Memories are fickle. They’re so important, but so ineffable.. So how do we make memories? And what types of memory are there? We’re finding out what actually happens when we upload something to our squishy storage system, and if there are any ways to hack our memories to be better. We might even be close to implanting new memories, or editing out old ones.
Memories are fickle. They’re so important, but so ineffable.. So how do we make memories? And what types of memory are there? We’re finding out what actually happens when we upload something to our squishy storage system, and if there are any ways to hack our memories to be better. We might even be close to implanting new memories, or editing out old ones.
Follow the show:
[music]
Dr. Gustavo Turecki [preview]:
It is squishy. It’s light. So it’s not spaghetti-like.
[music]
Dr. Sanjay Kalra [preview]:
White matter, it contains the wires that connect different parts of the brain, within itself and then also down to the spinal cord.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn [preview]:
The hippocampus is apparently supposed to look like a seahorse. When you roll it up, it looks sort of like a jelly roll or something.
[music]
[pitter-patter sound]
Katie Jensen:
This is Playing With Marbles. I’m Katie Jensen.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
Right now, the sound of my voice is travelling down your ear canal and battering against your eardrums.
[music: drums and cymbals]
Katie Jensen:
Those tiny drums are beating against a series of tiny bones—the body’s version of an amplifier
[music: louder drums and cymbals]
Katie Jensen:
They’re magnifying those vibrations before they ripple across the liquid in your snail-shaped cochlea.
[rippling sound effect]
Katie Jensen:
Inside that shivering ear goop are bunches of hair cells, riding those waves to generate electrical signals. Signals that travel down the auditory nerve, your very own aux cable.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
At the end of that cable is a big, squishy, pinkish-grey walnut: the brain.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
There are over seven trillion nerves in our body, our very own fleshy internet, buzzing with electrical impulses going to and from our brain. But they’re all useless without that melon-sized lump of grey matter to process those signals.
I’m the proud owner of one of those lumpy walnuts. And of all the various bits of me, the brain is the one I find the hardest to understand. Maybe it’s because I have to use my brain to understand my brain. Now I’m thinking about my brain thinking about my brain, thinking about my brain thinking about my….
Engineer:
Back in the room, Katie!
Katie Jensen:
Back in the room! Hi, I’m Katie Jensen. And my brain doesn’t really work how it’s supposed to work. I have OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s a form of neurodivergence, meaning my brain doesn’t act like a typical brain.
But I’m not so sure there is such a thing as “neurotypical.” There’s still so much to learn about how we all process and store information.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
Canada is a great place for me to do this investigation. This country is behind some groundbreaking research.
In Montreal, for example, we have a whole building full of brains.
Dr. Gustavo Turecki:
What you hear when you get in, it’s noise from the freezers [humming sound] that make a lot of noise because have like dozens of freezers. And then that’s where all the frozen tissue, it’s stored. [footsteps] On your right, you would have the room where do dissections.
Katie Jensen:
And scientists who watch TV with monkeys at Western University.
[animal sounds]
Dr. Ravi Menon:
You can show them a movie. You can show a human the exact same movie. And then you can look for the commonalities between the brains in the marmoset and the human. And there are plenty.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
As well as tons more stuff that isn’t quite as weird but is definitely super-important. Like figuring out how to do science together better.
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
We’re spread over 5,000 kilometres. So we’ve had to learn to collaborate.
Katie Jensen:
So, with the help of some friends at Brain Canada, I’m going to pick the brains of a few very smart people who can tell me how this mysterious organ works. Their job is to enable researchers like Dr. Sheena Josselyn.
[sound of a marble rolling]
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
The fundamental goal of having a brain is it allows us to learn from past experience, to guide our next step. You know?
I know that you know you shouldn’t do this because something really bad will happen. And I know that the last time I did this something really good happens. And that allows me to direct my next step.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
Dr. Josseyn is a professor of psychology and physiology at the Hospital For Sick Children and the University of Toronto. And as well as being fun to chat to, she studies how we make memories. I figured if I’m going to learn a bunch of stuff about brains, she can help me remember all that stuff.
So I’m going to ask a question. And as you listen to her answer, you can think about how your brain is doing all these things right now, committing this information to a tiny little corner of your memory. That question is: How does our brain actually form a memory?
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So that’s a really important question. I think it’s important on so many different levels, not only to understand, you know, this amazing, you know, two-pound-or-whatever organ in our brain—which is arguably the most complex thing in the universe—and also because it’s we can’t possibly try and treat a memory disorder unless we know how memories are normally formed and stored in the brain.
[music]
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So how is a memory formed? That’s a really good question. And my lab and a bunch of other labs have been doing some really, I think, interesting work trying to get to the answer to that question. We haven’t figured it out exactly, yet. But we are making some major strides.
So, we know that not all brain cells are important in encoding or forming any one particular memory. We know that only a small subset are. Which is really important. That means that our brains can store millions and millions of memories by having unique subsets of brain cells important in encoding each one.
And what happens is that when an important event happens…. And I’m talking mostly about episodic memory—so the memory of an episode rather than the how-to-ride-a-bike memory which is a different kind of memory. But sort of the memory of what happened, you know, last Tuesday when this person cut you off when you were, you know, driving down the street. And you have a very vivid memory of that, for whatever reason. What happens is that there are certain number of brain cells that happen to be more excitable than other brain cells at the time. And these cells seem to be really important in encoding that memory.
So when I’m relating the story of this person who cut me off—this really, really horrible driver—when I’m telling, you know, my friends about this, what happens in my brain is that these same cells become active when I’m relaying the details of this, you know, person’s crummy driving. And these same cells are always going to be holding this type of memory for me.
Katie Jensen:
So episodic memory is how we store stuff that’s happened. And that’s stored in cells distributed around the brain. And it’s different from general knowledge like remembering that you shouldn’t touch a hot stove; that kind of memory is stored in the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain, which gives it that walnut-y look.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
So we can think of our brain as this huge library full of all of our memories stored in different areas. But what does every library need? It needs a librarian. And it needs an index.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So those are my two favourite brain regions. And I really think that everybody needs to have a favourite brain region.
The hippocampus is apparently supposed to look like a seahorse. When you roll it up, it looks sort of like a jelly roll or something.
People have been studying that for a long, long time. And there’s been some, you know, huge insights made into the role of the hippocampus and memory by our own Brenda Milner. You know, Canadian Brenda Milner, over 100 years old and still rockin’ it in science.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
For five decades, Brenda Milner studied one of the most famous patients in neuroscience ever: Henry Molaison.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
In the 1950s, Henry had debilitating epilepsy and volunteered for an experimental treatment. He had his hippocampus removed.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
Now the treatment was a success. He lived for 55 years without any more seizures. But it had a very big, unintended side effect. Henry couldn’t store new episodic memories. Without his hippocampus, he could only remember things that had happened to him before the surgery.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
That’s how we know the hippocampus is what processes new information and turns it into memories. It’s our library’s index.
So we’ve got all this information stored but we need someone to tell us what’s important. A librarian. And our brain’s librarian is a fiery little character: the amygdala.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So that’s, ah, meant to look like an almond. Which apparently “amygdala” is Latin for “almond.” And the amygdala is really important mostly in emotionally charged memories. So not just everyday memories but memories that have like a biological significance. You know, events that make you angry, events that make you happy—those sort of emotionally charged memories.
Katie Jensen:
We tend to be better at remembering stuff that has emotions attached to it by our angry, little, almond-shaped librarian. She’s in there recommending memories to make you joyful, memories to make you sad, memories to make you laugh.
The amygdala works with the hippocampus so we can actually filter and use our vast trove of memories.
Unlike most librarians, though, the amygdala and hippocampus are open to some gentle coercion.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
Our memories are not like this perfect snapshot of what happened. So I can colour my memory. I forget to tell people that it was me that changed lanes badly, not this other driver. I forget all these different things in a memory, so it’s not a perfect recollection of exactly what went down.
Katie Jensen:
Because of Henry and Brenda, we also know that motor memory—things like playing an instrument or dancing—is different to episodic memory. These memories are controlled by the basal ganglia, deep within the brain, and the cerebellum, which is the bit at the bottom at the back end of the brain.
[piano music]
Katie Jensen:
Motor memory is really interesting too, though. And that’s what Dr. Julien Doyon and his team at the Brain Imaging Centre in Montreal are studying.
Dr. Julien Doyon:
When you start playing the piano or you start playing the guitar, obviously at the beginning one needs to think about the position of the fingers, but with time it becomes implicit. You don’t need to think about it; you just do it. Right?
And so that’s what is called “procedural memory.”
[piano music]
Katie Jensen:
Right. So what I’m thinking of as motor memory is called “procedural memory.” It’s the memory of procedures that we repeat so much that our knowledge of them becomes subconscious.
[piano music]
Dr. Julien Doyon:
It’s different from the declarative memory that we know where facts and events can be forgotten and learned, but also can be forgotten. With procedural memory the memory is more long-lasting.
Katie Jensen:
So declarative memory is stuff I forget easily—like the capital of Belgium. Whereas procedural memory is… well, it’s like riding a bike.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
If you’re feeling like that’s a lot to remember, I am too. I’m going to need some help. Surely there’s a way to hack my memory and supercharge my hippocampus?
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
The best thing is to (a) don’t multitask. Multitasking is the enemy of memory. If you’re 20 things at once, it’s no wonder you can’t remember where you left your keys. Your attention is divided and you just don’t encode things very well.
Katie Jensen:
Well, that’s kind of boring.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
Number two: get a lot of sleep. Don’t get stressed out. Eat healthy. Exercise. Do all those, you know, really, really boring things.
Katie Jensen:
Okay. Stick with me, though, because there’s also this cool phenomenon called “state-dependent memory,” where you remember something best if you’re in the same situation, or state, as when you learn it.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So as a professor, I tell my students, “If you are going to study while having a drink of alcohol, you better be taking the test while you’re having a drink of alcohol.” Because you always want to be in the same brain state.
Katie Jensen:
I would totally drink with Dr. Josselyn but she is joking—I think.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
That’s a joke. Because I’d never want (laughing) anyone to do that. But you should be in the same brain state as when the memory was formed. And that makes it easier to recall.
So it’s, ah, often said that people that are sad and depressed tend to remember sad and depressing memories. And it’s like a vicious circle. And that’s true. When you’re very sad and depressed, you tend to think of very sad and depressing memories. And when you’re happy, you tend to think of pretty happy memories.
It could be a very vicious circle. But it’s all due to biology. It’s all because we can remember things better when our brain state is in the… the state it was when we were encoding something.
Katie Jensen:
And if you’re looking to learn something that makes use of your motor functions, Dr. Julien Doyon has been doing some research into procedural memories that might help us do some brain hacking.
Dr. Julien Doyon:
It seems like sleep is critical for the consolidation of this form of memory.
[lullaby music]
Dr. Julien Doyon:
But it’s not all phases of sleep. What we found is that during the night we go to different stages of sleep. Right? From stage one, two, and three, and REM. We repeat those phases during the night. And so a whole cycle of sleep will take about, on average, about 90 minutes. And so you have first the stage one, stage two and three where it is more profound, and then REM sleep. And then it starts again.
Katie Jensen:
And there’s one sleep stage that is crucial to consolidating procedural memories.
Dr. Julien Doyon:
We find that it’s mainly in stage two that you can see that there is reactivation of the memory trays during the night that will then allow a better performance the next day, better consolidation of the memory.
Katie Jensen:
And because we know that memories are being consolidated in this second stage of sleep, we can try out some new ways to make those motor skills stick even more.
Dr. Julien Doyon: Katie Jensen:
We’ve done a study, for example, when we then present an olfactory stimulus, the odour of a rose.
Katie Jensen:
So basically, Dr. Doyon figured out that if you smell something while you learn a procedural memory—for example, sniffing roses while you learn to play the piano—and then you also smelled roses while you sleep, then your brain will consolidate those memories better, and you’ll learn faster.
So don’t wake up before you smell the roses.
[lullaby music]
Katie Jensen:
There’s still so much for us to learn about memory, though. And luckily, we have a few of our very own human hippocampi, like Dr. Sheena Josselyn, who are hard at work processing new information, about brains, to store in our collective memory.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
I really love my research. I find that it’s really fascinating trying to understand how the brain learns and remembers things. To me it’s like this real fundamental question. It’s like this huge mystery. And I’m a… I’m a fan of big puzzles. And this is like the biggest puzzle ever.
I’m really excited about learning exactly which brain cells can hold different sorts of memories. I think that that is really, ah, a cool thing.
So these theories have been around. I mean, Aristotle and way back thought that the brain was really important in encoding memories. But it’s only until, you know, really recently that we got these tools that allowed us to manipulate individual brain cells.
So we can use this thing called “optogenetics.”
[high-pitched music]
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
The cells of your body, if you modify them genetically, you will start producing these new proteins. And they are amazing proteins because they respond to light. And hence people have, you know, coined this term “optogenetics.”
Katie Jensen:
That’s Dr. Yves de Koninck. He’s director of the CERVO Brain Research Centre at Université Laval, and a professor of psychiatry. He studies the brain’s wiring: the neurons. Brace yourselves for a literal lightbulb moment.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
Dr. de Koninck alters the DNA of brain cells so that they respond to light.
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
So basically, by shining different wavelengths of light—so a blue light or a red light, they’re different wavelengths—we can shine light inside the brain of rodents. And we can turn different cells on and off. So we can make a rodent recall a memory falsely or have this memory apparently disappear.
[music]
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
And it’s at the will of the experiment. And you turn this light on, you get the memory. You turn this light on, you don’t get the memory. It’s like, you know, science fiction type things.
Katie Jensen:
And that’s what optogenetics is. It’s a way of figuring out which wires are connected to what. And it’s more precise than what we had to work with before.
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
Imagine yourself as someone who is trying to debug a computer component, a circuit, a computer circuit. You have it in front of you; you’re an engineer; and you say, “Okay, I need to understand how it’s working well.” What you do is you try to measure electrical activity in different places. And you go in and you try to stimulate this, activate this part of the circuit and see how the other parts of the circuit are functioning.
Well, we’re trying to do the same with the brain. And people have been doing this for a long time, using electrodes. So you can insert a little wire, or a little piece of glass that has a liquid inside, so that you can pass current. You can insert that in different brain areas and you can stimulate. But when you insert a wire in the brain and you stimulate, the big problem is that you’re stimulating everything. So it’s a bit of a crude approach.
[organ music]
Katie Jensen:
So it’s less invasive than how we used to figure this stuff out, but the mice still need to have a piece of fibre-optic cable implanted in their heads. It’s probably important for me to say that Canada has super-strict regulations around animal testing that the experiments have to adhere to. But the technology right now is still an invasive procedure. Not quite as invasive as running an electric current through a wire plugged directly into a brain.
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
But now we can do it in a much, much more gentle way with light. And we can do it in a genetically specific way. That means only certain parts of your circuit will produce those ion channels, so that when you flash lights only those parts of the circuit will be activated.
Katie Jensen:
So how do we actually alter the DNA of brain cells?
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
We actually go and use viruses.
Katie Jensen:
Viruses?! Uh-oh.
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
Of course, people hear “viruses,” uh-oh those are dangerous and so on, they’re infectious and so on. There are virus, or viral vectors, that are unable to reproduce themselves. So they can’t be infectious. They won’t generate a disease.
But what a virus is, is nature’s exquisite tool to actually inject the DNA or RNA inside cells. That’s what they do for a living. You know, when you get infection, the virus goes onto the surface of the cell, gets into the cells. Or there is a hole punched. And you know, if you can imagine that. The DNA is injected. Then that DNA is being reproduced, produces a lot more viruses. And it goes on, the cell explodes.
Ours don’t do that. They don’t reproduce. They just inject the DNA and then it stays there.
Katie Jensen:
So where do we get this DNA? We go fishing.
[the sound of casting a fishing line that lands in water]
[music]
Dr. Yves de Koninck:
It’s literally nature that has given it to us. Because it’s been discovered in nature is there are molecules, proteins, that are produced by cells that respond to light. They respond to light by being fluorescent. So actually the jellyfish, if you look at them in the dark and you flash a light, the blue light, you will actually see them glowing as green. And they produce these proteins that are fluorescent. And there are scientists, about 25 years ago, that said, “Hey, why don’t we use this property of these cells that are fluorescent and we take out the gene and, you know, we put it into a cell that we are interested in, and it will produce that protein now.”
Katie Jensen:
So to summarize. We take proteins from jellyfish, that respond to light. Then we use a hacked virus to inject them into a mouse’s brain cells. Then we shine coloured lights on different parts of the mouse’s brain to see what happens. I mean, there’s definitely more to it than that but those are the Coles Notes. It’s all very cool and sci-fi sounding but what’s the point?
[music]
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
I’m often asked that question. And it’s usually preceded by, you know, “The studies that you do are, you know, really interesting but how is this going to help my uncle who has Alzheimer’s or my aunt who has Parkinson’s Disease? And we really need better, you know, therapies right now. And how is what you’re doing going to benefit them?”
And [what] I like to say is, “Well, it probably won’t benefit them right now. I’m not going to spin this. It’s entirely true that, you know, as of this week, as of next week, what I do is probably not going to benefit your aunt or your uncle. But without the sort of things that I do, new treatments will never be developed. Yes, it is slow to go from fundamental research up to treatments, and even prevention. But without doing this fundamental research, we will never be able to have treatments, much less prevention strategies. It’s only by understanding how the brain works that we can ever hope to come up with treatments. Otherwise we’re just sort of shooting blindly. And you don’t want somebody shooting blindly at your uncle or your aunt. You really want knowledge to be guiding things. You don’t want, you know, these things that haven’t been tried, that haven’t been tested, to be tested out on them.”
So it’s really important that we understand that this fundamental work that we and other labs do isn’t going to pay off right away. And without doing this very, very fundamental, very, very basic research, we wouldn’t have any insights into how to treat people at all.
Katie Jensen:
How many years do you think we are away—and maybe this is easier to speculate in decades but—in terms of implanting memories or wiping memories? Like are we 30 years away from this, 50 years away from this, or 5 years away from this?
Dr. Sheena Josselyn:
Yeah, that’s a really, ah, interesting question. I’m going to say we’re about 10 years away from this. I think the technology is getting better. I mean, it’s right now very invasive. And I think that along with sort of developing the technology, we also need to develop the ethics of this.
I don’t want our… our results to be turned into sort of like a ‘cosmetic surgery for your memory.’ “Have a bad date, we’ll get rid of that! Don’t worry. Call us at…!” We don’t want that.
We think it’s really important that we think about the… the sort of ethical implications of all of our research. And we think that this type of, you know, getting rid of a memory or dampening down a memory might be super-important in the case of PTSD—where people are traumatized, where these memories interfere with their functioning. But we don’t want to have people only have really happy, lovely memories and get rid of everything else. We would never learn from our experience (laughs a little). We would keep, you know, doing the same mistake over and over again.
And ah, I think it’s really important that we remember both the good things and the bad things. And that’s a part of life, and that’s a part of living.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
So that’s one very futuristic way of messing around with your brain. But as Dr. Josselyn said, it’s still pretty invasive. And we have people with conditions that need treatment right now. So if we can avoid sticking stuff into a living brain, we probably should.
One thing we do have some emerging non-invasive treatments for is stroke.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
A stroke basically is caused by an occlusion by a blockage of a blood vessel that supplies the brain.
[heartbeat sound]
Katie Jensen:
Dr. Alexander Thiel is the director of the Comprehensive Stroke Centre in Montreal. If you had a stroke, he would be the guy you’d want to lead your treatment.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
And as a consequence of this blockage of this blood vessel by a blood clot, the brain tissue dies and it’s gone irrevocably.
Katie Jensen:
And if we lose a part of the brain, we can lose the functions that part of the brain controls.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
Depending on which area of the brain is affected by the blockage, you will have different deficits. For example, in most right-handed, ah, individuals, the language function is mainly lateralized to the left side of the brain. So if you have, let’s say, a left-side artery blockage then it’s more likely that you’re going to be aphasic—that you are either unable to express written or spoken language or to understand it. So you could still be able to speak but you would have difficulties to understand what other people would say.
Katie Jensen:
So if that part of the brain is gone, that sounds pretty bleak. But there’s something really amazing about brains.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
They’re malleable.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
If part of a brain stops working, another part of that brain can pick up the slack. It’s not always immediate but our squishy walnut lump does its best to work with what’s left, rewiring and reshaping the neural pathways to make up for injuries. This is called “neuroplasticity” and it’s what Dr. Thiel spends a lot of his time researching.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
So for example, if you compromise a certain region in the brain, but not completely, then suddenly the remaining neurons fire more to make up for the number of the lost neurons. This would be compensatory hyperactivity. That would be one tool.
Another tool would be that, ah, the dendrites of the neurons spread out and they make new connections, which they didn’t have before, in order to reroute information around the compromised brain area.
Katie Jensen:
The brain is okay at this. It does its best. But it won’t make up for really big losses. In fact, strokes are the leading cause of disability in Canada. And that’s something Dr. Thiel and his team and trying to improve.
They study ways to stimulate the brain and help it out with that rehabilitation process. They’re working on a pioneering treatment called “TMS,” transcranial magnetic stimulation. As the name suggests, TMS uses magnets to stimulate the brain. And unlike optogenetics, there’s no need to get inside your skull.
We’re still not sure why it worked for this, but TMS has already been used to treat symptoms of depression.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
So, before the patient comes into our TMS lab, they first go to an MRI scanner to get their brain scanned. And then we take this MRI—this picture of the brain—and we put into the navigation system that tells us where to stimulate.
So then the patient is, ah, sits down in the chair, similar to a dentist’s chair—you have to…
Katie Jensen:
(laughs a little)
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
Like this. Then we attach certain markers, ah, with a sticking tape on their forehead. And we have an infrared camera. And then we tell the infrared camera where the patient’s head is positioned in the room. And then we tell the system which points of the patient’s head correspond to which points of the MRI that we’ve done before.
And then as we move around the patient’s head, we can exactly see over which brain region we are. And once we’ve localized this, we can then bring the coil—the magnetic coil—into place over that area and then start the stimulation session.
Katie Jensen:
How long do they typically last?
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
The therapeutic stimulation is about 20 to 30 minutes. It takes a little bit, about… so 10 to 20 minutes preparation, because the intensity is always individualized to the patient. So we need to determine what we called “motor threshold”—so how much intensity do we need, for example, to see the hand moving when we give a pulse. That’s the motor threshold. And then we take a certain percentage of the motor threshold, with which we tend stimulate the target area. So this is a little preparatory thing that takes about 10 to 15 minutes. And then we do the stimulation itself.
And then immediately after the stimulation, the… the patient is handed over to the therapist to get the speech and language therapy, or physiotherapy, or whatever we are planning to do.
Katie Jensen:
Do patients report feeling anything as the magnet polarity is running through their skulls?
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
So of course, when we determine this motor threshold they feel the contractions in the fingers when we get to the hotspot that we are looking for. Otherwise, when we do the stimulation itself, what they may feel these are contractions of the scalp muscles because of course they are also stimulated.
Katie Jensen:
(laughs a little)
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
So they may feel a muscle twitching or something like that. Some people feel a little bit of like a tension headache after that, a little bit of, you know, muscular pain but which usually, ah, goes away on its own.
Katie Jensen:
Dr. Thiel is working on bringing TMS into mainstream use. For now, it’s still kind of experimental for stroke treatment. But it looks like doing it repeatedly could help the brain recover.
And that’s the thing. We know lots of stuff about the brain but we don’t know enough. Scientists are trying to solve those mysteries. But the way science works hasn’t always been the best at getting important stuff done.
Dr. Alexander Thiel:
It’s a very competitive process. You only give money to the best. And we’ve been really rewarding flashy discovery research. But there is a big layer of science that needs to build also the tools that the community is going to use, the database of information that the broad community is going to be using. There is this layer of activity that’s less glamorous, I would say, but that’s as important for the community for science to progress.
Katie Jensen:
And that’s where Brain Canada comes in.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
All the researchers we’ve talked to, and will talk to in this show, have received funding from Brain Canada for their work. Part of that comes from the government but lots of it comes from wonderful people like you who contribute by donating. That money is so important. Without it, a lot of this research might not happen. But it’s also so important that researchers use that money smartly. Things like MRI scanners are really expensive to run, which makes data expensive to gather.
Brain Canada has an answer to that: open science. It’s a transparent collaborative way of working. A whole school of scientific thought but you can boil it down to sharing your work with anyone who wants it, for free.
[music]
Katie Jensen:
The president and CEO of Brain Canada is Dr. Viviane Poupon, one of the movement’s biggest proponents.
[music]
Dr. Viviane Poupon:
There is a dire need for new treatments to treat brain illnesses. It’s a real race against time. And there was a lot of frustration from our clinicians and our researchers not to have a solution to offer to the patients that were coming through our doors every day.
Katie Jensen:
She used to be part of the team running the Montreal Neurological Institute Hospital, a.k.a. The Neuro, where she successfully pushed to make the organization the first-ever academic institute to adopt open science.
Dr. Viviane Poupon:
The… the complexity of the brain, it’s so complex.
Katie Jensen:
Yeah.
Dr. Viviane Poupon:
That it’s not one person who can solve that mystery, who can find the discovery that will really, ah, lead to a breakthrough. And so, open science becomes the prerequisite to understand it. Because you need to gather forces, you need to share data, you need to share tools to work together.
Katie Jensen:
This way of working has its roots back as far as the beginning of medical journals in the 18th century. But only recently, with a nudge from Dr. Poupon and others, have scientists begun to truly embrace just putting their work out there, for free, even when their work flops.
Dr. Viviane Poupon:
I think one important aspect of open science is actually how to share your failures. Data by itself, it’s something you tried. You know, you had an hypothesis and it generated data that you make available. Your hypothesis might actually have been wrong; your data is still there. It’s still relevant and can still be used by someone else to actually ask another question. And so you already saved some money there, because you’re only generating the data once and not twice or even ten times or hundreds of times, which is what’s actually happening. And so that is, I think, one very positive thing.
The other is that you can actually share your data and say, have a way to openly say, which is also something you… you want to do under open science principle, “I tried this hypothesis. I tried this experiment and it did not work.” You saved time and money to all the other scientists who would have been interested to ask the exact same question.
So I think in some specific fields, it’s a no-brainer.
Katie Jensen:
Pun intended?
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Katie Jensen:
Thanks so much for listening to the first-ever episode of Playing With Marbles. We’ve had so much fun making the show, and playing with our own marbles.
There’s loads more where this came from, so hit the “Follow” button to catch the next episode.
If you enjoyed Playing With Marbles, we would love it if you left us a rating or a little review. It helps other people find the show too, as does sharing the podcast with a friend.
We want everyone to know just how much cool brain research is being done here in Canada. So help us spread the word.
Playing With Marbles is a Vocal Fry Studios production, in partnership with Brain Canada. The executive producer is Jay Cockburn. Our associate producer is Max Collins. I’m Katie Jensen. Thanks for playing.
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