So you finally made it to the end, my friend, and in more ways than one. This is officially the final printed issue of the Central Sulcus.
When I started as editor-in-chief of the Central Sulcus two years ago, I knew right from the start that a printed newsletter was old hat. The format was difficult to produce, difficult to distribute, and difficult to archive. The long delays between publications made it impractical as a source of news. And as long as it took to make, it was generally consumed in days. So I decided to change the rules.
I steered the Central Sulcus away from news and information and into a forum where Neuroscience students could share their interests, their talents, and their passions. We printed reviews of restaurants, taverns, dance clubs and neighborhoods; event calendars and musical venue maps; artists’ drawings, from the stately to the irreverent; and a great deal of home-brew humor.
So as we transition to an online blog format, I would like to transition into something new as well, but not by subtracting, by adding. We will still strive to be a representation of the minds and passions of our fellow students. However, now we will be able to bring news, announcements, events, and much more to you. So thank you all, and please continue to contribute, or monkeys will raid your kitchen at night.
We have an exciting new line up for this fall’s Frontiers in Neuroscience. Be sure to join us every Friday at noon in the Whitehead Auditorium!
2/1 Yanjie Fan and Katy Shepard, Emory NS graduate students
2/8 Roger Cone (Vanderbilt)
2/15 Becky Meyer and Chris Makinson, Emory NS graduate students
2/22 Michelle LaPlaca (Georgia Institute)
3/1 Katerina Akassoglou (UCSF)
3/8 Willfried Rossol (Emory)
3/15 Spring Break
3/22 Christopher Coe (U. Wisconsin-Mad)
3/29 Michael Sutton (U. Mich)
4/5 Mustafa Sahin (Boston Children’s H.)
4/12 Tracy Ann Read (Emory)
4/19 Ralph Greenspan (UCSD)
4/26 Francisco Alvarez (Emory)
5/3 Julio Ramirez (Davidson)
Love is the one area where we are all scientists: even though we all engage in it to some extent, and we all have some knowledge about it, most of us will freely profess our ignorance. Even those of us who study behavioral neuroscience find that information flying out the window when we see our lover’s face. Can powerful, yet insubstantial emotions be explained by chemical reactions in the brain? Dr. Larry Young certainly thinks so. In his new book, “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction,” Dr. Young and his co-author Brian Alexander delve deep into the science and the experience of love, sex, desire, and infidelity, presenting the topics in their full complexity and cutting through the controversies using what is known from decades of research on the brain.
Dr. Young’s research lab at Emory resides at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, although it is by no means limited to primates. His projects are surprisingly broad in scope, focusing mainly on the neural substrates of social attachments in monogamous prairie voles, but also including human and non-human primates, as well as rats and mice. His research ranges from developing PET ligands, to transgenics and optogenetics, to genomics, to animal empathy. Researchers in his lab seem able to dream up any project they like, so long as they have the drive to master the requisite techniques and skills.
In this book, Dr. Young makes the case that complex behaviors and emotions are driven by chemical processes in the brain, and in many cases we know quite a bit about those processes. He leads us stepwise through the evolutionary garden, where genes, hormones, life experience, and brain circuitry impact our sex, gender, personality, and desires, as well as our ability to resist those desires. Yet, the book is by no means sterile and clinical; the science is weaved into a series of stories, provocative and accessible and yet informative and surprising.
He opens by showing us the science behind sex, gender, and gender preferences, and the critical periods in development where hormones influence them. Yet he does so through a series of fascinating examples, such as the machihembra from the Dominican Republic, individuals who are born female and yet transform into fully functional males at puberty. He discusses the secrets of how female behavior, preferences, and even odor subtly change over the course of ovulation – and how males somehow detect and respond to these changes, particularly when they are at the strip club. He also talks about the objective irrationality of deciding to have children. When some (roughly half) of us eventually do become mothers, some aspects of maternal instinct are inborn – such as the innate attraction to infants that seems to appear magically during pregnancy – while others are a (perhaps unconscious) result of early life experience, such as empathy and the feeling of reward derived from motherhood.
Dr. Larry Young, Ph.D.
Dr. Young then discusses some of the most famous theories from his field – that bonding in females is derived from brain circuitry for maternal care, while bonding in males is derived from brain circuitry for territoriality. Along the journey, we learn about oxytocin and vasopressin and the suite of behaviors to which each is related across a wide range of animals, along with a few other surprising hypotheses – for instance, why human men have large penises and human women have large breasts compared to other animals. We also learn how biology and genetics conspire against sexual fidelity – and how natural and common infidelity really is. Finally, Dr. Young explores the surprisingly faithful parallels between love and addiction, and how drugs of abuse release the same neurochemicals involved in human attachment.
The book is hilarious, graphic, blunt, sometimes crass – but always entertaining. The stories are intricate and yet complete and coherent; intriguing and funny yet based on pure evidence. The text is heavy with humor and science, though sometimes light on philosophy, creating the occasional split between a person’s biology and their identity, while blurring the lines between evolution and psychology. The book will fascinate and enthrall you while it educates you.
I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Young regarding his book.
INTERVIEW:
JPB: What inspired you to write this book? What was your goal in writing it?
The monogamous prairie vole
LJY: The biggest inspiration was the research that I have been doing ever since graduate school. It started when I was a PhD student at the University of Texas working with lizards. I realized that I could manipulate their sexual behavior very exquisitely just by giving them one hormone, estrogen or testosterone. As I came to Emory studying the voles, I was again astonished and fascinated to see how individual molecules could affect behaviors as complex as pair bonding. I wanted to share that science with people who are not necessarily behavioral neuroendocrinologists, but who may be interested in how the brain creates sexual desire or love. I wanted to convey to people who are interested in science and even the lay public the principle that the mechanisms that are involved in controlling animal behavior are also playing a similar role in humans.
JPB: How can we, as scientists, take control of the media narrative surrounding our work? Without each of us publishing our own book, that is.
LJY: When scientists write a manuscript, they should always think about, what is the public interest in this paper? Why would a non-scientist be interested in this? Then talk to the PR representatives from the University or your institution, the people who know how to get the media’s attention, and put together a press release. Don’t be bashful about trying to get your work out there. It is our job to convey to the public the importance of science, and that means reaching out to the press and communicating with them when we have things that are of public interest.
JPB: In the book you present two parallel hypotheses regarding human bonding: that bonding in females is an extension of maternal behavior; and that bonding in males is an extension of territoriality. Are these hypotheses primarily evolutionary, or do you think they extend into human psychology as well?
LJY: They are primarily evolutionary. In the book we present these as two mechanisms of pair bonding in monogamous animals, and the relevance of this to humans is more speculative. In the evolution of new behaviors, what the brain tends to do is tap into systems that already exist for other things and tweak them a little bit. Oxytocin, which is responsible for promoting labor, for ejecting milk when the baby nurses, for maternal bonding to the baby, this same molecule is involved in bonding the female to the male. The same thing is true for males and territorial behavior. Vasopressin is involved in scent marking, aggression, and territoriality, and in voles it’s also involved in mate guarding, protecting his female partner. It’s almost as if the female has become an extension of his territory, and he will aggressively defend that female against other animals. Human males don’t think of their female partner as their territory; women don’t think of their husbands or lovers as babies; but there is that root in the biology.
JPB: In light of the studies you discuss showing that OT underlies some aspects of maternal care, what do you think of recent work showing an increase in OT in children from administering OT to parents?
LJY: That is really fascinating work that suggests that the engagement of the parents with the offspring can really stimulate the OT system. That stimulation occurs when the mother and baby, or father and baby, are having reciprocal social interactions. That stimulates the OT release, making that social interaction more reinforcing and helping to build social skills and social aptitude. It builds the brain’s knowledge of how it interacts and relate to others. This system may somehow be disrupted in diseases like autism, and these individuals can’t develop the social skills and the social reciprocity that typical kids may have. If this data is true and can be replicated, this highlights the importance of engagement of the parents or caregivers with the baby in terms of facilitating the normal development of the social brain.
JPB: In Tristan and Isolde, Wagner said that love is a sometimes-fatal chemical imbalance; and in your book you make the case that love is an addiction. If love is truly an addiction, should we be using preventative medicines when going on first dates?
LJY: No, I don’t think so, because if you do that then maybe you’re going to miss the person who’s really the perfect match for you, your soulmate. If I would have done that on my first date with my wife, maybe we wouldn’t have the wonderful life that we have together. You never know when you’re going to meet that right person and when your brain’s real chemistry is going to be kicked off to create that love. You’re right that sometimes when people fall in love, it leads them to do things that they definitely regret later, even things that everyone around them can look at and say, “why in the world is he doing that? It makes no sense.” Nonetheless, his brain neurochemistry is telling him that this is the right thing to do. But the critical thing is that sometimes that crazy thing turns out to be the right thing to do. You meet that special person that you will be really happy with the rest of your life. I would hate for someone to miss out on that because they are afraid of falling in love.
JPB: What new research are you performing along the lines of the hypotheses you present in your book?
LJY: One important aspect of our work is not so much about the neurobiology of love but how we can use our knowledge of the chemistry of social relationships to improve social functioning in social cognitive disorders. For example, in autism, schizophrenia, and some other psychiatric disorders, there is an inability to relate to others and an inability to engage in social reciprocity. We are figuring out how to exploit neurochemistry to improve social functioning and maybe to teach social skills to those who lack them. For example, we are exploring the possibility of combining OT treatment with behavioral therapies so that we can teach social skills to autistic subjects. So that’s one really important application, going from the preclinical basic science to clinical applications. That’s really the goal of the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience that I started here at Emory. But we’re also doing some other things that are very interesting. For example, we are looking at the neurobiology of consoling behavior. When the partner is injured, prairie voles for example will show increased grooming to the partner, maybe to relieve their stress. We’re exploring the neurobiology and the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in that consoling behavior. This may give us insights into the evolutionary origins of things like empathy, which we all think of as a human trait. Empathy, like love, has its origin in animal behavior.
Graduate school demands a lot from us – specifically, the bulk of our time during the 5+ years of our 20s and 30s that we spend working toward a PhD. This timeframe overlaps with years during which many of our peers find partners, marry, and have children (as anyone who’s looked at Facebook recently can tell you). Parenthood, like doctoral training, is not something to be entered into lightly, but some students within the Emory Neuroscience Graduate Program have opted to take on these challenges at the same time.
Parents Seeking PhDs
Teresa Madsen started her PhD in 2005 and had her son, Finn, in 2010. She had originally planned to wait until finishing her degree before having children, but decided to have a child in grad school after hearing from multiple sources that there is no “good time” in an academic’s career to start a family. “I went to these work-life balance seminars at the Society for Neuroscience meeting and they all kept saying the same thing: You’re busy in grad school, but you’re also busy as a post-doc, and even busier if you get a faculty position,” she said. “So when my biological clock started ticking in my third year, and I realized I had just barely gotten started on my dissertation work, graduation seemed too far off to delay starting a family.”
Rachael Allen with Ansley
Rachael Allen suggests that students who might want to have children in graduate school should start planning early in their graduate careers: “If you’re rotating, consider whether other people in the lab have children and whether the PI runs an inclusive lab that is respectful of students’ needs and lifestyles.” Rachael’s daughter Ansley turned 2 on January 29. She says that becoming a parent has changed how she approaches her research: “I plan all of my experiments much more carefully so I can make it to my daughter’s daycare on time. I’m actually a lot more efficient now.” Teresa has had a similar experience, scheduling most of her lab work to take place between 9:30 and 4:30, with a few exceptions that require special childcare arrangements. She added, “It’s also important to me to maintain good work/life balance – evenings and weekends are for my family now.”
Resources for Emory Graduate Students With Children
Institutional support is critical for the success of all students, including students with families. Emory has several policies in place to make life a little easier for graduate student parents. In 2012, the Laney Graduate School implemented a parental accommodation policy for graduate students who become birth or adoptive parents while studying at Emory. New parents are entitled to eight weeks of paid leave at their normal level of stipend funding. This important policy means that Neuroscience graduate students who are funded by individual predoctoral fellowships from the NIH can collect the full eight weeks of paid time off to which they are entitled. (Students receiving NIH predoctoral funding are allowed up to eight weeks paid time off for a new child, but only if other students at the same institution have access to the same amount of leave.) The parental accommodation period is the result of several years of lobbying by former and current students in the Laney Graduate School and can be accessed by all students, regardless of gender, marital status, or sexual orientation. For more details, see the Laney Graduate School handbook, which can be accessed at: http://www.gs.emory.edu/academics/policies/index.html.
The Emory Work-Life Resource Center currently provides up to ten days of emergency backup childcare for any student whose regular childcare plans fall through. Backup care can also be used for elderly or disabled adult dependents who require caregivers. For additional information, visit: http://www.gs.emory.edu/graduate_life/support.html.
The Laney Graduate School hosts an annual dinner for graduate students with families. This event is designed to help educate student parents about the resources available to them and allow them to meet fellow parents who are studying at Emory. This year’s event will be held on Tuesday, April 16, from 4:00 – 6:00 PM (location TBA).
Stay Informed and Get Involved
When asked what advice she had for students who were might have children in graduate school, Rachael said: “Be aware of how things work at Emory, like parental leave and health insurance – did you know births are 100% covered?” Networking with other students and their families is one of the best ways to learn about official and unofficial resources. Graduate student parents, students who are considering having children, and allies who support improved work/life balance are encouraged to join the Grad Work Life listserv. For access, contact sociology grad student (and mother of two) Natalie Deckard at natalie.delia.deckard@emory.edu and include “listserv” in the subject of the email.
Advocacy for students with families is ongoing at Emory. Natalie is currently collaborating with the Graduate Student Council to pursue childcare subsidies for graduate student parents, “to assure that no graduate student has to make a trade-off between their own education and that of their children.” Furthermore, students across the Laney Graduate School can take smaller steps to make things easier for their peers who are parents: “I can never go to seminars that start at 4:00,” commented Teresa. “I understand why that’s a convenient time for a lot of people, because it doesn’t interrupt the middle of the day, but I can’t make it work without childcare.” Whether you’re scheduling a meeting or considering a position on student government, be mindful of what you can do to make our graduate program inclusive and supportive of all students, including those with families.
“Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown – And things seem hard or tough – And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft – And you feel that you’ve had quite enough – Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour . . . ” –Monty Python, The Meaning of Life.
Suppose, for an instant, that we look at ourselves at a distance. Let’s view ourselves beyond rugged individualism and societal collectivism, on a broader view than observes the intertwined ecosystem amidst which our populace is set, past even the infinities of the boundless cosmos, and even into the multitude of different possibilities for space and time. Monty Python’s Flying High Circus approached this scale in their epic 1983 film, The Meaning of Life. Three hundred years into Western Enlightenment, scientists observe this scale of understanding in postulates of quantum eigenstates that beget whole universe by the random manifestation of collections of matter/energy, and the existence of the multiple universes as a byproduct of cosmic inflation occurring between 10−36 and 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang. Looking from these heights, what can be said about us?
Let’s start from the outside edge of this scale in answering this last question. Amid the boundless potentialities of quantum events is the possibilities that zero energy particle pairs may spontaneously come into existence. This so-called vacuum fluctuation forms the basis of standard cosmological theory. Incidentally, Buddhist cosmogony is validated by this model. In their view, the universe began as a spontaneous fluctuation, arising out of nothing. The fluctuation even has a vocalization, the syllable “Ohm.” Whatever its sound, out of nothing, one such vacuum fluctuation formed a quantum bubble, which had the precise composition needed to allow it to overcome immediate collapse under its own gravitational pull. This bubble is understood to have rapidly inflated immediately after its generation, expanding and cooling over the next ten or so billion years. When temperatures declined, more languid reactions could occur, such as those in a chemical soup that pulled together the amino acid constituents of biological life. Four billion years later, descendents of those same amino acids – progeny of elements pounded together in the furnace of stars, coalescences of matter and energy – would be seen eating breakfast cereals on this very morning.
As if observing our lives to be the product of these events were not enough, description of this fourteen billion year evolution should offer some sense of calmness in this life with so many foibles. So my experiment does not turn out as I’d hoped; is the cosmos so simple that it should always bend itself to my inquiry? Human achievement is directly related to human ability, and as long as I work to hone my skill in this profession, human understanding will be advanced. So I spill wine at a formal; humanity has yet to evolve perfect dexterity. So I catch a flat; nothing made will last forever. Breadth of perspective helps us to find a stable place of comfort when social pressures might have us mistaking what we want to happen for what often happens.
In addition to enabling acceptance of the world as it presents itself to us, observing the known scale of the cosmos should afford us perspective regarding what to do with this life. We know that the real significance of our lives is generally bound to that space just around our passing. Thus we should do everything that we can to cultivate the world around us for the mutual benefit it affords upon cultivator and cultivated.
In a given lifetime, the galaxy will have rotated about 1/6250 of a degree. Dinosaurs roamed the earth the last time our solar system was in the same place in the galaxy. Who knows where we’ll be the next time around? I try not to think about that, since it’s really quite impossible to predict. Similarly, I’ll leave other elements of chance to the winds and focus on doing well those things that are in my power to control. What else can an improbable construct of random quantum processes do?
As grad students, we frequently combine science and sandwiches at lunchtime departmental seminars and meetings. But how often are we also able to use these same things to bring a smile to the face of a stranger?
On August 3rd, a group of Emory and Georgia Tech scientists and volunteers did just that when they hosted a luncheon for members of Side by Side Brain Injury Clubhouse, a day program for individuals who have experienced a brain injury. Side by Side provides a supportive environment for adults with acquired brain injuries to learn coping strategies and life skills while working and socializing with others. Members of the Clubhouse have a wide range of skills and abilities, and are encouraged to use and develop these abilities through a variety of volunteer tasks at the clubhouse, such as meal preparation, office tasks, and general maintenance. Side by Side members also participate in frequent game nights, social outings, and educational events to foster community between members of the Clubhouse, their families, and the greater Atlanta community.
And of course, if you want to learn about current brain research and socialize with neuroscientists in Atlanta, where better to go than Emory? With the support of the GDBBS, Neuroscience program, and BGSA, GIVE (Graduate Students Involved in Volunteerism at Emory) extended an invitation to Side by Side for a lunch event that would include presentations from researchers studying brain injury and tours of their labs. GDBBS students Monica Chau, Todd Deveau, Alisha Epps, and Shannon Mills, Georgia Tech students Chloe and Dielle Meyer, Neuroscience professors Michelle LaPlaca and Shan Ping Yu, Emergency Medicine professor Iqbal Sayeed, and GDBBS staff Margie Varnado and Gary Longstreet graciously donated their time, enthusiasm, and expertise. Ten Side by Side members and three staff attended the event, and their questions and stories challenged and inspired us all to remember the faces behind our research.
Dr. Iqbal Sayeed of the Donald Stein lab opened the luncheon with a presentation about the beneficial effects of progesterone in traumatic brain injury. Neuroscience students Monica Chau and Todd Deveau explained iPS stem cell lines and their use in experimental stroke models in the Yu and Wei labs. Joint Emory-Georgia Tech professor Michelle LaPlaca then explained her lab’s research on the biomechanics of TBI. Side by Side members were eager to ask questions throughout, and their interest and enthusiasm for brain injury research was infectious, as explained by GDBBS student Shannon Mills: “This was a unique opportunity, in that the topics that were shared were directly relating to issues affecting the audience and were able to give them hope for how issues they have gone through could be handled better in the future.” In the words of a Side by Side guest, Tony, as summarized by volunteer coordinator Virginia Vaughan, “We met some wonderful people who we hope can visit our Clubhouse and learn more about what we do here.” Tony was impressed that, at Emory, they are really looking into what they can do about brain injuries. “It gives us hope.” Not only did Side by Side members benefit from the presentations, but the researchers themselves also benefitted from the inspiration they received from those affected by the very problems they are researching. This event strengthened a critical link between the microscope slides, animal models, and cellular mechanisms studied in lab, and the human faces that provide the driving force for and are most strongly impacted by these experiments, as emphasized by Neuroscience student Monica Chau: “I really enjoyed sharing my stroke and stem cell research with the Side by Side group, because I felt that it had personal significance to them.”
Following these presentations, Side by Side members and Emory/Tech volunteers divided into three groups for lab demonstrations and tours. Each group went to their lab of choice, and was able to tour either the Stein lab or Yu/Wei lab or participate in a demonstration of an interactive computer program created by the LaPlaca lab. The lab tours enabled the Side by Side members to truly visualize and experience what neuroscience research is all about and allowed the researchers to view the process of scientific discovery from a fresh perspective, adding a new element of encouragement and motivation to their work. Seeing people recovering from brain injury viewing brain sections from rodent models of brain injury brought the reasons and results for scientific inquiry full circle, reinforcing the importance and need for future research and improved therapeutics. Oftentimes in science, we become so focused on a particular gene or receptor of interest, or spend so much time in lab with our rats, mice, or cells, that we become at risk of losing focus on the ultimate end goal of better understanding and improving human brain function, and this event helped participants refocus on this goal. In the words of Neuroscience student Todd Deveau: “As a graduate student invested in translational research, it is easy to get stuck at the bench and lose sight of why we are doing what we are doing. Having the opportunity to present our research to and interact with people who experienced brain injury was an extremely refreshing and rewarding experience. Overall it was a great experience and I hope to participate again in the future.”
GIVE hopes to maintain a relationship with Side by Side through attendance at the Clubhouse’s game nights on the second Friday of every month, a hope that was seconded by Side by Side guests. Additionally, volunteers hope to host additional events connecting GDBBS researchers with those coping with the diseases and disorders studied by Emory students. Anyone interested in volunteering at these or other events is encouraged to contact Margie Varnado (mvarnad@emory.edu) or Side by Side (http://www.sidebysideclubhouse.org/). As volunteer Shannon Mills summarized: “I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to pour out our knowledge to help others in the community be more aware of what’s going on in the world of science around them. I was glad to participate and share my time with so many great people and smiling faces.” And really, what student could pass up sandwiches, smiles, and science?
1) (a) Aoi, W. et al. Titanium-treated surroundings attenuate psychological stress associated with autonomic nerve regulation in office workers with daily emotional stress. Physiology & behavior 108, 13–8 (2012). (b) Fabricated.
(c) Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D.A. & Bloom, P. Disgusting smells cause decreased liking of gay men. Emotion 12, 23–7 (2012).
2) (a) Malik, T.A., Luz, L. P. & Peter, S. Caught on camera: an unusual type of bug in the gut. Gastrointestinal endoscopy 73, 363–4 (2011).
(b) Moreno, L. et al. Automatic analysis of signals with symbolic content. Artificial intelligence in medicine 18, 245–65 (2000). (c) Fabricated.
*Special thanks to James Burkett, Chubee Nemeth, and Kara K.
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