an early on in skepticali. So I know a lot of you've been listening for a long time So I just wanted to say thanks So why should you even care? well Neuroscience is about what makes us human and if you're not interested in that I guess you wouldn't be here and We're learning things that are really changing how we see ourselves I'm going to start just by actually telling you what neuroscience is Because it's actually a pretty broad I've never used this con before so okay So it might seem obvious, but it is the scientific study of nervous systems And that's opposite from say neurobiology, which is more down at the physics chemistry biology level This is a systems level field it according to Wikipedia has at least 15 branches and it's ranges from the molecular biological level all the way up to the level of behavior and cognition and It's very interdisciplinary it uses tools from many fields ranging from Molecular biology all the way up to computer science in fact I think the more I read I'm more I'm convinced that Neuroscience is leading the 21st century trend back toward interdisciplinary science You also hear the term cognitive science which really is about the ma setting the mind information processing It's associated with traditionally with the term computational theory of mind It includes because it's by definition interdisciplinary it includes psychology Linguistics philosophy and computer science, so you often will hear people refer to Neuroscience and cognitive science Because among the scientists themselves those are considered separate So back to why you should care like I said it's about what makes us human and We're learning things that are really changing how we see ourselves and others including other non-human animals, I'm sorry So as I said, I'm going to talk about a few key discoveries I've been doing the brain science podcast since 2006 So I've done over a hundred episodes, which of course I realize not a lot compared to those of you who podcast every week but I Feel like I'm only scratched the surface So I've picked a few people that Have done work that you probably haven't heard about That I hope will give you a feel for the depth and breadth of the field We are learning a lot about brain evolution. It's its own topic and one of the people whose work I'm going to talk about today is Seth Grant. He's in the UK and he's actually him and his colleagues have proven That the proteins that make up the synapse, which is the main connection between neurons That these proteins actually evolved before nervous system. So we're talking about things like And also the chemicals like dopamine, of course have been around forever Another thing is that you take C elegans, which is a very primitive nematode worm We share about 50% of our genes with that worm Personally, I think that genetic information should be enough to convince you of evolution, but apparently not for some people I'm going to talk a little bit more about C elegans in just a minute so here is a Slide that Seth Grant graciously shared with me. It sort of shows the idea that communication began when Single-cell organisms had proteins embedded in their cell membranes and they could interact with the world. That was the beginning Things like dopamine glutamate stuff like that that you hear about even today. So he calls this the proto synapse Then the way he describes it and he's an excellent teacher you you go from the proto synapse which is what's going on in the cell membrane to the actual synapse in a Invertebrate it's pretty primitive and then as you get to vertebrates like us it becomes more complex it turns out and this has been proven with proteinomics that The complex elements of the synapse evolved before we got big brains And this is a big deal because it goes against what we've sort of well Maybe not against but it challenges the assumption that it's all about how big your brain is it may be I think the evidence is leaning to The idea that the complex synapse was the key to being able to get brains and big brains So I originally talked with Seth Grant Back in 2008 I think and since then he's been doing a lot of exciting work And I talked to him last at the end of last year and we didn't update unfortunately He didn't have a chance to give me any slides, but I want to tell you about what he's discovered so Let me see if I can It's more about the synapse complexity Like I said vertebrate synapses are more complex than invertebrate synapses and so this as I said just Challenges the whole thing about big brains But the real question is well, how did this happen? I mean how did how do we get a complex synapse? It turns out it has to do with the duplication of the entire genome Which actually occurred twice in evolution, and I'm talking the entire genome of some ancient organism early on in vertebrate Evolution this is really I don't understand why I never heard of this before because it's kind of important to evolution Have you ever wondered well, you know, how could you get those? Mutations that you needed to make vertebrates without really killing the invertebrates and the key was that they Duplicated the entire genome and that as he put it gives you a whole bunch of extra Lego blocks to work with and so I'm going to use this example of something called the DLG gene To sort of explain how this works and it probably applies to a lot of other things too So the DLG gene is one that's been around since the early mammals about a hundred million years. So we In invertebrates, you would have had one copy of the gene Then it doubled and you had two and then it doubled again And so then you had four now this particular gene is of interest because it affects the proteins expression in the synapse and So the question is does it matter? So what Grant and his colleagues did was his training is in genetics and making Transgenic mice which is when they you know change the genes in the mice and see what happens And so what they did was they made these different strains of mice where one gene of this of these four DLG genes was mutated and then another strain with another one was and so on To see whether it made any difference. I mean it's a good theory, but first you got to prove. Well, it really actually matters So what they found was that the very oldest Gene the one that we inherited from invertebrates if you get rid if you mutate it The animal dies. It's not compatible with life The second oldest one if you mutate it you get severe learning disabilities You might say the the the two most the two newest ones seem to have opposing actions one of them If you mutate it the animal Learns more slowly, but it has what's called faster extinction Which it's like if you were going to work every week and after and they quit paying you How long it would it be before you decided to quit going to work? That's extinction, okay? So these animals have faster extinction, but they're slower learners you knock out the other gene of the pair and they Learn faster, but they're really slow about extinction actually. I think I know some people like that, but Anyway, they seem so that it seems like now that we have these extra genes to play around with we can have some that are sort of regulating by balancing each other Now there are people that have a mutation of one of these genes the one called DLG2 That's actually the reason why they picked this gene to play with because they already knew about people now I Skipped one thing because I can't really see my nose Growing old is bad for your reading One really neat thing that they did was that they developed this test that where they use this thing like an iPad and the mouse Touches it with its nose You know when it's doing the trials and that means they can give the exact same test to people with the iPad like device it's not officially an iPad, but it's got a touchscreen and So they've done this and they've shown that the people that they already knew had this deficit have this very similar learning Deficits, so that's that's pretty weird and kind of exciting now this is a mutation that's associated with schizophrenia and That's not really unusual if you think about the fact that people with schizophrenia tend to have cognitive deficits So it's really not surprising that a gene associated with schizophrenia would caught would be involved in in the synapse And again as I mentioned these genes have been around a long time, but this is evidence that they're still really important in in learning and Plus this whole line of work is sort of a proof of concept of a way of testing whether a certain gene affects behavior Now the implication first of all Vertibus have much more complex behavior than invertebrates But the point is it's not just because we got big brains we have more complex synapses and Probably those complex synapses are what makes our big brains possible now those of you who may not have any background in neuroscience might not realize it, but that's really Surprising I mean we've always thought that the synapse was the synapse was the synapse was the synapse turns out. It's not true Fortunately, it's mostly same enough that we can do studies, you know on for invertebrates But we have to now that we know this piece of information Any time we're extrapolating from invertebrate data now, we're gonna have to take this into account So the C elegans that I mentioned before it's Really popular with neuroscientists because for one thing it's transparent Another thing is that it's really small. So it's easy to work with in terms of lab space It reproduces really quickly and it has a very short life span And so those are all things that scientists like because lab work is really expensive So see elegans much much cheaper than mice and I don't think anyone ever gets attached to them either So it turns out also that and we know their genome because the C elegans I can't remember if the C elegans are the Or the fruit fly was sequenced first, but it was one of the very first ones to be Havids genome sequence. So we know that we know a lot about it and 70% of the Genes that are associated with human illnesses have homologs in C elegans So it's it's considered a great what we call a model organism and as far as its nervous system It only has 302 neurons, which makes it a lot easier to study than 80 to 100 billion neurons of the human brain Plus you can cut it open It has similar neurotransmitters similar ion channels similar synapses within the caveat that I just mentioned and I Guess I should mention these slides are from guy called. Well at the University of Alabama It turns out that C elegans even has seizures, which is pretty bizarre to think of when you consider that C elegans doesn't even have a brain and he when guy was sending me his slides originally he sent me a video of a Worm having a seizure, but it's just sitting there wiggling. So I've never put it into my presentation Although I did once have somebody asked me to send them a link to it But you can use the C elegans to test whether genetic changes will affect susceptibility to Seizures you can use it to check test drugs, which is a really you know a Efficient way to test drugs because you can eliminate a lot of them before you get to the more expensive testing methods Now what guy does is? He's studying the dopamine neurons. It turns out that there's only eight dopamine neurons in a C elegans So dopamine neurons are affected in Parkinson's disease. For example, that's he gets that's where his funding is from So he he can you can see you can label them with fluorescent dye since they're transparent and then you can see what happens So this is an example of the difference between healthy dopamine neurons and ones that are degenerating and the last time I talked to guy he was hopeful that they would be able to that they would have be able to actually get a Simple substance all the way to the point of a drug that people could use for Parkinson's, but I'm not sure where that stands right now So I'm gonna back up just a second. I want to talk a little bit about The human brain because I just gave you those two examples of sort of obscure basic science kinds of things but the basic sciences is where Um Discoveries are made that then change things for example now that we know that the synapse is not the same Who knows where that's gonna lead so these are a few of the things that I think are key discoveries in neuroscience or Concepts one has been talked about much today, which is the idea that the brain makes the bump mind Brain plasticity is I think the most exciting discovery Then the role of the unconscious which you hear a lot about Including emotions. I'm only gonna talk on about morality very briefly because I think Patricia churchland has a whole talk on that And I unfortunately will only talk about consciousness very briefly even though obviously that could be its own talk So the brain makes the mind You can debate about how important the body is You can debate about how important the environment is There are people who think that we should consider for example Our iPhone in our pocket to be part of our mind because we're using you know, we're outsourcing stuff to it But aside from where you might fall on that philosophical argument There is no doubt that the brain is essential and there is no evidence that you can get by without it Robert Burton is someone that I have regard as a mentor and I liked this quote from his first book disembodied thought is not a physiological option and The other point that Burton makes that I think is important is that you also can't have a purely rational mind And I'll talk about why this is true in just a minute brain plasticity, which is More than just the discovery that we can make new neurons, but the discovery that we can make new neurons Actually overturned about a century of neuroscience dogma And what's really interesting about that is if you go back and look in this literature You can find people who did work that Provided evidence of neuro plasticity, you know 50 years ahead of time That you know got ignored because it didn't fit what everybody currently thought and just like Scott Lillenfiel said this morning scientists are just as prone to be stuck in a dogma as anybody else and Actually, most of brain plasticity isn't from new neurons because there's only a very few places in the brain where make new neurons It's really more about new synapses and the synapses Changing and right now. We don't really know the weight between those two which one's the most important The reason that I think brain plasticity is so exciting is because for one thing hope it gives hope to people for recovery from all kinds of injuries and diseases and For the rest of us who are hopefully healthy It means that there's not any excuse for not learning new things as we get older That's the reason why I just started a fellowship in palliative care medicine 30 years after graduating from medical school I decided I needed to practice what I preach So I'm skipping ahead to the unconscious We're learning a lot about the fact that the conscious does probably most of what our brain does is unconscious And not only is it unconscious it is not accessible to Introspection and this is really important because there are people who this doesn't fit You know sort of um, you know like the old Freudian idea of the unconscious where you could figure out by dream analysis or some Pseudo science what's in your unconscious? We're talking about stuff that we just don't have any way of getting access to and this includes the sources of our basic emotions Emotions something scientists used to like to try to ignore But thanks to Antonio de Masio. We now know that our emotions are important for normal decision-making people who don't have emotions Actually, they can't figure out what's important to them. So they can't make choices shock pangsip is a Scientist who just deserves more recognition than he's gotten so far He has shown that we share the basic emotional circuits for our for emotions with other mammals and the key thing about these circuits is That they are sub cortical. It's not at the amygdala. It's way below there. Okay? Again, these are not things we have access to You can decide how you're going to react to your emotions, but you don't get to choose what they are They they happen at a level you don't have access to if you know that That means you maybe can give yourself a little slack and other people a little slack So the unconscious is doing at least 95% of the work maybe more It doesn't just shape our conscious thought it makes our conscious thought possible And we know this because people who have damage to these circuits that we would consider unconscious have a very hard time You know doing doing thought in the way that you know, we could normally think of it So how should we react? My friend Robert Burton again says that our reaction should be humility Because we it's not like we're really not in control, but not in that. Oh now my brain made my me do it kind of way I'm not advocating that position But it is humbling to realize how much is going on in our unconscious and stuff. We take credit for you might say This quote is from Burton's more recent book a skeptics guide to the mind which I highly recommend One investigators possible correlation is another's absolute causation. I Like this quote because it captures a very important idea When you're talking about things that are going on in the unconscious or our unconscious processes These include the origins of things like the feeling of certainty You you know when you know the answer That's uncons, that's has an unconscious origin So you are our sensations of causality and agency the agency. These are unconscious So when we I know that I heard Michael Schirmer give a talk several years ago about the fact that you know People were different in their tendency to see patterns in noise. Well, think of this as another aspect of that So we have Varying tendencies to see causality around us So that's what this quote Captures and this is part of the problem with when scientific studies that have shown Correlation get out into the press and get morphed into the proof of causation Even though they haven't proved causation Some of its bad reverse Whatever that was that Scott said this morning, but the other thing is that people just vary in their idea of when something has become proven and This is just part of the way that we're wired So, I mean even among scientists there can be Obviously, there's the bias of if it's your theory, you're more likely to think it's been proven, but So what are the implications of this This is another quote from dr. Burton. He says hiring the mind as a consultant for understanding the mind is like Asking a con man to give himself a job reference Now not everybody agrees that this is a fundamental fundamental limit on our ability to understand the mind but At least we need to be aware that You know a lot of this stuff is going on outside of anything we can access So besides our unconscious our brains and then our minds are being be shaped by our genes our environment our experience and They all interact we know that the genes can Be turned on and off due to experience And I'm not I realize that I'm I'm not going to get into morality except to say that we know that we're not the only species that has a sense of fairness and The evidence is that morality has evolved I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that with with this audience because I know that you're probably familiar with it When it comes to consciousness, we know Now that prop Consciousness is now the holy grail of neuroscience Which is really pretty ironic if you consider that a few decades ago. It was considered Scientifically out of bounds unstudiable, but not anymore So we're learning it's not maybe as unique as we thought and in terms of humans aren't the only Beings that are conscious. There's debate about this. That's where I come down the big one the existence of a non-material soul appears to be very unlikely given the evidence from neuroscience and Personally speaking, that's what turned me into an atheist is you know I got into studying neuroscience actually from a philosophical from the silk philosophical end and Before I knew it. I was an atheist so I'm kind of on the School of you bring the science to people and let them conclude what it means to them in their lives and the discovery Institute Knows this they're already attacking neuroscience as Materialistic neuroscience trying to undermine it because they understand its implications so implications for skeptics as much as we admire the Enlightenment ideal of the rational mind we need to rethink this you really can't have a pure rational mr. Spock mind Because emotions are also in our brains and we need them and there's a lot of other stuff going on These discoveries explain why you can't just convince change somebody's mind so to speak by giving them a better argument Because where they are on that spectrum of causation and certainty and all those various things Is gonna influence how they respond? So as I said because of this I think we need neuroscience literacy So that we can make better decisions about things like when should kids be allowed to drive and drink and You know we can avoid scams like something that's gonna make you use more of your brain when they tell you you only use 10% Which is totally false. I hope you already all already know that we need we need to reform education but I think that the most important thing is the promotion of Tolerance and understanding if people have a better understanding of how their minds work and the minds of other people work a Lot of this stuff that we tend to think is people control like whether you believe in God or not you do not Control I'm convinced So I was just wanted to shout out to my other Tam speakers, but I don't think they're slow showing this slide These are people that are been on my podcast So if you would like to hear more from them after you hear them talk, I hope you'll track down their their episodes Especially Carol Tabris's episode about cognitive dissonance. Sorry, Ginger Campbell. Thank you so much for switching Ginger Campbell