(Dr. Regina) Welcome to Spark Science. This is Regina Barber DeGraaff. As many of you know I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University, but I also teach courses in science communication. This episode of Spark Science will be the first of a two episode series featuring student made podcasts. It will also be our neuroscience episode for this season. You may have noticed there is one per season to highlight the sometimes forgotten science at Western Washington University. The outstanding graduate of behavioral neuroscience, or BNS, is Anna Marie Yanny who interviewed director of BNS, Kelly Jantzen. I’m really proud of them all and I hope you enjoy listening to their work.

>> Here we go.

[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around

(Anna Marie) Hello, I’m Anna Marie and today I’m here with Dr. Kelly Jantzen the director of the behavioral neuroscience program at Western Washington University. Today we’re going to talk about how cells in our brain help us connect with others. Thanks for being on the show.

(Kelly) You’re welcome.

(Anna Marie) The first thing I wanted to ask you is, what is your specialty?

(Kelly) My specialty? I have a number of different specialties, but in general my specialty is in human brain imaging using various different human brain imaging tools like [inaudible] and functional magnetic resonance imaging and stimulation tools like transcranial magnetic stimulation to understand human interaction and in particular, how humans interact with their environment. So, perception and interaction, how we interact with our world.

(Anna Marie) Awesome. And what made you decide to study perception and action with these tools?

(Kelly) It started essentially during my PhD when I was studying plasticity in the human brain and how the brain changed as we learn to interact with different things in our environment. It solidified during my postdoctoral years when I went to a lab where they investigated theories and models for how we interact rhythmically with things in our environment with stimuli that are rhythmic like walking, piano plying, anything that is a continuous movement. We tested theoretical models for how that worked and when I moved there they didn’t have a good brain imaging contingent so I became their brain imaging wing of the research. I just started studying all kinds of different action and perception that I continued studying when I got here.

(Anna Marie) Awesome. As I hinted at in the beginning we’re going to be talking about the specific types of cells in the brain called mirror neurons. I was wondering if you could give us a definition of what is a mirror neuron?

(Kelly) I think the first thing to do is give you a definition of what a mirror neuron is not. A mirror neuron is not a neuron that you can see under a microscope. There is nothing anatomically different about a mirror neuron. Mirror neurons are defined as many types of neurons are defined by their functional properties, by how they respond. So, mirror neuron are neurons that respond when you perform an action but they also respond when you watch someone perform the same or similar action.

(Anna Marie) So, if I we’re giving someone a high five and you were watching me give someone a high five then the mirror neuron in your brain would look like you were giving someone a high five?

(Kelly) Exactly. If I were giving a high five there would be a large number of neurons in my brain in various locations that would activate that behavior. If I were to watch you giving a high five, some percentage of those same neurons would became active. The idea is that by watching you perform the action, I’m basically planning that action myself.

(Anna Marie) OK, and preparing for maybe someday when you would need to give a high five, you’re primitively kind of learning that through something else?

(Kelly) Well, the idea isn’t necessarily that you’re learning it because there is evidence that you have stronger mirror neuron activation if you can already do it. So it may not be related to learning so much as mapping the behaviors of someone else onto your own abilities.

(Anna Marie) Awesome, so mirror neurons are important. There’s research on it. You studied them somewhat. What are their real world applications? How would they facilitate our interactions with people in the real world?

(Kelly) First let me say why they may be important. These hypothesis aren’t without controversy of course as all are. One of the earliest dominant ideas about what mirror neuron are doing is allowing for a mechanism of action understanding. If neurons that became active when I perform an action became active when I watch you perform the same action, the idea is that I am somehow representing the goal of that action. In fact, if you look where mirror neuron are most concentrated it is in areas of the brain that are responsible for representing action goals. You have an intrinsic mechanism for action understanding. By understanding the intention of your action because when I see you perform the action the same action gets activated in me, which is where the name mirror neuron came from. It’s not an explicit form of understanding, it’s more of an implicit form of understanding by having your brain mirror or mimic the behaviors of somebody else.

(Anna Marie) So, if I was watching you reach for a cup of water, then I could, through mirroring some of that action in my brain, assume that you might be thirsty?

(Kelly) Right, or at least what the intention of the action is. So, if you’re watching me reach for a cup of water, the way that you know is much simpler than that even. The way you know I’m reaching for a cup of water is because you start planning that same action yourself. So you have the cup, you see the arm movement, and you’re able to say, “Ah, you’re reaching for that glass of water.” It’s a much more fundamental form of action. For instance you can show that if someone is reaching out. One of the early studies for demonstrating that these are really related to action intention was to have people reach out with the exact same grip and grab an object, put the object to the mouth or put it to something that’s on their shoulder like a little container. So the reaching action is the same, the grasping action is the same, the bringing action is the same and then you either eat it or put it in a container. The only way to know the difference between those two is what’s being grasped, the object. One is edible, one is not and yet you can show right from the beginning of the action, you can see different neurons activating for those two tasks so you can see that there is an understanding of the intention of the action based on watching the person and knowing the environment.

(Anna Marie) I wouldn’t just put a grape on my shoulder, I would eat it.

(Kelly) Correct, you would eat it.

(Anna Marie) if it was a Lego, that would go on my shoulder.

(Kelly) I hope so. I think the question was, what is it useful for? And that’s what it’s useful for and it’s hard for us to imagine how you’re using that or how it plays into our everyday understanding and abilities. Maybe one way to understand is to look and see what seems to happen when that system doesn’t seem to work effectively. One case where it doesn’t seem to work very effectively is in autism, where people have tried that exact same task with autistic children and they’ll find that autistic children actually don’t show any kind of predictive activity in their mirror neuron system to just kind of reaching and grasping, suggesting that they’re not picking up the information about what the intention of the action is and what is to come based on the observation of someone else.

This could, at least in part, underline parts of their difficulties in interacting socially with people. You don’t have an intrinsic mechanisms for understanding what people are doing or how they’re doing it. Of course there’s this old adage, 90% of communication is non-verbal. I don’t know if there’s any truth in that number of 90% but I think it underlays the fact that we all understand how non-verbal communication is. Mirror neurons provide some mechanism, not all mechanisms, but at least one mechanism for non-verbal communication where we can understand the intentions and goals of other people just by watching what they are doing.

(Anna Marie) Alright. You said, “Understanding the intentions and goals of other people by watching them.” I’m wondering if it’s too far of a leap to compare that to the golden rule of treating others how you want to be treated. Could mirror neurons have some root in mapping an action that you see someone else performing to how you might perform that same action or react to it?

(Kelly) Perhaps. So in reacting to it we’re getting into the idea of empathy in mirror neurons. Some folks have definitely tried to make the link mirror neurons and empathy in that mirror neuron activity can help provide information to an empathy systems in the brain, to emotional systems in the brain, that allow you to understand not only what someone’s intentions are but how they feel or how they’re feeling about, or how that makes them feel. Those intentions are related to a goal and maybe they have that goal because they feel a certain way and I feel what they feel. I feel their pain or I feel their joy. That is definitely one approach that people have taken. Sometimes people make the distinction between cold actions, which are the unempathetic ones and empathy related actions to make that distinction.

(Anna Marie) Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for everything, it was really awesome to talk to you and learn about all of this.

(Kelly) Do you have to ask me if you can record me?

(Anna Marie) Yes. Is it alright if I recorded this?

(Kelly) Yes, it’s alright that you recorded this. [Laughing]

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Early late at night
♪ I wander off into a land
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
♪ There’s a world inside
♪ Where dreamers meet each other
♪ Once you go, it’s hard t come back
♪ Let me paint your canvas as you dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants

(Lyla) Hello, I’m Lila Neigh and this is researching the researchers. A brief look at research opportunities here on Western’s campus. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to four people across a range of fields currently involved in research including two undergraduates. I’ll introduce them and their research before I start asking about their research experience. [Music]

Anna Marie Yanny is an undergraduate student in her senior year of studying neuroscience and the founder of Western’s poetry club. She’s done undergraduate research about how musicianship influences language processing. That is, how studying music effects how you understand language.

(Anna Marie) We took 15 non-musicians and we gave them 10 days of musical training. We tested their speech perception before and afterwards. The interesting part of this task is we were testing their speech perception but we were training them in music which originally people thought there were two different halves of the brain that were focusing on two different types of processing. What we did find is that people’s speech processing, or specifically their ability to discriminate small differences in voice onset time, was a lot better after they had gone through this musical training. That suggests that everything that’s going on in this speech processing region of the brain might actually be affected by what’s going on in the musical processing of the brain.

(Lila) So you were specifically testing specifically voice onset . . .

(Anna Marie) Yes. Voice onset times. So this is a temporal acoustic future of speech. What we had was a scale that ranged from a D to a T. D is an example of a sound that has a really early voice onset time and T is an example of that has a really late voice onset time. Then we had a scale that ranged from a really good D, to a kind of good D, to a totally ambiguous stimulus, to a kind of good T and then at the end we had a really good T. We were looking at how good people were at discriminating, is this a good T or is this a good D? We found that the discrimination got better after the musical training.

(Lila) Does that impact their ability to understand typical everyday speech?

(Anna Marie) At least with monolingual American English speakers, we don’t necessarily need to discriminate these small differences in voice onset time in order to understand what someone is saying. Even if I wasn’t giving you the best Ds when I was speaking, you would still be able to understand what I was saying. You have more sensitivity to these features. The idea is that maybe musical training actually influences your speech processing in a way that neuroscientists didn’t know about before.

[♪♪♪]

(Lila) Kathleen is a graduate student studying minerals on Mars. She’s currently studying geology but as an undergraduate she studied aerospace engineering.

(Kathleen) I’m studying [inaudible] geometry effects on reflectant spectra for weathering [inaudible] and codings on Mar’s rocks. It sounds like a mouthful but it’s honestly not that complicated. The basic concept is, do the rocks on Mars turn different colors if you look at them from different angles? Like turns out it matters quite a bit. A lot of the data I work with comes from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. Curiosity does in fact look at rocks from different angles so I have that piece of the puzzle for Mars. My goal is to be able to tie those changes in the reflectant spectrum that we see to actual physical properties of the rocks. In order to do that I have to be able to take a rock and put it in a scanning microscope. In order to do that we basically make our best guess as to what rocks on earth might be fairly similar to rocks that we find on Mars. If we look at their spectral signatures and find a really a close match between observations, we take all of those rocks and the observations we see on Mars, then maybe if we take these rocks and dig in a little deeper using the scanning electron microscope using the techniques thought we can’t do on Mars. Maybe that will actually give us more information about the underlying meaning, of the specter we’ve left on Mars.

(Lila) How does getting the data from the curiosity rover work?

(Kathleen) A lot of information is in the public domain. A lot of it is really accessible to pretty much anyone. That being said, in order to get the data in the format you want it for scientific purposes, it can be much better to go to the source to work with people at JPL. [Music]

(Lila) Dr. Ing Bao is an assistant professor that teaches analytical chemistry here at Western. She also leads a research group of 5 students studying nanoparticles in three main areas. Functional nanocomposite, self-organized plasmonic rings and plasmonic sensors.

(Dr. Ing Bao) I will describe my research package you bring into a building. Think about a building that is not composed by bricks but is actually composed by little dust. Our lab with synthesizers, a little dust, and that dust can have plasmonic property, can have other fluorescence property, that dust will compose to a building and that building is called a composite. When you manipulate it in a way that it will self-organize into a designed geometry we want them to be. The first area is not a composite. The second area is similar. Non-compost is the bulk material, right? But rings, we are trying to make the particle align into a ring size. It’s kind of also manipulation. The third part is a plasmonic sensor. We are taking advantage of the property of material. For example, the optical property can be used for the sensing application. This is more like the application area.

(Lila) It’s kind of like the functional nanocomposites and the self-organized plasmonic rings are getting the materials built into a certain structure and then the plasmonic sensors are actually using that structure to do something.

(Dr. Ing Bao) Exactly.

(Lila) What do you mean by plasmonic?

(Dr. Ing Bao) Plasmatic property is interesting. When you shine a light into the material, the reaction will start the osculate. The frequency of the osculation will match the [inedible] of the incident light. That means the light for photons, the energy is converted to the electron osculation. In this spectroscopy you will see a big absorption peak. That means that absorption with lens is frequency of electron osculation because they take all of the incident and light in so the absorption gets big. This osculation is easily effected by the environment [inaudible] particles of shape. Because it confines the area where the electron can go so the frequency is different because the distance is different. The size of the particle poses a similar idea. It confines the area to how far they can travel. Also environment because the light will interact with the air. Like the polymer, they have a different refractive index. So those are all factors of the plasmonic property. If we manipulate them, if we want to use this particle to be a sensor for the environment changing, while changing osculation, if you have mercury ions there, or a different gas in the environment, and if UVB peaked, you know it shifted.

(Lila) Ian Mackley [sp?] is an undergraduate student in his sophomore year majoring in biochemistry. His research group studies how soul signaling portions binding patterns differ. It’s still new and a lot of time has been spent setting up the lab.

(Ian) different proteins can bind different things. Proteins we’re look at called PDZ domains bind to the tail end of other portions, so amino acid chains or peptides and stuff like that. If you look at a PDZ domain you can see a pocket or cleft that you can shove one of the peptide chains into. If it goes by that general mechanism, most will have a binding motif. The thing with PDZ domains is that you can have two different peptide chains that both satisfy the binding motif but one can bind to 5 different PDZ domains. They are mostly interchangeable. You can have a neither sequence that still fits that domain but it will bind to 30, even 50 PDZ domains. The binding motif is not completely correct. Part of what we are trying to do is figure out what is causing this weird discrepancy between binding patterns.

(Lila) What’s the application for this project?

(Ian) The part that I’m interested in is definitely the pure theory understanding. There is an application that sort of the other half of our lab is working on where if we can figure out the rules for this modulation of bonding infinities, we can then engineer our own peptides that will selectively bind with different strengths to different PDZ domains. That has huge synthetic drug applications. If we can design selective drugs we can have them bind to selective things to have less unintended consequences.

(Lila) so, you said that your head professor got here last fall?

Ian yes

(Lila) Because of that the lab group has done a lot of set up and prep work. Can you tell me what is involved with that?

(Ian) A lot of trying and failing to grow bacterial cells and a lot of making buffers. All sorts of weird or somewhat common place solutions for stuff like galactophoritis or bacterial cultures, stuff like that.

(Lila) Why have you had a hard time growing bacterial cultures? It seems like that should be something easy.

(Ian) So here’s the dirty little secret. No one is supposed to know but everyone does. The cold room in the chemistry building where we keep our cell plates, has a black mold infestation.

(Lila) so the bacteria gets overrun by the black mold?

(Ian) assuming we don’t use the right antibiotics, yes. It’s not actually not that big a deal, we just have to do it again. It’s only a day’s work. It’s not too big a loss.

[Music]

(Lila) I also asked each person a series of questions about the research experience at Western.

[♪♪♪]

(Lila) How did you get here? How did you find out about this opportunity, and how did you get interested in it?

>> I was a Western Washington native. I’ve always known I would want to study science. I wanted to study space in particular. I did my undergraduate degree at MIT studying aerospace engineering. By the end of that I knew that although I loved space and loved what I was doing I really wanted to be home. I was incredibly lucky to find a professor who was doing research here working with nexus curiosity mars rover. That’s a robot I worked on from the engineering side. That was exciting to be back in a place I love, still doing the science I love.

>> I learned about Dr. Janson’s lab through an event series that they used to do called neuroscience on tap. Dr. Janson was talking about speech processing there. Of course I’m interested in poetry. I thought, what the heck, this is the perfect lab. It blends my two interests, neuroscience and poetry. So I bombarded Dr. Janson with emails and then one day finally got an email back that said, come on in check out our lab. Ever since I have been working in that lab studying how musicianship effects language processing. It’s a really interesting multidisciplinary subject.

(Dr. Ing Bao) the main attraction to me is Western is very undergraduate focused. They emphasize on teaching at the same time as research. I’m very variable [sp?] about [inaudible] research experience when they are undergrad student, they will have a better idea of which school they want to pursue, what career they want to go to.

[♪♪♪]

(Lila) are there any techniques used in your lab that an undergraduate an undergraduate student would not be allowed to do?

(Dr. Ing Bao) no. Absolutely not. Well as long as you can change.

(Lila) there are undergraduate in the lab with me that are involved in pretty much every step of the work.

Would you say that your department strongly emphasizes undergraduate research?

>> Absolutely. I think that’s one of the best things about the program. We are mostly an undergraduate institution. We are able to work in the lab at a capacity that a lot of graduate students would be working in the lab.

>> My lab in particular until very recently didn’t advertise at all. It was very much like, you want to do the research, you take the initiative and come find us. In fact recently we started to decide that it’s really important to attract a diverse group of people to apply so we’ve started to advertise.

(Kelly) I think the entirety of the biochemistry department tries to encourage undergrad research. It’s one of their big shticks that they have undergraduates helping and often getting stuff published under their names.

(Lila) How do you think your field will change in the next 5 years and what role will you play in it?

>> New space technology will be more and more part of it. Right now it’s just about figuring out as much as we can about Mars. That’s going to be something relevant to anyone trying to go to Mars.

(Kelly) I’m not sure how massive of an impact we’ll have. Proteins are a messy subject because of how various they are. It might open up new theories for explaining other protein domains. Like the BDZ domain that bonded weirdly. We may be pioneering. Or we may be just another theory.

>> In my opinion is the next frontier because there is so much that we don’t know. If you are focused on a network that is used to process one aspect of learning or one aspect of speech processing, you could discover something that is groundbreaking in the next month. It is really uncharted.

[♪♪♪]

(Lila) Is there anything else you would like to talk about that I haven’t mentioned so far?

(Dr. Ing Bao) I want to tell them, if anyone interested in research should start doing research early. Research is not a one day thing, one year thing. It’s accumulated for a certain amount of time. If you start too late you will get experience instead of publications. We are always open to talk to students. Don’t be afraid of professors.

>> I’d like to encourage anyone to pursue whatever they’re interested in. Some people see it as inspiring but also out of reach for normal people. Don’t think that. If you’re interested in something just go do it.

[♪♪♪]

(Dr. Ing Bao) I’d like to thank Anna Marie, Kathleen, Dr. Bao and Ian for taking the time to talk to me. All interviews were recorded in Bellingham. This podcast was produced in partnership with WWU and KMRE. Music was obtained by the YouTube audio library.

[♪♪♪]

Thanks for listening to Spark Science. If you missed any of the show, go to the website sparksciencenow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook @sparksciencenow. Spark science is produced in collaboration with KMRE and Western Washington University. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. Our audio engineers are Natalie Moore and Julia Thorpe. Production was also done by Anna Marie Yanny, Lila Nay, and Nicole De Remo. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Black-a-licious and Wondeland by Janell Monet.

[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow

♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element of brown

[End of podcast.]