Today: the clocks in your body. We're talking again this week with Tony Wyss-Coray, the director of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience here at Wu Tsai Neuro. Last year, we spoke with Tony about the biological nature of the aging process. Scientists can now measure signs of aging in the blood, and can in some cases slow or reverse the aging process in the lab. We discussed how this biological age can be quite different from your chronological age, and why understanding why people age at d...
Mar 07, 2024•22 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Today on the show, a new understanding of Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders — right after Alzheimer's disease. It's familiar to many as a movement disorder: people with the disease develop difficulties with voluntary control of their bodies. But the real story is much more complicated. This week, we speak with Kathleen Poston, a Stanford neurologist who is at the forefront of efforts to redefine Parkinson's disease and related disorder...
Feb 29, 2024•24 min•Season 3Ep. 5
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we sit down with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo to explore the intersection of memory and navigation. This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items. This ancient...
Feb 22, 2024•25 min•Season 3Ep. 4
In this episode of "From Our Neurons to Yours," we're taking a deep dive into the neuroscience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the recent discovery that the anesthetic ketamine can give patients a week-long "vacation" from the disorder after just one dose. Join us as we chat with Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, a leading expert in the field, who led the first clinical trial of Ketamine for patients with OCD. She sheds light on what OCD truly is, breaking down the misconceptions and revealing t...
Feb 15, 2024•23 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Welcome to "From Our Neurons to Yours," from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Each week, we bring you to the frontiers of brain science — to meet the scientists unlocking the mysteries of the mind and building the tools that will let us communicate better with our brains. This week, we're tackling a BIG question in neuroscience: why do we do what we do? Specifically, we're talking about dopamine, and why the common understanding of this molecule as a "pleasure chemical...
Feb 08, 2024•23 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries. Join us as we talk with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological disorders and restore communication for those who have lost the ability t...
Feb 01, 2024•22 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Imagine an electrical storm in your brain, a power surge that passes through delicately wired neural circuits, making thousands of cells all activate at once. Depending on where it starts and where it travels in the brain, it could make your muscles seize up. It could create hallucinatory visions or imaginary sounds. It could evoke deep anxiety or a sense of holiness, or it could even make you lose consciousness. This kind of electrical storm is what we call a seizure. If your brain is prone to ...
Nov 30, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about the sound of rain — does that sound taste like chocolate? Or does the sound of a saxophone feel triangular to you? For about 3% of the population, the sharp lines between our senses blend together. Textures may have tastes, sounds, shapes, numbers may have colors. This sensory crosstalk is called synesthesia, and it's not a disorder, just a different way of experiencing the world. To learn about the neuroscience behind this fascinating phe...
Nov 16, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Welcome back, neuron lovers! In this week's episode of From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about the neuroscience of sleep. Why is slumber so important for our health that we spend a third of our lives unconscious? Why does it get harder to get a good night's sleep as we age? And could improving our beauty rest really be a key to rejuvenating our bodies and our minds? To learn more, I spoke with Luis de Lecea, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, who has been at the fore...
Nov 09, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Welcome back to "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. In this episode, we explore the collective intelligence of ant colonies with Deborah Gordon , a professor of biology at Stanford, an expert on ant behavior, and author of a new book, The Ecology of Collective Behavior . We discuss how ant colonies operate without centralized control, relying on simple local interactions, such as antennal contact, to coordinate their behavior. G...
Nov 02, 2023•18 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Welcome back to "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast where we criss-cross scientific disciplines to take you to the frontiers of brain science. This week, we explore the science of dizziness with Stanford Medicine neurologist Kristen Steenerson, MD , who treats patients experiencing vertigo and balance disorders. In our conversation, we'll see that dizziness is not a singular experience but rather a broad term encompassing a variety of different sensations of disorientation. We learn about the...
Oct 26, 2023•17 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Welcome back to our second season of "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast where we criss-cross scientific disciplines to take you to the cutting edge of brain science. In this episode, we explore how sound becomes information in the human brain, specifically focusing on how speech is transformed into meaning. Our guest this week is Neuro-linguist Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science based in the Stanford Department of Psychology . ...
Oct 19, 2023•22 min•Season 2Ep. 1
We all know exercise has all sorts of benefits beyond just making us stronger and fitter. It lowers and inflammation. It buffers stress and anxiety. It clarifies our thinking. In fact, regular exercise is one of the few things we know with reasonable confidence can help extend our healthy lifespan. But for all the evidence of the benefits of exercise, it's a bit surprising that we don't know more about how exercise does all these great things for our bodies and our brains. Today's guest, Jonatha...
Jun 22, 2023•22 min•Season 1Ep. 15
When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible. You may have heard of a concept called neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to change or rewire itself. This is of course central to learning and memory, but it's also important for understanding a surprisingly wide array of medical conditions, including th...
Jun 08, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technology that uses magnetic fields to stimulate or suppress electrical activity in brain circuits. It's part of a transformation in how psychiatrists are thinking about mental health disorders that today's guest calls psychiatry 3.0. Nolan Williams has recently pioneered a new form of TMS therapy that has just been approved by the FDA to treat patients with treatment-resistant depression. That actually describes a lot of people with serious depressi...
May 25, 2023•25 min•Season 1Ep. 13
One of the strangest and most disconcerting things about the COVID 19 pandemic has been the story of long COVID. Many COVID long-haulers have continued experiencing cognitive symptoms long after their initial COVID infection — loss of attention, concentration, memory, and mental sharpness — what scientists are calling "brain fog". For some patients, the condition is so serious that it can be impossible to go back to their pre-COVID lives. Today’s guest, actually had an early intuition that COVID...
May 11, 2023•20 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Nearly one in five Americans lives with a mental illness. Unfortunately there’s a limited set of options for treating psychiatric disorders. One reason for that is that these disorders are still defined based on people’s behavior or invisible internal states — things like depressed mood or hallucinations. But of course, all our thoughts and behaviors are governed by our brains. And there’s a lot of research that makes it clear that many disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, and probably de...
Apr 27, 2023•23 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Today we’re going to talk about frogs — and spiders — as parents. What today’s show is really about is “pair bonding” — that’s the scientific term for the collaborative bonds that form between two parents — as well as the bonds between parents and their offspring. It turns out that if you look across the animal kingdom, strong family bonds are way more widespread than you might imagine. Frogs have them. Spiders have them. Fish have them. We wanted to learn more about the neuroscience behind thes...
Apr 13, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Recently on the show, we had a conversation about the possibility of creating artificial vision with a bionic eye. Today we're going to talk about technology to enhance another sense, one that often goes underappreciated, our sense of touch. We humans actually have one of the most sensitive senses of touch on the planet. Just in the tip of your fingers, there are thousands of tiny sensors, which scientists call mechanoreceptors that sense texture, vibration, pressure, even pain. Our sense of tou...
Mar 30, 2023•20 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Hi listeners, we're shifting to a biweekly release schedule after this episode. See you in a couple weeks! --- Most of us probably know someone who developed Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia as they got older. But you probably also know someone who stayed sharp as a tack well into their 80s or 90s. Even if it’s a favorite TV actor, like Betty White. The fact that people age so differently makes you wonder: is there some switch that could be flipped in our biology to let us all liv...
Mar 16, 2023•17 min•Season 1Ep. 8
We take this for granted, but our eyes are amazing. They're incredible. We process the visual world so automatically and so instantaneously, we forget how much work our eyes and our brains are doing behind the scenes, taking in light through the eyeball, transforming light into electrical signals in the retina, packaging up all that information, and sending it on to the brain, and then making sense of what it is we're seeing and responding to it. In fact, new science is showing that the eye itse...
Mar 09, 2023•18 min•Season 1Ep. 7
We've probably all heard of circadian rhythms, the idea that our bodies have biological clocks that keep track of the daily cycle, sunrise to sunset. Maybe we've even heard that it's these biological rhythms that get thrown off when we travel across time zones or after daylight savings. So on one hand, it's cool that our body keeps track of what time it is, but today our question is just how important are our circadian rhythms to our health and wellbeing? Do we need to be paying attention to the...
Mar 02, 2023•16 min•Season 1Ep. 6
What makes addiction a disease? I think we all know at this point that addiction is another major epidemic that is sweeping our country and the world, but there are few topics that are more misunderstood than addiction. In fact, some people question whether addiction is even truly a disease. To delve into this question of why neuroscientists and health policy experts do think of addiction as a disease, I spoke to Keith Humphreys , the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral S...
Feb 23, 2023•10 min•Season 1Ep. 5
You may have heard the idea that the gut is the second brain, but what does that really mean? Maybe it has to do with the fact that there are something like 100 to 600 million neurons in your gut. That's a lot of neurons. That's about as many as you'd find in the brain of say, a fruit bat, or an ostrich, or a Yorkshire Terrier. And it turns out, this network of intestinal neurons, termed by scientists the "enteric nervous system," can actually have a lot of impact on our daily lives – not just i...
Feb 16, 2023•14 min•Season 1Ep. 4
What can octopus and squid brains teach us about intelligence? One of the incredible things about octopus's is that not only do they have an advanced intelligence that lets them camouflage themselves, use tools and manipulate their environments and act as really clever hunters in their ecosystems, they do this with a brain that evolved essentially from something like a slug in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago. Our brains share virtually nothing in common with theirs. The question for...
Feb 09, 2023•14 min•Season 1Ep. 3
If you've ever had a migraine, you know that the symptoms — splitting headache, nausea, sensitivity to light — mean you're going to want to spend some time in bed, in a dark room. Migraines are flat out debilitating, and the statistics back this up. Migraines are the third most common neurological disorder. They affect as many as a billion people around the world, making them one of the world's 10 most disabling diseases according to the World Health Organization. But for all the misery for thos...
Feb 02, 2023•13 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? Recently, there's been growing excitement in the scientific community about revisiting the potential medical benefits of psychedelic drugs that have been off limits for decades. Scientists are discovering or rediscovering applications of psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and other compounds for treating people with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute has several leading experts paving the way in this...
Jan 26, 2023•19 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Announcing: From our Neurons to Yours, the new podcast from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. On this show, we criss-cross scientific disciplines to bring you to the frontiers of brain science, one simple question at a time. Send us a text! Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends . That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers ...
Jan 10, 2023•2 min0
