Rachel Carlson
Appearances
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And then these frog-eating bats, for example, they are actually listening in on the mating calls of frogs that are much, much lower in frequency. So they've had to evolve basically like another set of hearing sensitivities.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So they have enormous ears. This helps with their eavesdropping behavior as they listen in for frog calls and other prey sounds. They also, as you might guess from the name, have this fringe on their chin and lips. And this has been hypothesized as a way to very quickly make chemosensory assessments of prey quality. So whether a frog is palatable or poisonous.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So if they heard a particular frog call, they would expect, okay, this is palatable prey. I'm flying for it versus this is a poisonous frog. I'm going to stay away. But what we didn't know is how these acoustic preferences developed.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Was it something that they were born with? Was it something in between? So the goal of this particular study... was to really probe those juvenile bats, to ask them, what are your preferences for these different frog calls? And how do those compare with adult bats?
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
These poor male frogs have to make this very loud, conspicuous call. And it's an acoustic beacon. So not only from a distance does it signal to a female frog that here I am, I'm wonderful, I'm attractive, I'm calling at the top of my lungs. It signals that, unfortunately for the male frog, to predators as well. So these frogging bats, that's their first signal that, oh, there's prey in the area.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And that's what initially brings them right to the spot where those frogs are. But as the bat approaches, it has to have landing control as it comes close. It has to know where the ground is and when to stop. Wow. And then it has to pinpoint at the very end exactly where that frog is. And the frog's best line of defense is to stop calling.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So if that frog becomes aware that the bat is on the way, the bats really have to switch deck location at the very end because that's going to help them pinpoint in the final moment of approach where that prey target is. And then the bats actually use another sensory modality right when they're in contact with the frog or toad. And that is chemical cues.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Once they actually have the frog or toad in mouth, if they've made a mistake, they will spit out that frog and toad. They will spend quite a long time grooming and cleaning and trying to get all those noxious toxins off of them, and they'll be fine. And actually, interestingly, the frog is also fine. So it's a strategy that really does work for both.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And we think that that might be why they're so cognitively flexible, is that if they do make a mistake at the eavesdropping level, at the...
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
echolocation level at all these sequential levels of assessment as they approach the prey they have a number of possibilities for correcting that mistake and if it did eat that frog it would get very sick and it could die like these some of these frogs actually are so toxic that much larger mammals like a dog or a cat, like they would die eating that.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So it looks very, very much like the juveniles are acquiring these responses over time, that this is something that they have to acquire with experience and likely with learning as they grow up. So much like a human child, you don't, you're not born knowing that there are dangers, perhaps, in encountering strangers. You have to be taught by those adults around you that there is stranger danger.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
You have to be careful. And it looks like that might be what's going on with these frog-eating bats.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Absolutely. It is a little bit like caller ID. So you want to be able to know before you take that action that this was one Oof, that was one to avoid. Do not approach it.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Yes. You're probably less likely to do that the next time, right? Like it's – it definitely is a learned behavior that over time – You think –
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Absolutely. So why don't you start with the Tungra frog?
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
I sort of fell into bats by chance, and really the reason I fell into them was because of Austin, because of that enormous urban colony of bats.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
You're like, that's the filet mignon of frog. What are you doing? It really is.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And not just bats. There's so many predators that love that frog. Really, we call them the popcorn of the forest. Like they are bite-sized. They're palatable.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So that one is actually so famous for this terrible introduction into Australia. It's also introduced into Florida. It's wreaked havoc with many, many ecosystems. It does happen to be... Native to Panama, so it is supposed to be right here in our ecosystem. But it's enormous, and it's highly toxic.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So we had only in the past tested adult bats. We captured a whole bunch of bats, both adults and juveniles this time, and we brought them into a flight cage, which is just basically a big screened room. So they're at ambient temperature, ambient light. They have all that normal outdoor sounds. And then really we just played the frog calls one by one and quantified what those reactions were.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So we were wondering to what degree is that eavesdropping behavior really hardwired versus something that needs to develop through experience over time? What this experiment showed was absolutely the latter. It seemed that they really, really do need to have experience with these palatable versus poisonous species to develop the acoustic repertoire that the adults have later in life.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
It actually is like that in nature. The forest at night in the tropics, it's this cacophony of frog calls and there are many times, many species calling at once. Yeah.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And with the juveniles, they actually showed interest in those toxic frogs and toads, which really, coupled with our other experiments over time, led us to think that that learning period is critical for them to develop this fine-scale discrimination of what's safe and what's not in terms of prey approach in the forest.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
This species in particular is fascinating. So these are not even very close evolutionarily, frogs and bats. And yet these bats have figured out basically how to interpret these frog calls, that this one is palatable and this one is poisonous. And I can consistently rely on that for correct discrimination between meals that are safe and meals that are quite risky.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So we're fascinated by eavesdropping behavior. And you find eavesdroppers across sensory modalities, across the animal kingdom.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Absolutely. Humans do it too. But no, you find it really in nearly every taxonomic group. that you look at. And I think that the ones that we haven't found it in is just because we haven't looked hard enough yet. So this is the first study to our knowledge where we've looked at how eavesdropping predators acquire that specific behavioral strategy.
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
I was mesmerized. How on earth are they not bumping into each other? How can they recognize their own echolocation call? How are they also communicating socially with one another?
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How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So I'm really hoping that the study spurs interest in all of the fantastic biologists all over the world who are interested in eavesdropping behavior. Because it would be really, really fascinating to see if the patterns that we're seeing with these bats are similar across other predators that eavesdrop on the communication signals of their prey.
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In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
The way evolutionary biology had been done in the organismal side of this world was to look at traits that change over time, you know, butterfly wings and plant leaves and seed colors and the beaks of the Darwin's finches and things like that. And that's really hard to study when you're looking at microbes because there's no traits.
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In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
I mean, they do have different shapes and they do have different surface structures and stuff. But back in the day when we were just discovering microbes, that was really hard to even say how they were related to each other.
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In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
People were starting to use molecules, amino acids and RNA. They were starting to use those as signatures of evolution.
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In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
He had these notebooks and notebooks and notebooks, and I've seen these notebooks. There's like shelves of them, which are basically saying the size of each of these little bands in these two-dimensional gels is And based on that, he was finding relationships.
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In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Until he walked down the hall and said to Carl, well, you should really look at these guys. They're very different. I don't know what they are.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
OK, move things around like Legos. Literally, Gina, in my brain, I was picturing scientists playing with these tiny little molecular blocks. And then David told me that's actually not that far off.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
It's not, actually. Even the guy who first synthesized LSD in the 1930s, Albert Hoffman, worked on finding derivatives of the drug that didn't give people hallucinations. Oh, wow. But some scientists say those hallucinations are the whole point. Hmm. I asked Albert Garcia-Romeo about this. He's a psychologist and psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
He told me that we really do need more treatment options for conditions like depression, especially for people who can't take classic psychedelics.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Albert says these big experiences can play a role in how people feel after taking a drug like a psychedelic.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
That is the question. We're talking about what could be next for psychedelic medicine. I'm Rachel Carlson.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, Gina, first we have to understand what people think drugs like psychedelics and ketamine even do in the brain. Yeah. So I want you to picture the neurons in the human brain as one big tree. Okay, I'm closing my eyes. I'm doing it. The neurons have something called dendrites. Those are like the branches of the tree. Okay. And then those branches have these tiny nubs called dendritic spines.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Okay, like leaves? Yeah, like leaves. And these leaves, or spines, are the sites where neurons in the brain communicate with each other. In a healthy brain, you can think of these really lush, leafy trees. Imagine squirrels are hopping between branches.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah. And David says that when researchers eventually started studying the effects of ketamine on depression in animals, they saw that it seemed to help do this. And it worked much faster than the kinds of antidepressants we'd been using since the 1980s. So that's like Prozac, Zoloft, things like that.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah. David told me that he and lots of other researchers started looking for other compounds that could also do something like this, quickly help regrow these mental forests, these sites of connection in the brain. He coined a term for drugs like this. He called them psychoplastogens. Okay. And that includes psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. A.K.A.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah. And just to be clear, Gina, a lot of this research is happening in animals. So scientists think that something similar is happening in humans, but but they don't know enough yet about how these drugs work to say for sure. Still, David says that it got researchers thinking, what if people didn't have to take a drug every single day?
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
There is a version of ketamine that the FDA approved in 2019 to treat depression that didn't respond to our current treatments like SSRIs. It's a nose spray called Spravato. But even that requires patients to go to a clinic. They have to stay there for at least a couple of hours while they get the treatment. And they need someone else to drive them home because ketamine can make people dissociate.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Gina, hi. So first, this episode will make sense for people who haven't heard the previous episodes. That said, in our last episode, we talked about why some researchers are interested in not just the chemical effects of drugs like psychedelics and ketamine, but all these other factors that come with them, like the trip, or therapy, or even expectations patients have about the drugs themselves.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Oh. So researchers like David are trying to figure out, are there drugs that have similar effects on the brain without all the trippy side effects?
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, exactly. Plus, right now, psychedelics are mostly extremely restricted, controlled drugs.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, I mean, testing whether something could potentially make a person hallucinate is really tricky, as I'm sure you can imagine. Researchers know certain receptors in our brains are involved in the hallucinogenic effect of psychedelics and ketamine. So companies like Delix are basically trying to make drugs that are like distant cousins of magic mushrooms or ketamine.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
They help those trees in our brain grow new leaves, but they don't make people hallucinate. Okay, so do we know if these like non-hallucinogenic drugs work? It's definitely still up for debate, but Delix has a drug called DLX-1. It's in clinical trials now. I talked to the company's head of research and development, Eliseo Salinas.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
He told me that the company did a clinical trial to test whether DLX-1 made people hallucinate, and it seemed like it didn't. And now they're testing the drug on patients who have depression.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
And again, there's a lot more to learn. And you said other companies are doing things like this also, right? They are. Companies want to develop drugs they can patent so they can get funding for more research. So there are a bunch of groups in this space. Some are just making more traditional psychedelics.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Some are trying to make shorter acting psychedelics or engineer out potentially negative side effects, like some psychedelics bind to certain heart receptors. So they might want to take that side effect out. And all this kind of exploded around 2019, 2020, with lots of these companies popping up and eventually trying to file these patents for their respective drugs.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, it can get a little complicated since traditional psychedelics have been around for a really long time, and a lot of them come from nature. So I talked to a patent lawyer about this. He focuses on psychedelics. His name's Graham Pachenik.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
So Graham told me patent examiners may not always have access to all of the past research out there. And there are people who've argued some companies have gone too far by trying to patent things that they say shouldn't really be patented, like the way the room is set up while patients are getting treatment.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, exactly. And so it's still too early to say, but it's possible we could start to see more companies like Delix in the future. If investors are more inclined to put money into drugs that kind of work like psychedelics but don't involve actual psychedelics.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah. But other researchers say while all those factors might be important, not everyone can or wants to take psychedelic drugs. Here's one of those researchers, David Olson.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Yeah, some people definitely feel strongly that the whole experience that comes with these drugs is key when it comes to treating patients. Even David and Eliseo both told me they're not saying that we should replace psychedelics altogether with these non-hallucinogenic compounds. But they are saying that we should develop both things. Here's Eliseo.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Right. But again, not everyone feels like this is really the best way to approach the research. Remember Boris Heifetz? He's the anesthesiologist and neuroscientist at Stanford who did the ketamine study. We talked about it in our last episode. Yep. He and David are collaborators. And he told me that these new drugs, like the ones David's making, could be great.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
But even then, if they do work, he still thinks these experiences people seem to have around psychedelics are really important. And for most patients, this whole idea of taking out the trip
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
And Gina, the thing that really sticks with me here as I've listened to scientists like have this conversation in their own research and with each other is that we're learning so much about the human brain right now. But there's also a ton that we don't know.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
So I think this research in psychedelics is encouraging neuroscientists to confront how we study the brain at all, how we study our unique experiences differently. And where these two things, our chemical biological processes and our personal emotional ones, intersect.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
For example, most practitioners would say that people who have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia shouldn't take psychedelics. That's why David's making drugs that are inspired by psychedelics, but without a trip. Wow. OK, so tell me more. So David co-founded a company called Delix Therapeutics. They use the structure of drugs like ketamine, LSD, ibogaine, MDMA. And then?
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How To Have Hard Conversations
It's the Renaissance music. Absolutely. And they told me they sang with this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together. They eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talked through and ultimately disagreed on a lot of things. They said there have only been a few times where they voted for the same people.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
It is no surprise that there is a lot of disagreement and division out there in the world right now. That's the understatement of the century. I mean, Donald Trump was just reelected as the 47th president of the United States after a campaign season filled with divisive and sometimes downright hostile language. Yeah.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
And over time, they've set some boundaries with each other.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
This was so striking to me, Emily. Like, they're really reflective about each other's opinions and about each other as people in general.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
But we also were able to join each other's worlds. And this joining of worlds was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen. Yeah. Jeannie and Richard have been married for a really long time, and they have so much mutual respect for one another. That's a really key baseline component of these conversations, and it's not a given for everyone you meet. Absolutely.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
It's not easy, but we're going to try to work through it. So today on the show, the neuroscience of disagreement. When we have the opportunity to engage with someone who thinks differently than we do, what's going on in our brains, and how can we make the most of those conversations? I'm Rachel Carlson.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Okay, Emily, imagine that you and I are about to have a disagreement. So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
That's Rudy Mendoza-Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we probably won't even notice these things while they're happening to us, but on top of them, our amygdala starts to respond. Yeah, our amygdala. That is like our brain's threat detector.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
And a lot of people are gearing up for the holidays where you might not always see eye to eye with the people you love in your life.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that. So I called up the lead researcher, Joy Hirsch, to talk about it. She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine. And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other, which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at Right. You're just like slid under an MRI machine. Exactly. And in this case, people wore these things that looked like swim caps on their head and they have these little thingies all around the caps. What is little thingies? What's that for? It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
She told me they're technically called optodes. So some of these are like little lasers that emit light into the brain and then some detect that light. So researchers like Joy can then use these measurements to look at neural activity.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner. Yeah. They surveyed a bunch of people on Yale's campus and the New Haven area on statements that people tend to have strong opinions about. Like, for example, marijuana should be legalized or same-sex marriage is a civil right.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
And then they specifically paired people up so the partners were strangers, they didn't know each other before, and also so that they agreed with their partner on two topics and disagreed on two other topics.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
What did she find? During agreement, Joy says they saw activity related to the visual system and also in the social areas of the brain. But Emily, it wasn't just activity in these places. These areas were also more synchronous when people agreed on the topic.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
What does that mean? So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Versus when participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as synced up. It was kind of like a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet. And as they disagreed, Joy says it seemed like each brain was engaging a lot more emotional and cognitive resources.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
So Joy is hypothesizing that disagreement might be really taxing on us. Like you're expending more energy when you disagree with someone than when you agree with them. Okay.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
First, kind of like we said before, we decide if we want to have a conversation with someone and also if that person is going to be receptive.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person? Yeah. But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple. Focus on your breathing. Can you take a breath? Yeah.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Allison co-teaches that Bridging Differences class with Rudy I mentioned earlier. She told me that this moment, slowing down, breathing, can help us move into step two, which is coming back to our goals for the conversation. Right, like she described it as an intention? Yeah, why we're having it, what we're looking to get out of it.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
So Emily, this week NPR is exploring these divisions and finding stories about people trying to bridge their divides, successfully or not. And since we're a science show, I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise? And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Because research shows it's not super easy to change someone's mind. And it can be pretty ineffective to spout facts at someone to try to do this. Yeah. But Allison and Rudy both told me we can find more common ground with someone when we try to understand their perspective instead of trying to convince them that they're wrong.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
And it kind of seems like they have the right idea, at least from a scientific perspective. Research shows that people who engage in dialogues or conversations to learn rather than to win come away from those conversations with a more open perspective.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Yeah, that's a great question, Emily. And it's our third step, empathy. So that includes asking the person you're talking to questions about themselves, trying to humanize them to learn more than just their opinion on whatever topic it is that's bringing up these feelings.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Totally. No, I think so, too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole. But it is kind of like how Jeannie and Richard met in their singing group. Like, they got to know each other's hobbies. They learned about their families, their careers. And knowing these details about a person can help us be more open to them. In other words, it's about seeing the person and not the label.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
That's Juliana Tafour, the director of the Bridging Differences program at UC Berkeley's Greater Goods Science Center. That's where Rudy and Allison teach their class. And these tactics can help us be more charitable towards others, like by looking at the strongest parts of their arguments instead of the weakest, and more humble.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Just understanding where we might need more information or circumstances where our own beliefs might be limited.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Yeah. Like, I know I don't know everything. And even the things that I think I know well, like, there's always more to learn. Yeah. It's not really that any one of these things or even all of them together is a magic wand that's suddenly going to help us all agree. Yeah. And that doesn't seem like the goal. No.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Like for Jeannie and Richard, they both told me neither of them have really changed any of their opinions in the last 44 years of marriage. But it was clear to me just by talking to them, they really admire each other. They respect each other's beliefs. And I think what's most important here is they try to understand why they each hold the opinions they do.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Special thanks to Kenneth Barish. He wrote a whole book about some of this stuff called Bridging Our Political Divide, which is going to come out in the next few weeks. I'm Emily Kwong.
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How To Have Hard Conversations
Jeannie Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richard Bruckheiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
They're asking, is it the drugs themselves making people feel better or everything else that comes with them? We'll even hear from a patient about her experience.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Right. Or, Gina, it could be a combination of all of these things or others, and it's pretty hard to parse out. But Boris tried to disentangle all of these factors in a 2023 study he did on ketamine and depression. That was out in the journal Nature. So to do this, they used anesthesia.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
And in Boris's trial, they looked at 40 patients who were already scheduled to have some kind of basic surgery and go under anesthesia. All the patients also had a history with major depression. Okay. And Boris told them that while they were under anesthesia, they would either be getting an infusion of ketamine or saline.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Based on research in animal models, scientists think that ketamine works by binding to this specific receptor in the brain. It's called the NMDA receptor. But what also happens there is that it can give people this kind of dissociative feeling, like they're separated from their own bodies.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Yeah, it is not a psychedelic, but it does kind of get thrown into this psychedelic related bucket because it can have sort of similar-ish effects sometimes. depending on how much a person takes. And so the idea with Boris's study was that by putting patients under anesthesia, it might help solve this big problem that most studies of psychedelics and ketamine have.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Yeah, if someone gives you LSD, you are probably going to know. So I spoke to one of the participants in this study.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Cindy had an ongoing relationship with depression.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
She's from Santa Cruz in California. She told me she felt like she should be enjoying her life in the sun, outside, by the beach.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Before the trial, Cindy told me she didn't know anything about ketamine.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
And Gina, another thing Boris told me is really important here is that we've known for a long time that after people go under anesthesia, their mood often gets a bit low. So things like depression can get worse. And in a group of patients who were already suffering from depression, that's what Boris says they expected to see, at least in the group that didn't get ketamine. And what about Cindy?
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So in our last episode, we talked about how drugs like psilocybin and ketamine are raising all these questions about the limits of what we know about our brains and how we experience reality.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So Cindy got the drug. She got ketamine. But remember, she didn't know that, and neither did Boris or the other researchers. Okay, okay. So what happened when she woke up? Here she is.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
What about the other patients? So in the group that did get ketamine, 60% of those patients felt better the day after surgery. And most of those people had stayed better when the researchers checked on them two weeks later. Wow. So for context, Gina, this is much faster than something like Prozac or Zoloft, which could take at least a month to see results and has to be taken every single day.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Right. So Boris says they figured, OK, ketamine works even under anesthesia. So even if the patient doesn't know that they actually got it. So it wasn't just Cindy who felt better. Boris told me about a different patient, not Cindy, he also talked to.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
He saw this patient a couple days after her surgery.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So statistically, there was no difference between people who got ketamine and people who got placebo.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
And even Cindy, who did get ketamine and did feel like it helped her depression symptoms, told me she thought about whether it was really the drug that helped her or other parts of the study. Like what was it that really made her feel better?
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Exactly. And she told me that she wondered, like, how far would it take other people who were struggling with something like depression if they just had this same kind of support that she got from Boris and her surgery team?
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Boris told me that a lot of patients seem to think that if they felt better, they probably got ketamine, even if they didn't, which to him points to this expectation or hope that patients might have about being in a study where they might get some kind of drug at all.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Exactly. So when we're talking about how drugs like psychedelics and ketamine work, or if they work at all, what the heck are we actually talking about?
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Yeah, I mean, that's what Boris is saying. And what he really emphasized to me is that placebo can sort of be seen as this fake thing or a sign of failure in a study. But there's science supporting its effectiveness. It can actually change our brain chemistry. But people often see it as this imaginary treatment.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Right. So Boris tackled this question with anesthesia. He came away feeling like maybe these other factors are really important. And a lot of people in the field argue this. Other researchers are focusing on creating new drugs altogether, ones that work like psychedelics but don't have a trip at all.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
David Olson is one of these researchers. He's a chemical neuroscientist at UC Davis, and he says neuropsychiatric disease is a huge problem globally. We're talking in the neighborhood of a billion people.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So, Gina, let's go back to our big question here. Why might drugs like psychedelics or ketamine help people? Is it because of the way they could alter the brain or the trip or experience that comes with them? Yeah. David's saying forget the trip. He's betting on their chemical and biological effect.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
A lot of his research is focused on creating new psychedelics and even drugs that are inspired by psychedelics, but he says could be more accessible and safer since lots of people can't take psychedelics. Right. And researchers still don't really know the long-term effects of taking these drugs.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
That's one aspect of his work. So we'll get into this process tomorrow on Shortwave.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Thanks, Gina. I produced this episode with Burley McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Special thanks to John Hamilton, Brent Bachman, Johanna Sturgey, and our incredible standards team.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
This is Dr. Boris Heifetz. He's an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist at Stanford University. And he told me that researchers have been wondering for a while if the trip that comes with a lot of psychedelics, this journey or experience, is really important, or if it's just this unnecessary byproduct when it comes to making people feel better.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
That's Nadine Lamberski. She's the chief conservation and wildlife health officer for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. And when I visited, she told me that these birds live really high up in cavities and trees. maybe somewhere like six to 8,000 feet up where it gets really cold at night.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
I love being here. And this time it's really exciting because we've been reporting a story together on thick-billed parrots. And you got to see these parrots in, like, real life. Yeah, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California. I drove down from Los Angeles, pulled onto a dirt road, and met some parrots at the Bird Conservation Center. It looks like they're cuddling.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Still, their populations continued to decline into the 1990s when researchers estimate they numbered just over a thousand. Today, there's no longer a wild population in the U.S., You can only find them in Mexico's Sierra Madre.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
The thick-billed parrot population is growing. It's increased by 10% in roughly the last decade. So today on the show, the community that came together to help the thick-billed parrot. And how these birds are fighting for survival and winning, for now, thanks in part to some tiny solar-powered backpacks.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Yeah, and Gina, we learned that these conservation efforts have to be multifaceted because the parrots are facing a bunch of different threats, like forest fires, parrot smuggling, and deforestation. And those pine trees the parrots use to build homes way up high in the Sierra Madre, those trees are prime targets for logging.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
They're kind of looking at me. And I met their care specialist, too. It sounds like they're laughing. Maybe they're laughing at me. Rachel, they're laughing with you. I don't know. I kind of feel like they were laughing at me. But they're still so charismatic and they look really cool too. They're bright green with little red splotches on their heads near their beaks.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Over the years, researchers at OVIS, where Ernesto works, and other conservation organizations like the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have partnered with the community to develop more sustainable forest management. They've discussed which trees to take, how many, from where, things like that, all to minimize the impact to these endangered parrots through legal protection.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Later, Ernesto found that woman's daughter. She'd been a kid when the first deal was signed, and almost three decades later, she was now a leader of the ejido, the local communal lands, and was in charge of renewing the contract to protect the forest.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Nadine says these artificial nests, or bird boxes, can help these breeding couples that almost all mate for life. Aww.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Nadine told me they have trained climbers go up the trees and then use a rope and pulley system to bring these boxes up high.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
He called it plasticity. So if they don't have pine trees, maybe they'll move to aspen trees and use smaller pine cones from younger trees.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Scientists think this is another reason why the thick-billed parrot numbers are increasing. Which takes us back to our big point here. The birds are having babies and they're doing okay. And the researchers know this, in part, because they're tracking the birds with these tiny solar-powered backpacks. I love this part.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
They have big pupils and the adults have black beaks while the babies have white beaks. They all live really high up in trees, usually pine, making their homes in abandoned nests and holes.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
James Shepard is the lead researcher behind this effort. He's a senior scientist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. And he's been in the field putting the backpack trackers on the birds. And it's been a big help in their counting efforts. But people weren't really sold on this idea at first.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
I mean, a can opener for a face is pretty metal, but James wanted to try this idea anyway. So he came up with a plan to make these tiny tracking backpacks, literally backpacks. They have little straps and everything, but they don't bother the parrots, and they're even designed to fall off after a couple years.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
And Ernesto's cautiously optimistic for another reason. As he's continued to work on saving these parrots, he says he's seen people's views on conservation change.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Fingers crossed we get some good news about these parrots in the future. Gina, I loved doing this story with you. Thanks for having me.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. I'm Rachel Carlson. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
These fundamental questions are at the root of the hit Apple TV Plus show, Severance, now in its second season. And I love TV and I love neuroscience, so I had to hear from Dr. Vijay Agarwal. He's a neurosurgeon and Severance's science consultant. In the show, some employees at a company called Lumen Industries undergo a surgical procedure that alters their brain.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Their memories are divided between work experiences, where they're known as their innies, and their personal lives where they're known as their outies. The protagonist, Mark Scout, and many of the other characters in the show choose to get the procedure after personal trauma. It's a way of escaping their everyday lives.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Vijay says the show's creator, Dan Erickson, and the executive producers, including Ben Stiller, were set on making the show as realistic as possible when it came down to the science.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
So today on the show, the neuroscience of severance, the connection between trauma and memory, the ethics of neurotechnology, and why one neuroscientist says the show, it's not too far off from reality. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Hey, shortwavers. Producer Rachel Carlson here. Before we start, you should know this episode contains Severance Season 2 spoilers. All right, we warned you.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
All right. So Vijay, we're talking about the neuroscience of the Apple TV show Severance. And some companies are developing neurotechnology now that would go into our brains in real life. How far off is reality from what's happening in the show?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
So every morning, I try to wake up around 5.45 a.m. ish. I almost always hit the snooze once. Okay, fine. Twice. And an hour later, I'm walking into the office. I say hi to our editor, Rebecca. Hello. Hello. But what if that me walking into NPR wasn't really me?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Wow. Okay, so then you were kind of talking about this before, but what areas of the brain – are we targeting or what areas of the brain would we target?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Right. What are some of the ethical considerations of things like neurotechnology?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the episode focused on Mark's wife Gemma this season in episode seven really gets into the potential for abuse. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about that and how you think the show deals with it.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Yeah, I mean, Vijay, let's talk about that more. I feel like throughout the show, characters have these moments where fragments of trauma break across the severed barrier of their brains, if you want to call it that. You can see it through Gemma's experiences in all those different rooms or even with Irving's drawings.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Wow. Yeah. So one of the big fan theories right now is about transferring consciousness, specifically that Kieran, maybe other Egan's could be brought back somehow by transferring his consciousness into a new body. And maybe that's what all the tests are for. So I know you can't give us any spoilers, but how would you go about advising a show on consciousness?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Right now, so many researchers are interested in studying altered states of consciousness. things like psychedelics, even anesthetics as potential treatments for things like PTSD.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
But these two versions of myself were completely separate. What if we had the ultimate work-life balance?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
And since we've been talking about trauma and grief and escape as big themes of the show, was that consciousness research something that you were thinking about at all when you were helping to craft some of the more scientific parts of the narrative?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
Does this show make you appreciate anything about how the world works, about how the brain works in a way that you hadn't thought about before working on it?
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
All right. Well, Vijay, thank you so much for talking to me. I am so excited to hopefully have some of the puzzle pieces fit together.
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Could 'Severance' Become Our Reality?
I produced this episode and it was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineers were Kwesi Lee, Gilly Moon, and Harrison Paul. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is the senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
She does. She told me she felt like she was expressing herself differently. She changed the way she taught her classes. even ones she'd been teaching for years.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
But here's the thing, Gina. Researchers like Albert, they don't know exactly why Lori sees things differently. Is it because the drug altered her brain chemistry? Or was it the journey she took while she was on psilocybin? I called myself, like, the new Lori.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, you know, people often take psychedelics looking for some kind of experience that could transform their lives or change their outlook on everything. So if you're a scientist, how do you tell if the effect of a psychedelic is because of a change in brain chemistry or because of this spiritual journey? I spoke to Boris Heifetz. He's an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist who works at Stanford.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And he said it kind of boils down to one question.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And once I heard him say it that way, I couldn't get it out of my head.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So I went on my own journey, not like my stuffed animals are talking to me and I can't look directly into a mirror kind of journey. Not like that. But a reporting journey with lots of scientists who had lots of opinions.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Is it possible for researchers to separate those things when weighing their potential benefits? And does the difference matter?
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So psychedelic substances have been around for millennia in indigenous medicine. Okay. And in the late 1930s, this guy named Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD. Then the actual term psychedelics was coined in the 1950s. Okay. Now, those drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are called classic psychedelics. In the brain, they all activate something called the serotonin 2A receptor.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Serotonin is a chemical in our brains. It regulates things like sleep, mood, appetite. And at this specific receptor, classic psychedelics have these very powerful psychoactive effects.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, exactly. So in the 50s and 60s, psychedelics, both in recreational use and in research, are huge. But then, in the early 70s, the U.S. does this big crackdown on controlled substances, and that, coupled with tighter regulation on pharmaceutical testing, really shuts down most psychedelics research on humans. And the next big phase in neuropsychiatry in the 80s is super different. Yeah.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Boris told me the goal became to have sort of a one-size-fits-all mental health approach.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So Gina, this is when SSRIs come on the scene. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They also target serotonin receptors. antidepressants like SSRIs work for about two-thirds of people who take them, but there were still some major problems. They don't work for the other third, even after trying multiple different drugs. Right. Which leaves a lot of people like just in the lurch. Yeah.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And I mean, there's other factors, too. You have to take them every single day. You have to be on them for at least a few weeks until you can even really feel a change. Yeah. And so there's this urgent need for alternative treatments for mental health conditions, which is why around 2000 or so, researchers start studying another drug called ketamine.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
You might know it as a recreational drug, but it's also been used since the 1960s as an anesthetic in clinical settings. So it's not a psychedelic. It's not a psychedelic, at least according to most people I talk to. Okay. But it can have these similar-ish effects depending on the dose. Like it can make people feel numb or give them this sometimes euphoric or dissociated feeling.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Hey, Gina. So psychedelics are being studied to treat lots of different kinds of conditions.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
That's David Olson, a chemical neuroscientist at UC Davis. He studies compounds like psychedelics. And so, Gina, to summarize all this history, David told me that once people started studying ketamine, they wondered what other kinds of compounds might have similar rapid effects. And remember all that research on psychedelics that got paused? Yeah. Yeah. OK. So that comes up again.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Right. So for the first question, this is really a challenge for all experiments. You want to make sure that you're testing one thing and then comparing it to a control or a placebo drug. To see if it's really the thing you're testing that causes an effect versus like some other factor. Right. And that's even harder when it comes to these drugs in particular.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Albert told me about a few ways researchers can address this problem. So one is to give people another drug called an active comparator. Usually it's one that can kind of mimic certain effects of something like a psychedelic without having to give people one.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Or another strategy is just to give everyone the drug, sometimes at different doses to see what's most effective. And then you can sort of parse out a threshold for what might work and what might not. Okay. So remember Lori?
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Every person in the study she was in got psilocybin. So they knew that they were going to get it. Lori told me she met with therapists before and after her treatments, and they were in the room with her over the course of her experience with psilocybin.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
That's Albert Garcia-Romeo. He's a psychologist and psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. Albert ran a study using a psychedelic called psilocybin. It's the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And he wanted to see if it could help people who'd previously had Lyme disease.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, exactly. Most studies have some kind of therapeutic support involved. And for Lori, on that day that she got her first round of psilocybin, she walked into the room. It was very tranquil.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And the light was dim. She said she felt like she was preparing herself for this big, important moment.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Exactly. And this doesn't take away from the study or what Lori experienced and the fact that she told me she felt so much better after. But it does mean when patients and studies do feel better, it's harder to say what helped them feel better. And then that can make it hard to know how to give other people that same experience. Here's Boris again.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah. So when I asked David this question, like, why does it matter? He reminded me that not everyone wants to trip or should trip depending on their medical history. For example, most professionals say that if a person has a family history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, they probably shouldn't use psychedelics or ketamine.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So if researchers can figure out what matters, like if you don't actually need to trip to get these potentially positive effects, scientists could get more effective treatments for more people. So how are they going to try to settle that debate? Some researchers, like Boris and David, are asking, what happens if you remove the trip altogether? Whoa.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
They're doing this in really different ways, but they both hope it's going to bring us closer to answering the question. That'll be next time on the show.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Because you may not realize it, but Lyme disease often comes with lots of psychological symptoms in addition to all the physical ones. Lori Unruh Snyder is one of Albert's patients in that study. She's an agriculture professor. She got a tick bite. She got Lyme disease. But it took doctors four years to get to that diagnosis.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, and even after she took a course of antibiotics for treatment, she told me she still didn't feel like herself at all.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
A component moving through the ground. I imagine she's talking about drumming here. Drum roll.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Wait, wait. Okay, I just have to say, I'm taking bachata dance classes right now, and I am so intrigued by how few men have rhythms. So I'm very curious how this drumming works. These crabs have a rhythm. All right, what are the four stages of this courtship dance?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
That's amazing. I mean, a guy who can dance and has rhythm definitely is sexy. So I would be drawn to this drumming crab.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Hard transition. We're going from seismic vibrations during crab courtship to growing chicken nuggets in a laboratory. Why are people trying to grow chicken nuggets at all?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Chicken muscle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love me some chicken muscle.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
I mean, I feel like I've heard stuff like this elsewhere. I assume there are other researchers trying to grow meat in labs. What makes these particular chicken nuggets so special?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Hello, hello. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Okay, tell me what I am learning about today.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
So from crab courtship to chicken muscle to drugs without the trip, such as LSD. I mean, why, Rachel, would I ever want to take a drug like LSD but not have the psychedelic effect? Like, what's the whole point?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Wait, so I don't get it. These researchers, they just like chop off the trippy part of the LSD molecule? Okay.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
OK, but what are the chances people would actually start taking these drugs anytime soon?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
We love a Rachel reported series, don't we? Thanks, Elsa. It's so fun having you here.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
The crabs are cheering you on. Oh, I love it. Maybe they'll dance with me and have more rhythm than the guys in my class. Let's hope so. We can only hope.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
All right, guys, to start us off, tell me all about these fiddler crabs that apparently do not fiddle.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Well, Tom Plummer is a paleoanthropologist at Queens College in New York and wasn't involved in this research. But he says the paper suggests early humans were using mental imaging to make these tools, which means like maybe they had an image in their heads of something and then use their hands to replicate images. They're just like us, just puzzling along.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Hey, Shortwavers, Rachel Carlson here and Emily Kwong with our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have Ari Shapiro.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
But Ignacio also noted the paper opens even more questions than it solves. So he wants to know, could they find even older bones? And why was there a million year gap between these and the previously found bone tools? So there's still a lot of questions about some of our early ancestors.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
So there's two parts. There's a small sensor patch that researchers dipped into store-bought lemonade. That patch is attuned to recognize molecules like glucose and glutamate. chemicals that represent the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Data from Lemonade in California was sent hundreds of miles away to Jinghua's lab in Ohio.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
But Nimesha finds eTaste super interesting and is really curious about scalability. Will we see VR dining one day? Could there be medical applications? Maybe a version of eTaste could help doctors diagnose the loss of taste from long COVID or traumatic brain injury.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
No. The woolly devil is a new flower to science found recently in the desert landscape of Big Bend National Park in Texas. It's called the woolly devil because it's covered in this whitish fuzzy fur with a hint of yellow in the middle. Some are no bigger than half an inch in size.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
And these little plants were camouflaged in the rocks, which probably explains why they haven't been documented before.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Well, they thought it was a sunflower. And Ari, I want you to picture a sunflower in your mind's eye. It looks like a single flower to most of us, but it's actually a flower head made up of lots of tiny flowers. And then it all comes together to look like one big flower.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Wild. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Yes, they are. But Ari, these flowers have only been found in a few places in Big Bend. which has had a drought in recent years. So the researchers say even though sunflowers are known to be resilient in lots of different kinds of climates, this new genus of plant could have a rough road ahead.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Thanks, Ari. You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Mallory Yu and Rebecca Ramirez. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.
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Stone Age To Bone Age?
Let's do it. So archaeologists know early humans used stone to make tools that usually meant knocking rocks against one another to get like sharp flakes for cutting animal carcasses or plants. And the Acheulean period, about one and a half million years ago, way before Homo sapiens showed up, was known for stone hand axes. They're sort of oval or teardrop-shaped rocks with sharp points.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
And after marathons, they saw that myelin decreased in the runners' brains, especially in the areas of the brain that are important for things like motor coordination, like how we move our bodies, and sensory processing. So after a marathon, there's less myelin. Is that a bad thing?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Rachel Carlson. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring Juana Summers of All Things Considered.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
But there are some neurological diseases where myelin decreases and doesn't return to normal. Carlos thinks studying runners could help us better understand these disorders, like multiple sclerosis.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Another neuroscientist in the field, Yannick Poitelot, Told us the kind of scans the researchers took makes it hard to say, like, for sure that running caused the change in myelin. But he says that this study was really exciting. It's one of the first to show that human myelin could be used as an energy source. And he thinks it could inspire lots of new work in the field.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, it was miso. Okay, the paste created from like fermented soybeans or grains. It's used a lot in Japanese cooking. And part of the study is in service of astronaut nutrition. Like how do we make their diets more delicious, more nutritious, more diverse?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
So how did this miso make its way into space? Well, Juana, it almost didn't. I spoke to Maggie Koblenz and Josh Evans, who published their study in the journal Ice Science this week. And Josh reminded me that, like most fermented things, have a really strong smell. And this fact almost stopped them from getting the experiment into space.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, it did. When it came back to Earth, it tasted nuttier than the miso from the same batch fermented on the ground. Interesting. Why do they think that happened? So they don't know for sure. It could have been like radiation. It could be microgravity. It could be a combination of all of this. But the leading hypothesis is that it was mostly temperature swings inside the space station.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yep. Plus, we're talking about fermenting food in space and what it does to its taste.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah. So this was a big mystery that perplexed researchers for a while. Like basically bats emerge from their caves like around dusk all at once. There can be hundreds, thousands or even millions of bats in a group all funneling out together. And for the most part, they don't crash into each other.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, lead researcher Aya Goldstein said one big innovation was tiny microphones.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
ISS scientists used to put microphones in front of the caves to measure the sounds of bats emerging, or they would have like a few bats in captivity. But none of this really got to an individual bat's perspective while in a densely packed group.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
So they found that when the bats were like very densely packed, their calls were shorter, higher pitched, lower in volume and more frequent. And all of this essentially allows a bat to hear its own call echoed back instead of disappearing in like the ruckus of other bat sounds.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Bat behavioral ecologist Rachel Page at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who wasn't involved in this work, said that this was a major advance in the field.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
I'm intrigued, y'all. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Could Running Change Your Brain?
Thanks for joining us, Juana. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for letting me come back. You can hear more of Juana Summers on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Mia Venkat. It was edited by Jeff Brumphill and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee and Jimmy Keeley were the audio engineers.
Short Wave
Could Running Change Your Brain?
I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
I wanted to know, what does science have to say about how to manage conflict well, political or otherwise?
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
And that's how I ended up talking to two people who've been disagreeing with each other for almost 45 years. Jeannie Safer is a psychoanalyst, she's liberal, and she's married to Richard Bruckheiser, a conservative Republican who works for the National Review.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
It's the Renaissance music. Absolutely. And they told me they sang with this group for like six hours every single week. So they were spending so much time together. They eventually got married. And when they first got married, they talked through and ultimately disagreed on a lot of things. They said there have only been a few times where they voted for the same people.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
And over time, they've set some boundaries with each other.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
This was so striking to me, Emily. Like, they're really reflective about each other's opinions and about each other as people in general.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
But we also were able to join each other's worlds. And this joining of worlds was proof that these kinds of conversations can happen. Yeah. Jeannie and Richard have been married for a really long time, and they have so much mutual respect for one another. That's a really key baseline component of these conversations, and it's not a given for everyone you meet. Absolutely.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
It's not easy, but we're going to try to work through it. So today on the show, the neuroscience of disagreement. When we have the opportunity to engage with someone who thinks differently than we do, what's going on in our brains, and how can we make the most of those conversations?
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Okay, Emily, imagine that you and I are about to have a disagreement. So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
That's Rudy Mendoza-Denton. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Rudy co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences. He says we might not even notice these things while they're happening to us. But on top of all of them, we start making these split-second decisions about whether or not we trust someone just by looking at their faces.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Who's that? That's Aurielle Feldman-Hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University. And she says when we interact with someone we've decided is untrustworthy, or even someone who just belongs to another group than us, our amygdala starts to respond. Yeah, our amygdala. That is like our brain's threat detector. It's like a smoke alarm.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that. So I called up the lead researcher Joy Hirsch to talk about it. She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine. And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other. Which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at a time. Right. You're just like slid under an MRI machine. Exactly. And in this case, people wore these things that looked like swim caps on their head and they have these little thingies all around the caps. Little thingies. What's that for? It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
She told me they're technically called optodes. So some of these are like little lasers that emit light into the brain and then some detect that light. So researchers like Joy can then use these measurements to look at neural activity.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner. Yeah. They surveyed a bunch of people on Yale's campus and the New Haven area on statements that people tend to have strong opinions about. Like, for example, marijuana should be legalized or same-sex marriage is a civil right. And then they specifically paired people up so the partners were strangers. They didn't know each other before.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
And also so that they agreed with their partner on two topics and disagreed on two other topics.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
What did she find? During agreement, Joy says they saw activity related to the visual system and also in the social areas of the brain. But Emily, it wasn't just activity in these places. These areas were also more synchronous when people agreed on the topic.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
What does that mean? So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Versus when participants disagreed with each other. In those cases, people's brain activity wasn't as synced up. It was kind of like a cacophony instead of a harmonious duet. And as they disagreed, Joy says it seemed like each brain was engaging a lot more emotional and cognitive resources.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
So Joy is hypothesizing that disagreement might be really taxing on us. Like you're expending more energy when you disagree with someone than when you agree with them. Okay.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
First, kind of like we said before, we decide if we want to have a conversation with someone and also if that person is going to be receptive. You can always walk away.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
So that's kind of like step zero. Decide, do I want to have a conversation with this person? Yeah. But if we do decide to engage with that person, the first step in a potential disagreement is simple. Focus on your breathing.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Allison co-teaches that Bridging Differences class with Rudy I mentioned earlier. She told me that this moment, slowing down, breathing, can help us move into step two, which is coming back to our goals for the conversation. Right, like she described it as an intention? Yeah, why we're having it, what we're looking to get out of it.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Because research shows it's not super easy to change someone's mind. And it can be pretty ineffective to spout facts at someone to try to do this. Yeah. But Allison and Rudy both told me we can find more common ground with someone... when we try to understand their perspective instead of trying to convince them that they're wrong.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
And it kind of seems like they have the right idea, at least from a scientific perspective. Research shows that people who engage in dialogues or conversations to learn rather than to win come away from those conversations with a more open perspective.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Yeah, that's a great question, Emily. And it's our third step, empathy. So that includes asking the person you're talking to questions about themselves, trying to humanize them to learn more than just their opinion on whatever topic it is that's bringing up these feelings.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Totally. No, I think so, too. I mean, it's a whole other rabbit hole. But it is kind of like how Jeannie and Richard met in their singing group. Like, they got to know each other's hobbies. They learned about their families, their careers. And knowing these details about a person can help us be more open to them.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
That's Juliana Tafour, the director of the Bridging Differences program at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. That's where Rudy and Allison teach their class.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
And these tactics can help us be more charitable towards others, like by looking at the strongest parts of their arguments instead of the weakest, and more humble, just understanding where we might need more information or circumstances where our own beliefs might be limited.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Yeah, like I know I don't know everything. And even the things that I think I know well, like there's always more to learn. So it's not really that any one of these things or even all of them together is a magic wand that's suddenly going to help us all agree. Yeah. And that doesn't seem like the goal. No.
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The Science of Disagreeing Well
Like for Jeannie and Richard, they both told me neither of them have really changed any of their opinions in the last 44 years of marriage. But it was clear to me just by talking to them, they really admire each other. They respect each other's beliefs. And I think what's most important here is they try to understand why they each hold the opinions they do.