HDBI Podcast

Podcast transcript: Made the Same Way

Episode 6: This pattern of wrinkles

Oneda

You're listening to Made the Same Way, the podcast for those who were curious about how we humans are made. My name is Oneda. I'm a rapper, producer and songwriter from Manchester, and in this series we're discovering how we get from a fertilised egg to a fully functioning human being. To answer this, I've teamed up with HDBI. That's the Human Developmental Biology Initiative to explore science in a brand new way. Each episode we bring together one emerging artist and one knowledgeable researcher to discuss science, life and music, and at the end of each episode, the pair will have a limited amount of time to collaborate on an original piece inspired by their conversation.

Katie

So if we look at every single person's brain, most of these wrinkles will be in the same place. And going in the same direction.

Harmony

So each sort of pattern for every person is similar?

Katie

Yeah, pretty much the same.

Oneda

In this episode Katie, a scientist at University College London, meets Harmony, a spoken word artist.

Katie

Hi, I'm Katie. It's very nice to meet you.

Harmony

Hello. I'm harmony. Nice to meet you too.

Oneda

They're chatting about the development of the brain. How and when it forms, why it looks the way it does and if the brain really can be affected by music.

Harmony

OK. So Katie, can you describe your job to me?

Katie

Yes! So I am a research scientist at Kings College London, and my research group is interested in understanding how our own brains develop in pregnancy. So understanding how our brains start off, how they grow, how they get to the right size and the right shape. We don't look at how our brains function yet because we don't understand how they grow and until we do that, we don't think we could look at function.

Harmony

So you look at like the way that they develop?

Katie

Exactly, yes, we're interested in how human brains develop. And what about you? What do you what do you do?

Harmony

What do I do? So I am a musician. It's something that I've been doing since I was about 13 years old and I just wrote a song one day and yeah, ever since then, no matter what I've been doing in life, it always seems to kind of find me again. What are your expectations of talking to me? What are some things you’d want to get out of today?

Katie

I think it's going to be really interesting to see how somebody else views what we do. As scientists, we spend so much time talking to other scientists that we end up looking at it with quite a narrow perspective. And today, I'm really hoping to gain a very different perspective because you're going to view it in a really different way. Have you like, are you interested in science? Did you study science? Is it something you've never thought much about?

Harmony

So I'm interested in science, yes, because it's something that I think dominates our society so much. But you know it's like I wish that we could make correlations to it outside of school. So in school, like, they teach us OK, this cell has a mitochondria in it. OK, cool. But if we can't apply that into the world, what's the point in using it? So maybe like we could look at how we can apply like the development of the brain into how that plays a role into music, because music is something that we listen to so much right? On a day-to-day basis, we’re always taken in audios, whether it's like on the TV or anywhere.

Katie

Yeah, well hopefully that’s what we're going to try and do today is bring some of our science into a situation and give it some context so it seems a bit more accessible.

Harmony

So how did you get into science? Were you always interested in?

Katie

It I think so. I think I've always been interested in science. I knew early on that I didn't want to be a doctor. Cause usually if you're good at science at school, everyone tells you, you should go and be a doctor. And for some reason it never, it never felt right. So then I started looking into what else you could do with science and saw that you could become a researcher and this seemed much more exciting to me because It always changes so you can start a project and then you find something and then it leads you onto a different path than you initially thought. And there just seems like a lot of creativity and a lot of options, if you went into research.

Harmony

You mentioned to me before, you're always finding new ways and new different like discoveries...

Katie

Yes. Yeah, even if they're really tiny things. So they're not - they don't always make the news - but just knowing that you've asked a scientific question and then you've tested it and then you're the only person in the whole world that knows the answer to that question when you first see it. I think that's a really magical feeling. Especially in our lab, we quite often use microscopes and images, and so you're like, wow, I'm looking at this image, I'm the first person to see this image! And then all you want to do is go and share it with your colleagues and then hopefully eventually share it with everybody else… I guess it's the same kind of feeling when you write a song? And you're the only one in the world who’s heard it. And then you get to share it and see how other people enjoy it.

Harmony

Yeah, that’s pretty much it, I think. It's your own personal piece of work. And I feel like a song, songs are really cryptic, though. You know, one sentence can mean so many things, and I kind of like that. Like it can only make sense really to you, which would be a good time to ask you actually what is your opinion on the sort of like spiritual side of things about like frequency and music? And how that plays into the brain?

Katie

Yes, I think the brain is such a wonderfully complicated organ in the body that we just really don't understand. And we see scientifically - you see effects of things that we can't explain. So we know that people, if they hear a song and it reminds them of something good, it will make them feel happy. But we don't understand why that happens. So if there's a certain type of music that would make you feel in a spiritual way or lift you up or make you feel better… you know, that definitely happens. And you can, you know, see that change in somebody. But we have no idea how that works. And I think it's a fascinating area to understand. It's because we don't know how it works, I think it's then really difficult for us at the moment to say, oh yes we know that doing this would make you feel better… but there's no denying that music in particular really speaks to people. It activates parts of the brain that that speech and language don't. And I think one really nice example of that is if you have somebody who has Alzheimer's Disease, actually, they remember music for a lot longer than they remember other things. And you can see that that song, their favourite song, will take them back to that place where you know that they first heard it or where it was most important to them. So there's definitely a sort of spiritual side to how we appreciate music and how the brain processes music.

Harmony

What do you know, though, about the brain? Like what can science actually show about the brain that maybe spirituality or music can't?

Katie

So a lot of our studies, especially in my group, we look at sort of the structure of the brain. So we're trying to understand how the brain is built, why it's the size and the shape that it is and how that structure is linked to its function. So if we take another organ in the body, like the heart... It has different chambers that move blood around and its structure is inherently linked to its function. It sort of makes sense - you've got blood coming in one way, and then it goes out the other way. And then when you look at the brain, we sort of forget that actually every other part of our body, its structure is really important for function. So we're trying to understand sort of the building blocks and then we might be able to understand the function a bit better.

Harmony

Yeah, the brain is quite a mysterious organ, I'd say. Isn't it like 95% just… Like what's it called? Grey matter?

Katie

So yeah, you have very simply, 2 sorts of matter. You have your grey matter and your white matter. And the grey matter contains the cell sort of factories, so we call them the cell bodies where sort of the hub of activity is, and we tend to think of grey matter as like I think it's sort of listed as what makes people clever. So they say, oh, you have a lot of grey matter if you're very intelligent. And the white matter is where information travels from one cell to another. Sort of very briefly. And grey matter is on the top of your brain and white matter is further inside, and they're both really, really important…. I don't know the percentage makeup, but I think it's probably closer to 50/50.

I've got five models of brains in front of us on the table today. These are from MRI scans of developing brains, so they're from some very, very kind pregnant women let us scan their babies and they are life-size, 3D printed models of their brains across different weeks of development. So I'm going to start with the smallest one, so this is 26 weeks of pregnancy. It's very small and it doesn't really look like a human brain like we would expect it to because normally our adult brains have all of these wrinkles on the outside. But our brains don't start off that way. They start off completely smooth, so it looks a bit more like a kidney bean or a peanut, I think was said… and it's pretty smooth on the surface and it's about the size, I don't know what it's about, the size of, maybe like a clementine? About that kind of size. And we're interested in understanding how this tiny little, very smooth brain grows during pregnancy, up to the biggest model that I've brought with me, which is a brain at birth, which has all of those beautiful wrinkles and folds on the outside, and is really rather large. So you'd need two hands, I think, to hold that one. And we're really quite interested in understanding this pattern of wrinkles. So when we said we're interested in sort of structure and how the brain is built, we all have pretty much the same pattern of wrinkles in our brain. So if we look at every single person's brain, most of these wrinkles will be in the same place and going in the same direction. So that would suggest –

Harmony

Wait, sorry, can I ask a question?

Katie

Yes, of course!

Harmony

So each sort of pattern for every person is similar?

Katie

Yeah, pretty much the same. So these really big folds that we can see with our own eyes on the outside, they're all pretty much the same in my brain, your brain, everyone who's listening. So if the body, you know, goes to such an effort to make sure these folds are in the same place in everyone, then we think that might be important for its function… And if you look, you see there's a one really big fold that runs down the middle. And it's actually in this tiny model, this is the very start of it - this little line in the middle. So this very small brain we've got in front of us, there is one fold on each side and it's this big line here, right in the middle, and it's called one of the central folds because it's in the centre. So sometimes we name things with a bit of logic in science… and then as we go up the different weeks, you start to see that fold is still in the same place. There it is in this one… it starts to get a little bit more wrinkly as all the other wrinkles appear. And then by the time we reach birth, it's got really big, but it's still exactly in the centre and so we can always find these same folds in everyone's brains.

Harmony

So you do know what that is responsible for?

Katie

Yes! So we know that you've got your motor cortex on one side, so that's responsible for how you move. And you've got your sensory cortex next to it. So that picks up all the information about how you're feeling the world. So what information you're getting back when you're moving. And so it makes sense. We think that these two areas are next to each other so as you're moving, you're also sensing the environment and that will change how you move through it. The cortex is the bit of the brain that you can see on the outside, so the bit that's all wrinkled and folded that you're used to looking at, that whole piece is called your cortex. And it's really interesting for us to study because it's the newest part in terms of evolution of the brain. So it's the thing that evolved last in our brains was the cortex. And that's why we think it might be really important for what sort of makes us human. So it might have a really important function as well as - the brain does lots of important things like controlling our breathing and keeping us alive and keeping us upright. But it also does really interesting things like language and music. And you know how we express ourselves and feel our emotions.

Harmony

So obviously the brain it's, you know it goes through some sort of process to get to the end result. What are some things that could go wrong there?

Katie

Yes. Yeah. So there are quite a few things that could go wrong... I've talked a bit about structure and shape of the brain and actually that can develop in a different way. So you can get changes in brain shape or size. I think one good example of that, if you remember the Zika virus that was in the news a few years ago and you had babies born with smaller brains. So that's one sort of thing that can go wrong in development. But there's a lot of environmental factors that can change how our brain is developing and we tend to think of it as sort of molecules that are getting in, but it can also be experiences... So maybe I'll give a more positive example… So if you grow up in a home where your parents speak two languages, so in a bilingual home, it can often take you maybe a little bit longer to be able to learn languages, but you've then learned two languages, sometimes even three languages! And then your brain finds it easier to learn languages throughout the rest of your life. So it gets it wired in a slightly different way than if you - because you're exposed to those different languages and it has to tell the difference and learn and then put them together. So there's lots of different things that you can experience and environments that can change how your brain functions..

Harmony

What about before you're born? Is there anything that can change in the brain development?

Katie

Yes. So this we know a little bit less about because it's a little bit more difficult for us to know how the fetus is sort of sensing things... I would think most pregnant mothers would tell you that their baby can hear sound at some point. You know, they might move in a different way when certain music's played… and we don't know anything about whether that changes the baby's brain. Maybe if you play a lot of certain type of music, do they then like that type of music when they're born? We’ve no idea about that. We do know that there are things that can have a negative effect... So certain illnesses or viruses we know aren't good, which is why often pregnant women are offered vaccines to sort of protect the baby from things that might be harmful. So we know that and it's mainly to do with things that are passing from the placenta - from the mother, through the placenta, into the baby… And there are quite a few things that can do that. Another one, I think, is alcohol. So we ask mothers not to drink alcohol because it's not good for babies’ brain development. The brain develops really quite early though. But at that point, it's sort of, it doesn't have any of that grey matter or white matter we talked about it just has these stem cells... So we, we call them stem cells because they are the cells that everything sort of stems from… So you can start off with just two cells that come together, and then you have a cell that's then able to keep dividing and make every kind of cell and organ of the body… So we call those cells stem cells. So we have a lot of those in the brain to begin with and they're capable of making all the different types of cells you'd need in the brain. And so they're a long way away from what we're looking at in front of us with sort of fully formed brains and nerve cells that connect to each other. But it's again, it's all of those stem cells rather than anything that we would recognise as a brain. And really it keeps on going even after birth. So it takes quite a long time for our brains to develop.

Harmony

Yeah. How- what age does it stop developing?

Katie

Yes, this - I think this becomes a bit of a question about what we call development and what we call just changes in in brain activity and function. You could argue - so it will grow for many years afterwards as your head and your body are growing and you'll get new connexions made throughout your lifetime… I think we could probably say developmental neuroscience would take us up to sort of late teens, early 20s. Because there's a lot of changes that happen during your teenage years.

Harmony

That’s a long time!

Katie

Yeah, it's a really long time, but I think if you look at it in terms of learning, you find it a lot easier to learn when you're younger than when you're older. It's because your brain is actually still finishing developing, so it's easy to adjust things and as you get older and it sort of stopped continuously making new connexions, it's a little bit harder to get it to do that...

Harmony

OK. So why? Why do you actually like research the brain? What is your reason behind it?

Katie

Yes. So the reason we're interested in human brain development is, as you might have guessed from some of my answers already, we don't know very much about it. We know the brain is really important and we know that during that period when a baby's brains are developing in the womb, there are a lot of very fine processes that need to happen correctly for our brains to function efficiently. There are lots of neurodevelopmental disorders or psychiatric disorders that get diagnosed where we have no treatments or therapies to help anybody. And it's because we try to understand what's going on in those disorders or what's going on in the brain that might be underlying those things. So ,we hope that if we can understand how a brain is put together and how it's built in development, then you could start to understand why it functions the way it does and then why those functions might not be happening when we look at some of those disorders.

So I guess it's like if you look at a house, and you wouldn't be able to understand the plumbing and how the electrics are put together, unless you've built that house, ayou can see how all of it is put in and then it just works beautifully. But if you just walk in and turn the lights on and put the tap on, you don't know on what's going on.

Harmony

What's a really interesting thing you've learned about brain development?

Katie

I've had a good think about this because part of being a neuroscientist is you love brain development, so we have lots of favourite facts. I think for today one of my favourite things about the brain that's maybe quite relevant is that the brain stores information about songs in a different area to information about language. So if you hear the beginning of your favourite song without even really thinking about it, you can sing along and you know the words. But if someone asks you to sit down and write out all the lyrics to your favourite song, that's a really difficult task to do. So there's something about music that means that it's remembered in a different way and stored in a different place. But I think that's something that's really interesting - that music it has evolved with us in in a way that we have a different part of the brain that processes it.

Harmony

So that was a good conversation!

Katie

Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. It's nice to think about what we do in a different way!

Harmony

So, welcome to my world.

Katie

Yeah, I'm very excited to see! How would – like, tell me a bit about how you'd normally go about this sort of creative process?

Harmony

OK, so first of all you have to find your inspiration. So if I just would brainstorm now. It would be….OK so why - I think of like DNA? Frankenstein…. People with mental health issues… things that you can play on, so songwriting is really good if you pick broad topics, things that you can like, play on - like rain or death, because there's just so many... I'm so dark, aren’t I? Maybe we could find a topic or find an object or something and then look at it from a different angle?

Katie

I think that's really interesting that you were talking about- that you said it was a bit dark. I think so - the the brain's probably one of the things we understand the least. And when you think about mental health and all of the disorders that we don't have treatments for, you know there's a lot of of pain and a lot of frustration that we can't treat those. And it all stems from our lack of understanding about the brain. And the more we understand it, hopefully we can relieve some of that sort of darkness, I guess because we'll shed a bit of light on how the brain works…

Harmony

We could also say that about a person… if we had a person like - if we knew more about them, we could help them. We- they - we don't understand them, OK. So from there we've kind of got our first person point of view. No one understands me – automatically there you've got your like theme, I guess you could say. So what I've wrote so far is: and there she was, in a room full of dust. Silence crept into her ears. Nicotine filled her lungs…. And then I was going to go and describe a setting like a bit more of, like a baby in a room of adults. And the adults are not paying any attention to her. But she's got all this, like, creativity inside of her, and then she gets up to go and draw something and we're in her mind now… so a stroke of a paintbrush, guided by insuition, she doesn't know what she's drawing, but it's something different. And then I was gonna go out and, like, go off on that. And it's basically like she's doing something so magical, right? But no one else - like to everyone else –

Katie

It's like she's just sort of moving around? Yeah, it's really nice for you to explain sort of how you've gone through that… no, I’ve really enjoyed it, it’s been really fun!

Harmony

Thank you for coming here, all the way from London as well!

Katie

Ohh, it's been really nice to do it in person! After years of doing everything on Zoom, it's just really nice to meet people and bring some brains!

Harmony

I've created a spoken word piece inspired by my conversation with Katie, the scientist. Katie showed me models of a baby's brain as it goes through its developing stages. I was fascinated by the knowledge that every brain's pattern and structure is the same for everyone. You can hear Katie explain in the conversation that we forget that every part of the body's structure is really important for function. What struck out to me which she said that we forget. We forget that our bodies are here to keep us alive, but so much of that is lost through this idea of separateness and appearances. So this spoken word piece illustrates this idea.

<Spoken word piece begins>

Take our masks off.

A painted picture stands alone in a room full of people.

It examines each pair of eyes that stares blankly at the reds and yellows.

A sunset, huh?

That's what I see.

A voice emerged from the back of their heads.

They spun their spines and looked behind, catching the eye of a ginger-haired man with a classic black moustache.

What you're seeing is a person undergoing a transformation, hence all the colour.

But if you focus on the shape, it's a man, isn't it?

The two reluctantly look again…

Well, it - it doesn't have to be a man. It could be a woman or a fairy, or even an elf.

The moustache man smiled, his fingertips twitching, his lips stuck an awful, uncomfortable U-shape.

He stood there for a minute. His nervous system froze. He locked eyes with the couple.

Who are you, sorry?

Good question.

The masked wolf's expression turned from outright weird to normal instantly.

Consider this a lesson.

The next time you go to examine something, don't get caught up in the details - you'll miss the moment.

He grazed his fingers onto the thick pane of the canvas that hung in the gallery.

After all, it's all pieces to the same puzzle.

Oneda

You've been listening to Made the Same Way. Thank you for listening!

Next time we're exploring the ethical questions associated with research on very early human embryos. How does that process work? Does everyone agree with it? And if not, why not? Made the Same Way is a Reform Radio production for HDBI, which is funded by Wellcome. It was produced by Olivia Swift with help from Jamie Green.

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