858: Studying New Cellular Mechanisms of Memory Involving Myelin - Dr. Douglas Fields

0:00Hey listeners, I'm Dr. Marie McNeely, and this is episode 858 of People Behind the Science. Thank you so much for joining me today to revisit a great conversation with our guest, Dr. Douglas Fields. Listeners, Doug studies how the brain develops and the mechanisms involved in changes to the brain structure and function called plasticity. He's particularly interested in how experience regulates development and plasticity in the brain, as well as the mechanisms at a cellular level that are involved in learning. And in this episode, he discusses his career,

0:32his life outside the lab, and some of the exciting research that he's done over the years. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

1:08Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Douglas Fields. So, Doug, welcome to our show today. How are you? Great. Thank you for having me on. Well, we are so excited to have you with us today, and I'm looking forward to chatting more about you, your life, and your work. But let's start by giving our listeners a little bit of background first. So, listeners, Doug is Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institutes of Health, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

1:43In addition, he is author of numerous books and magazine articles about the brain, including the recently released book, Electric Brain, How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, tells us how we learn and helps us change for the better. Doug received his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of California, Berkeley, his master's degree in marine biology from San Jose State University, and his PhD in marine biology from the University of California, San Diego, working jointly in the Medical School and Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Afterwards, Doug conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Yale University, and

2:18the National Institutes of Health before starting his research laboratory there at the NIH in 1994. Doug is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is the founder and editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Neuron Glial Biology. And in our interview today, Doug is going to share more about his life and science. So, Doug, we're excited to hear about it all. So, let's start with what you like to do when you're not. Doing science. Sure. Well, I enjoy rock climbing and mountain climbing, and I like to build guitars. I like

2:49to make beer and wine and recently even made a still, but I was just interested in that process. But primarily it's guitar and climbing is what I do. But one of the main activities that I enjoy is writing about science for a general audience. Phenomenal. I'm fascinated. I've never met someone who builds guitars. So, how did you get into this and what kind of guitars do you make? Oh, I make all kinds of guitars. The ones I enjoy making most are acoustic guitars, and I make all kinds, classical, steel string, lap guitars. Electric guitar is more furniture

3:21building, but an acoustic guitar is an art. And until you string it up and play it, you don't know if you've built a musical instrument or a birdhouse. But I got interested. I was coming back from Woods Hole Marine Labs, Massachusetts, where I'd spent the summer. I had a summer lab up there and I play guitar and I was interested in going to the Martin Guitar Factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. So, I went there and learned how they make guitars. And I saw the process was so complicated that I would never undertake it, although I had toyed with the idea. But then I

3:52found a book in the bookshop about building guitars. And it was a wonderful book and really well-written. And that got me interested. And so, I began to build guitars and I started going to luthier conferences the same way I'd go to scientific conferences, but hanging out with right-brained people. And it's a lot of fun. When you do science, it's hard very often to see progress because you work every day and it goes very slowly. But you can come home at night and do a little bit of work on your guitar, carve the braces or glue the neck or something. And then it's got to sit and wait. And you come back the next day and you do some more. And so, you can see

4:26progress every day. So, that's one of the fun things. Definitely. So, what do you do with the guitars when you're finished with one? Do you keep it? Do you sell it? Do you give it to friends? Do you have a collection? I give them away because they're too much work to sell. I enjoy giving them away. And I have plenty that I keep as well. But mainly, I give them away. I love it. Well, Doug, it sounds like you have a lot to keep you busy outside of work. But I know you are doing some phenomenal work as well. So, I'd love to chat about that side of your life. So, how do you describe what you do to people who aren't very familiar with science?

4:58Well, I'm a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health. I usually tell people, I'm a nuts and bolts scientist to differentiate from people who study the brain through psychology. I'm interested in how the brain develops and mechanisms of plasticity, particularly how experience regulates the development and plasticity of the brain and the cellular mechanisms of learning. I know you interviewed Nick Spitzer. He was one of my professors at UC San Diego. Oh, wow. And now, actually, we've been colleagues, kept in close communication throughout my career.

5:32But he's interested in a similar kind of thing. And this is what's the most fascinating thing to me about the brain is how it is developed and modified by experience. So, the human brain cheats evolution by developing after birth. When a baby's born, you can't do anything, really. And that's because the brain isn't developed. And it is not fully developed until the early 20s. Why is that? That is because the environment that you are born into will affect the way your brain is wired and make your brain and abilities ideally suited to the environment that you're born into. I mean,

6:07we don't live in caves anymore. So, that's a very interesting aspect. And of course, brain plasticity is also very important in overcoming injury and disease. And the mechanisms of memory have always been very fascinating to me. Certainly. Well, I look forward to chatting more about your research as we go through our interview. But as I mentioned in our introduction, you are an author as well. So, can you talk a little bit about your writing work here and what that's like? I enjoy writing. It's infectious. I do a lot of writing for magazines, and I've written three popular books. And I guess what I like about writing is pure creativity.

6:39All the other things that I do, I enjoy. They're creative. Photography is creative. Science is creative. Making guitars is creative. But there's always this instrument between you and the creative act. Writing is pure creativity because the minute that sentence bubbles up to your cerebral cortex, your consciousness, the creative act is over. And now you're just producing it. It's reproduction. Write it down. But I also like learning new things and that it opens up doors. I get to travel around the world and visit people and call them up on the phone. So, it broadens my interest and my experience.

7:11And I get to meet wonderful people and learn more diverse aspects of science than if I was in my own field. So, I really do enjoy writing. And I enjoy sharing the science. I mean, I love science. I love doing it, reading about it, writing about it, sharing, talking about it. It's very rewarding. Absolutely. And Doug, it sounds like you are packing a lot into every day between the research, the writing, and all these hobbies outside of science. And I love getting bits of motivation and inspiration and just learning more about what keeps scientists going. So, can you talk a little bit about what motivates you or if you have a favorite quote or a saying that just really resonates with you?

7:45Well, first of all, scientists are born with motivation. You have to have strong motivation to do science. And I don't know where it comes from, but scientists are driven by curiosity, the why question, and just wanting to learn. So, that's just a gift. I don't know where it comes from, your environment and your upbringing, but that's important. So, in terms of motivational quotes, I think an important one is follow your dreams. When you come to decisions in life as to what you should do and you try and make the decision, just follow your dream, not somebody else's dream,

8:16not what you think you should do or what your parents think you should do or what is the right political thing. And if you're guided by your dreams and you don't achieve them, that's fine. At least you did everything you could. But I think one of the worst feelings is regret. Had an opportunity or considered doing something and you made the choice or you failed to take the path that was where your heart was leading you. So, follow your dreams. I like that quote because I think otherwise you're left with that, especially as a scientist, perhaps that nagging curiosity, wondering what would have

8:47happened if you would have done that. So, wonderful motivational quote to share with me and our listeners. And we touched on the fact that Nick Spitzer, who's a phenomenal person, was a professor of yours. And I'd love to talk about some of these people who you've encountered in life and in science. So, when you think back over your life, Doug, are there particular role models or mentors or people that you can really point to that had a big impact on you? That's one of the wonderful things about science is that you get to meet so many wonderful people. Scientists by nature are curious about the world.

9:18They're interesting. They're intelligent. So, they're wonderful people to talk to and to meet. So, I'm very pleased and feel very gifted to have been able to meet so many great scientists. But throughout my career, I can't just pick one. But there are people that come to mind. And I think that we all owe a lot to our teachers through high school and grade school. I think that's the formative years. And I was lucky in high school. And I don't know why. My teacher, Mrs. St. John, knew that I was very much a science nerd, very interested in science. And she excused me from biology class so that I could

9:52do experiments. You probably couldn't do that today. I mean, the curriculum comes down from the county. My wife is a high school biology teacher. But she let me do experiments so long as I would just take the tests and do okay on the tests. And I did pure science. At the time, there was a big controversy. The idea was that memory was coded in our DNA. And this was supported by experiments in which scientists would train animals, flatworms, but also mice and rats, to run a maze. Then they would extract the RNA or just grind up the brain and feed it to a naive animal. And the animal acquired the

10:27memory. So this was the prevailing theory of how memory worked. So I did those experiments. I trained goldfish and rats and extracted their memory and put it into a naive animal. And it didn't work. I also communicated with scientists at Berkeley who are doing that kind of research. So that was exciting just to have a scientist write you back. So with the passage of time, it became apparent that that was all bad science. Those were bad, poorly designed experiments. The theory was all wrong. Then in junior college, I had an enthusiastic teacher, Doug Cheeseman, and he was just so enthusiastic and

11:01supportive. I then went into marine biology after Berkeley. And then I went to get a master's degree and I studied ichthyology. And there my professor was Greg Kaye. And he was a wonderful professor. I learned a lot about how to do science, quantitative analysis, and collecting data. And he was very supportive and he didn't put his name on research papers that I published. He was very generous. Oh, wow. So as I said, I was originally a marine biologist. And one of the things that I discovered as a marine biologist was that these very deep sea fish could sense electric fields. I was working for the

11:35Department of Fish and Game at the time, and they got this very bizarre deep sea fish called a ratfish, hydrolycus collii. It has eyes like a rabbit, fluorescent green, and it swims with its front pectoral fins, and it has a tail like a snake. It's a very bizarre looking fish. So they got that. And of course, it wasn't any commercial value. So they let me take it home. So I took it home. I'm a graduate student. So I decided to eat it. And as I was dissecting it, I noticed it had these strange structures in the head that reminded me of electroreceptors in sharks. So I wonder if these

12:07could be electroreceptors. It had just been discovered that sharks can sense electric fields that are created by all animals in water. So that became my master's thesis to explore that question. I don't recommend eating ratfish. It tastes terrible. I was going to ask. But it was intellectually nourishing. But then how do you get one of these things? They only get three a year in Monterey. But I had close relationships with local fishermen, and they got one. And they called me, kept it alive. I showed up, I got the fish,

12:37took it back to the lab. And then I knew that it was only going to live a few days and that it couldn't feed in captivity. And I wanted to prove that it could sense weak electric fields. So I put it in an aquarium that was a ring-shaped aquarium, swam against the current. And then my idea is I put electrodes underneath the sand that when it went over an electrode, I would tap it with a glass rod. And eventually, when I switched on this electric current, if it could sense that, it would turn around rather than get hit by the rod. So that would prove that either that it

13:08could sense electric fields or that you can't train fish. Anyway, I flipped the switch one time and the fish turned around. So I knew it could sense electric fields. Then I could change the strength and the frequency and learned all about that. Then getting to your question, Professor David Lang from Scripps showed up in his VW bus full of electronic equipments. He was a neurophysiologist and he had preamplifiers, oscilloscopes, and all kinds of equipment that I'd never seen. I was at Moss Landing Marine Lab teaching school. We didn't do a lot of high-tech

13:38research. So here he had all this equipment and expertise. So I decided that we would, working with Dave, that we would record the impulses, neural impulses from these organs to see if they really respond to electric fields. So we did that on the same fish. And then I did the anatomy on the fish. I did electron microscopy. And then that was my first paper and it was published in science. So I had behavior, anatomy, and physiology, but I don't think they realized it was all one fish. But anyway, I then applied to a PhD program at Scripps in San Diego. He became my major professor

14:11and he was influential. And Mark Ellisman was my major professor. He's an electron microscopist. But in terms of role models, it was definitely Theodore Bullock, who was one of the people who started the Society for Neuroscience. He had an encyclopedic mind and understanding of nervous systems. So he was a great inspiration. He believed in writing and communicating science to the public. So very often when I find myself wondering what I should do in a career situation or a scientific situation, I would just ask myself, well, what would Bullock do? And then I would do what I think he would have

14:44done. That is phenomenal. It sounds like you've had some great mentors and role models and people to look up to throughout your career. And you hinted that in grade school, you had already sort of been pegged as a science nerd, someone who was super excited about science. So how did this start? Do you remember when you first had this interest? I guess I was just always a science nerd. I always loved science. I can't remember when I didn't. So I'm one of these fortunate people who always knew what I wanted to do. My bedroom had a lab bench in it and I did experiments. I mean, today you get arrested because a lot of them involved making

15:18explosives, but I was doing it for research and I had animals all over. I enjoyed taxidermy and I would collect and preserve animals and I couldn't pass a roadkill without bringing it home and seeing what this exotic animal was. So did your parents support this? I must ask. Yeah, they did. Really? I had to order these chemicals and I'm a teenager. So they signed for it. Saltpeter and pound of carbon. Don't ask questions.

15:45They supported it. But in fact, that's what you have to do with kids. You have to help them find what they're interested in and whatever it is, support them. So anyway, I've always been interested in science. That is phenomenal. We've talked about some of the steps in your research training that helped you get to where you are today. But can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up at the National Institutes of Health? I think it's a good lesson because I talk to a lot of students and they worry about their degree and pick the right one and everything. And careers are not linear. So I went into marine

16:16biology and biological oceanography at Scripps, but I was actually studying the nervous system after the ratfish. I studied electroreception and sharks. So I was always studying the nervous system. I then did postdoc at Stanford and Yale, but I went to the NIH as a postdoc and thought I would be there for just two years. And that was in 1987 and I'm still there. So how did they manage to keep you for so long? Well, I feel fortunate. The National Institutes of Health funds nearly all the biomedical research in the country, but it's funded by investigators and universities sending in their grant applications

16:52and then a committee of scientists and all scientists end up serving on these, evaluating whether this new proposal is novel and important and worth funding. And the problem is by the time you get 25 people to agree that this is a new novel idea, it probably isn't. So the NIH realized that this is a problem that because we have scarce funding and NIH gives it out so carefully, that means that you tend to fund the safest research and not fund high risk research that could be high

17:23reward. So to solve that problem, the intramural program, which is what I am in, turns that process around, you're given the money and then you are allowed to do the research that you think is important, but not to compete with the kind of research that other scientists would be getting funded through R01s. You're supposed to be doing something that is high risk and innovative and probably wouldn't pass review by that committee. And if you do that, you're reviewed every four years. And if you do that, then you can stay for another four years. If you don't succeed, then you get

17:54another two years and then your lab will be closed. So what that has meant is that I think throughout my career at NIH, I have been able to do research that was that type of research. It wouldn't have been funded on the outside, but it did prove to be novel and important and open new areas of research. So that's why I'm at the NIH. Wonderful. And I know over the years, you have worked on so many cool projects. So is there one in particular, Doug, that you want to tell us more about today, perhaps one that's ongoing in the lab right now? The thing I'm most excited about now is a new cellular mechanism

18:27of memory and learning involving myelin. And in fact, in the current issue that just came out this week of Scientific American, I have an article explaining this new mechanism of learning and my research. When you say plasticity, people think of synaptic plasticity, all the fundamental basis of learning and plasticity is based on making synapses stronger or weaker or breaking them or making new synapses. Synapses are the connections between neurons. And that's been the case since Pavlov or at least since Hebb. But when you start to look at the brain as a network, you get out of the synapse.

19:02We've learned a lot about the synapse and synaptic plasticity, and I study that in my lab. But when you look at the network operation of the brain, that's a different perspective. The most important thing in any transportation or information network is what time you get to your relay point. You're taking a flight to San Francisco, connecting through Denver. You've got to get to Denver at the right time. Can't miss your flight. If you get there too early, that's not good. The human brain is the most complicated network in the universe with trillions of connections. And the speed of transmission of information travel at widely different speeds from a slow walk to that

19:37of a race car. So how did all those speeds get set so that you have synchrony of impulses arriving at every relay in the brain? So the idea is that you would be able to adjust the conduction velocity to optimize simultaneous arrival at relay points through the brain. And the mechanism for that involved myelin. So myelin is the electrical insulation on axons. And traditionally, it has been considered static and inert, no relevance to learning or memory. Of course, it's very important

20:09in disease. Multiple sclerosis is a disease that results when this insulation is breaking down. And it's made by a non-neuronal cell. But my research, beginning about 25 years ago, showed that these cells, non-neuronal cells, could sense electrical activity going through these circuits. We identified how that was possible and how that took place. That activity would then control the development of these cells that make myelin and the formation of myelin to control the speed of impulse propagation through this network. So that's what I'm most excited about now. And the

20:40article that's out this month will explain that a lot better than I just did.

20:45So can you tell us briefly, I guess, what the connection is then with memory if you've figured out some of these timing elements? How does that relate to memory then? Well, in a couple of ways. First of all, the fundamental theory of changing a strength of a synaptic connection is simultaneous arrival. It's called spike time dependent plasticity. That means that impulses have to arrive at the same time to make that synapse stronger. So Pavlov had to present the bell and the food at the same time to make the connection to salivate to make that synapse stronger. And if you don't have those two signals at the same time, then you don't strengthen that

21:19connection. So how are you ever going to get simultaneous arrival if the path lengths are different from different parts of the brain to the synapse where these two impulses converge unless you can change the speed so that you can speed it up from the long distance pathway and slow it down from the shorter pathway? That's one important aspect. The other is any complex cognitive function, learning anything, requires sending information through multiple points in your brain. So learning to play the guitar, let's say, requires sending information through many different regions of the

21:53brain. And when you first do it, it's very, very slow. You're consciously thinking about where to put your fingers. And as you learn, then suddenly it gets better. And then it becomes automatic. Learning to ride a bike is maybe a better example. It's hard. You practice, practice, then suddenly you've got it. And it's an enormous amount of coordination to ride a bike. Imagine trying to make a machine that could ride a bike. So this is a different kind of memory from what Pavlov studied, reflex learning. This is the kind of learning that's really most interesting, I think, to humans, these complex kinds of learning, learning to play the piano, that kind of thing.

22:25Very cool. Well, Doug, we are excited to hear more about your research than we've touched on and sort of hinted at some of the challenges that you've faced over the course of your career and just in general that scientists face in terms of getting funding, that uncertainty as you go down your career path. So we love talking about these challenges because I think they are so important to share with our listeners who often only hear the success stories in science. So Doug, do you have a favorite story of a failure or a challenge or one of these difficult times that you've faced that you can tell us about today? If you're doing science, there's no such thing as failure. I mean, if the experiment doesn't work,

22:59that's fine. That's part of the process. I mean, it's also like rock climbing. If you're not falling, then you're not trying hard enough. That's part of the process. You expect to fall. If you don't get your papers rejected, you're not trying to get them in high enough journals. And if you're just doing research where the answer is pretty clear and predictable, you're not really pushing the frontiers of science. So you don't really fail unless you have falsified data or totally messed up, that's a failure. So I don't really have that sense. I do have the sense though, in terms of hard times,

23:30there's a lot of difficulty in doing science involved in funding, getting equipment, getting personnel, getting the idea is not enough. It can be a brilliant idea, but you've got to get all the materials and personnel and people all together to do that. So that's difficult. And when things fail, it's often because of that. And collaborations are wonderful. They're one of the best things in science, but they have a high rate of failure that many times don't work. They're very difficult to coordinate. And now there's more and more legal issues of the institution wants to know who's

24:02going to get a patent on it. So those are the kinds of things that I feel impede me, but I understand why they're necessary, but I don't feel failure in science. Certainly. Well, I think you brought up an important point that failure is part of the process. And I think this is something that a lot of early scientists sort of struggle to wrap their heads around and accept as part of the process. And you mentioned that part of the challenge is in just in getting all of the pieces to come together to be able to do your science. So do you have an example of a challenging time that you had just getting all those pieces, whether it was staff, equipment, funding, collaborations,

24:35getting everything together to make a project a success? I can't think of any one example, but I have many now. I have many experiments in mind that I really want to do and I can't do, but I'll look for the opportunities to make them happen. That really is a big part of science is that plenty of ideas, not enough people, not enough resources or opportunity. So I'll give you one example right now. So I haven't worked on electroreception in years, and it's a big mystery of how these sharks can sense electric fields that are half a nanovolt per centimeter. So in theory, if you connected a one and a half volt battery across

25:08the Atlantic, a shark could tell whether it was on or off. It's just phenomenal. We don't have anything like that in electronics. And the neural impulse is activated by millivolts. We're talking about millions of times more voltage than the sharks can detect. I think I know how that works, but I'm going to have to get access to sharks and I'm going to have to get a place to do the research. This is nothing that I would be able to do at the NIH because it's not really biomedicine, it's basic science. So that's an example. I think I've known for 10 years how those organs work,

25:40and I would just love to be able to go test my idea. And I will someday. I don't know how. You just need to add some more hours to your day too, I think. Yeah. Well, it'd be great fun to go to Woods Hole and be by the ocean. Woods Hole is wonderful. Absolutely. Well, Doug, thank you so much for chatting about some of these challenges that you face in science. But we don't just want to talk about the difficult times. I'd love to highlight some of your successes as well. So do you have a favorite success story, whether it was a big win or just a small victory that was particularly meaningful that you want to share with me and our listeners today?

26:11That's easier. And it's always your latest paper. But in this case, it was really quite sweet because this paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showed that myelin could change its structure and that the node of Rambier, which is where impulses are generated, these are the repeaters along nerves that generate the impulse. Those were structurally changing their structure. And we determined how that happened. And the reason that's important is that the speed that information, neural impulses, pass through an axon, a nerve fiber,

26:44is dependent on the thickness of the sheath and the structure of the node. And we were able to show that the myelin is not static, that it can change its thickness. And we identified down to the cellular and the molecular level how that worked. And it involved another kind of cell, another glial cell. Glial cells don't get as much study as neurons, even though 85% of the cells in the brain are glia. Glia are brain cells that communicate without electricity, but they can control neurons. So publishing that paper was a great achievement. It was definitely 10 years of work. And that means

27:17submitting the paper and having it rejected, presenting the work at scientific meetings and being harshly criticized because the dogma was that myelin couldn't change. So that's a recent success. Certainly. Well, congratulations on the success that you mentioned was many years in the making. And I'm curious, Doug, is this a behavior that all types of neurons exhibit or are there particular neurons that seem to do this more? Well, these would only be neurons that have myelin. And myelin does not exist in animals that don't have

27:47backbonds. This is actually what separates the cognitive power of a vertebrate from an invertebrate, things like flies and worms compared to dolphins and dogs and people. And it's largely due to the formation of myelin because that allowed high speed impulse transmission. And that meant that you can have smaller diameter axons because the only way to increase the speed of conduction if you don't have myelin is to make the axon bigger. You can get more water through a big fire hose than a small one. But animals without backbones, they have ganglia. They don't have one brain. They have

28:21multiple brains all over their bodies because the conduction velocity is so slow. A shrimp will have a ganglia, a collection of neurons at each joint in its articulated tail, for example. But because vertebrates had myelin, they could compress all of these neurons in the body into one organ, which was the brain. And then that allowed for complex interactions that ultimately led to a higher level cognitive function. So what did it feel like then when you were able to get that paper accepted that really did go contrary to this dogma that had been long held for many years?

28:54Well, it was a struggle. So it was wonderful to get it published. And where you publish things are important. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences views one of its missions as being able to publish work that goes against dogma. They specifically recognize that. And the papers that go there are handled by members of the National Academy of Science. Some of the other higher profile journals didn't take the paper. Gotcha. I know you've had quite a bit of success, not only in your scientific writing for scientific journals, but for writing books as well. So I'd love to chat about books next. And we'll be sure to add

29:29your most recent books as well as some of the previous ones to our reading list on our website. But can you tell our listeners a little bit about these books first? Sure. So the first book I wrote for the popular audience, general reader, was called The Other Brain. And that book is about glia. And I wrote that book at a time when neuroscientists were just opening their eyes to these neuronal cells in the brain that had been ignored. Glia means glue, and they had been considered connective tissue. You'll note that glia is plural because it was stuff. There is no singular noun for these cells. And neuroscientists didn't go into studying the brain to

30:04study the connective tissue. So they've been ignored. But at this time, new methods revealed that these glial cells communicate without electricity, that they can control neural communications, they can control synaptic transmission, they're involved in every aspect of health and disease. And so as that was happening, I wanted to capture that moment in history, that pivotal moment, and then explain this new science. The next book was Why We Snap. And that's about the neuroscience of sudden aggression. I travel a lot as a scientist, but I always travel alone. And in this case, I was going to a scientific meeting in Barcelona. My daughter,

30:39Kelly, had just graduated from high school. So we took the opportunity for her to go see outside the United States for the first time. And I was giving a lecture in Barcelona on my research. But before that, we had some time to run to the Gaudi Cathedral. We were coming up out of the subway station, and I felt this tap at my pants pocket. I had cargo pants right above my knee, and I slapped it, my wallet was gone. And I instantly reached back and grabbed the guy by the neck and flipped him onto the ground and jumped on his back and put him in a chokehold and

31:11started fighting with this guy to get my wallet back. Oh, my goodness. And at that particular moment, this question bubbles up to my mind, what are you doing?

31:20Your daughter's asking the same thing, right? My daughter thinks that my job at the NIH is a cover. Anyway, that was truly scary. And I described that in the book, because if something in our environment can cause you to engage in a life or death struggle with no conscious thought, I wanted to understand how that worked. And that led to that whole study and very fascinating new research on neuroscience of sudden aggression. I also did an article in Scientific American earlier this year on that. So that's what led to that book. And people need to understand, okay,

31:52I don't have any martial arts experience. I weigh 130 pounds, gray hair, wearing glasses. I'm never in the military. I don't get in street fights. But I realized that we, like all animals, have this innate defensive behavior to protect, in this case, my daughter and my valuables or whatever. It was the wrong thing to do. I mean, that's dumb. You should just give your wallet to a robber. Don't fight. In hindsight, right? Yeah. Well, that's also what drove me to write the book, because it wasn't the right thing to do. And I wanted to know how to control that. Anyway, so that's what that book's about.

32:24My current book that just came out is Electric Brain. And this is about brainwaves. And it's fascinating to me, because we hear a lot about brainwaves, I think, in the press. But it's all superficial. And a lot of it's wrong. And people don't really know what they are. And this science of brainwaves is really revolutionary advance in brain science that really going to transform medicine and society. And I learned about this as a scientist before it was published. And I started pursuing this research. In addition to being able to diagnose neurological illnesses by brainwaves and

32:58other methods to monitor electrical activity in the brain, psychiatric conditions, ADHD, schizophrenia, can be revealed by monitoring electrical activity in the brain. This is all in research labs right now, but it's soon going to find its way into medical practice. What's really fascinating is that by recording somebody's brainwaves for five minutes while they do nothing, but let their mind wander, will reveal how that individual's brain is wired. The IQ, personality, what you're good at,

33:29what you're bad at, what kinds of things you can learn easily are all revealed. And you can monitor activity in a preschooler's brain for five minutes and know how well that child will be able to read when they go to school. So this is really going to change society. And I think that's really interesting. In addition, there was this big mystery I sensed underneath the science, which is fascinating enough. How come we don't know the name of the person who discovered brainwaves? Why isn't that in textbooks? So there was something fishy. So I went to these early pioneers labs around the world

34:01to look at their notebooks and try to see for myself who these people were. And one of them, the first person to record human brainwaves was Hans Berger. He did it in Jena, Germany. He ran a psychiatric hospital and he did these experiments in secret on mental patients. And what did he think he discovered? What motivated him? Those are all interesting questions and I go into it in the book, but he didn't tell anyone what he was doing. And then he kept his findings a secret for five years before he announced it. And then when he announced it, people dismissed it. And the storyline had been that

34:36in World War II, he had committed suicide as a result of persecution by the Nazis. The eugenics movement and forced sterilizations all began in mental hospitals. So Berger would have been right in the middle of that. But I went through his notes and I talked to some historians there who has recently become apparent from these documents that that was a false story and that he was a Nazi sympathizer. He was also very much involved in forced sterilizations. So interesting how history is a construct. After World War I, many of the people who had been in universities before were

35:08high in the Nazi party because the others were purged and they stayed on. So these people covered up what had happened. I don't have time to go through the whole history, but it's a fascinating history. I want to mention one thing. Near where I live is a town called Catonsville. And I didn't realize that it was named after Richard Caton, who was a London physician who in 1875 was the first person to record brainwaves. He discovered brainwaves and he did it in animals. 1875, there's no electricity flowing through anything. There are no amplifiers. How did he do that? So

35:39it's interesting to see how he did this. He's working by candlelight and gas lamps. If you want electricity, you got to make a battery or fly a kite and collect lightning, which is what these people did. So it's fascinating. He gave his lectures, he published his results. Nobody cared. Nobody got it. Nobody understood it. He was 50 years ahead of his time. So I think that's neat because probably today somebody has published a discovery and nobody gets it. And we won't appreciate it for decades until we catch up. He had everything right. And then my book's in three parts. I use different

36:12treatments for each part. The discovery of brainwaves and the history is part one. Part two is, all right, what are brainwaves? And this is really why I wrote the book because what brainwaves are has divided neuroscience into two camps. And this is really at the forefront of neuroscience right now. It's a huge controversy. Half of the field of neuroscientists believe that brainwaves are a fundamental new mechanism of how the brain operates at its most sophisticated level by coupling together neurons in different parts of the brain. For example, when you pull up a memory, it comes with sights and

36:43sounds and smells and emotions and place and time. Those things are all in different parts of your brain. How does that all come together? People think that brainwaves can couple all of that activity together. So this is a really important aspect of how the brain works. Other scientists say, no, the brain works at electrical activity and brainwaves are just noise, like the noise of an automobile engine. So to get into this question, I just take the reader around the world. I go into the labs, talk to the scientists who are doing the research. And because I'm a scientist, they'll talk to me and learn what's going on and what they think and what they are sure about and what they're unsure

37:16about and let the reader make their own mind. And that's fun because that's science in action. And part three, nobody doubts that analyzing and changing brainwaves is very important in terms of understanding the brain, in terms of neurological illness and psychiatric illness. So that's what part three is all about. Brain-computer interface. I interview a lot of people with chips in their heads that can control prosthetic limbs and things. So that's the book. And writing the book just gave me so many opportunities to interact with people that I wouldn't and hear their stories.

37:47Well, this is all fascinating. And I look forward to adding these books to our reading list on our website for our listeners to find there. Doc, are there any other books that you'd like to recommend that you think we should definitely add to our reading list? Well, a book I enjoyed is The Nature Fix by Florence Williams. It's sort of on the neuroscience of why we enjoy and need nature. I've always been struck when I go to Manhattan, it's most congested place and carved right out of the center is Central Park. And all the New Yorkers just worship that place and it keeps them sane. So that's interesting. In terms of fiction,

38:18I enjoyed reading most recently Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens. I thought the ending was a little bit contrived and not believable, but I enjoyed the nature. And I also enjoyed the mystery. In writing Why We Snap, I had a case of a murder where I knew both the murderer and the victim. It was Two Climbers. And I couldn't tell the story because the trial hadn't finished. So I had to do it as a whodunit. And I learned how hard it is to write a whodunit. But in terms of just thought provoking books, I really liked H.G. Wells' book Mind at the End of

38:50Its Tether, 1945. Wells amazes me in terms of writing. He came up with The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. And in this book, he looks at the evolution of the human brain and comes to the conclusion that we have reached the extravagant point where we are about to go extinct, basically. And it's interesting because we're comfortable with other animals going extinct. They elaborate to excess. Dinosaurs get huge and peacock tails get so big that the bird can't fly. And he's making the argument that we have evolved our brain to the

39:23point where it's dysfunctional. And I wonder about that. The statistics are one in a hundred people will have a schizophrenic episode in their life. They don't talk about it. But one in a hundred people, that's a lot. And a lot of people have criticized this book. It was the last book he wrote. It was kind of pessimistic, but I think it's intriguing and thought provoking. Certainly. Well, excellent recommendations, Doug. We will add these to our website for our listeners to find there. And we touched earlier on travel, and I'd love to dig in a little bit more because, as you mentioned, as a scientist, you have so many opportunities to talk to people,

39:56to meet with people, to go places that you otherwise wouldn't really be able to. So when you think back about all of these opportunities you've had, is there one in particular that really sticks out as the most memorable travel for science? I love travel, and that's an important part of it. As a scientist, I can go almost anywhere in the world and call up somebody and go talk to them. And that also works for my writing. So I had read that the scientist in Quito, Ecuador, had resurrected yeast from a 1,500-year-old pre-Incan tomb from their

40:30fermentation vessels, brought them back to life, and found that this yeast was a new species. And it proved how the conquistadors thought that these pre-Incan people had made their drink, which was called chicha, because the yeast was not the kind of yeast that we have in North America. It was candida. It comes from the body. So I had a lot of fun meeting this person. We drank some beer that he made out of some yeast that he had resurrected. And then he was going to take me into the pre-Incan tomb, but I went and climbed a mountain, Cotopaxi, and then due to a transportation

41:01problem, couldn't take me to this tomb. So I was there with my other daughter, who was a climber. So we decided to go find these tombs. And it was sort of like Indiana Jones. We went to museums, talked to people. Quito is kind of dangerous. And when you go from the airport to your hotel in Gringolandia, which is this little area where it's safe for tourists, the taxi driver doesn't stop at red lights because you'll get carjacked. So when we were going all through Quito, we were going through some pretty dangerous places. So that was kind of fun. But I enjoyed that. And I wrote that article, Raising the Dead for Scientific American.

41:35Very cool. So if our listeners have an opportunity to go to Quito or visit Ecuador in general, what is one thing they must do or see? Well, I think the mountains are wonderful there, the volcanoes. As a climber, that's what I enjoy. Phenomenal. Well, thank you so much for taking us with you on one of your scientific travel adventures. And throughout our conversation, we've sort of chatted about some of the ways in which scientists maybe don't meet the stereotypes that a lot of people have about us. You're a writer, you have all these hobbies outside of science as well. And I love breaking these stereotypes that people hold because I think scientists are these creative, amazing, funny, multifaceted people,

42:08and not everybody sees us that way. So Doug, when you think back over your life and your career, are there particular examples that you can think of that go contrary to these stereotypes? Maybe quirky lab traditions are just funny memories that really highlight this human side of science. Oh, you're right. And science takes all kinds. You need a patient person who can be a museum curator, but then you need the other kind who is, think on the fly, an electrophysiologist, and he's trying to eke out information from this brain cell that he's only going to have alive for a few minutes. So science takes all kinds and it's a big tent. I don't know. There are quite a few unusual times

42:43when I was a marine biologist, we would go out to San Nicolas Island to do field research. San Nicolas Island is owned by the Navy and it's been untouched for well over a hundred years. And to see a place that has never been touched by man is amazing. So we would go out there and we wouldn't bring anything except a six pack of beer. And at the end of the day, we'd just reach down and pick up abalone or a fish. So that's how Indians, our ancestors used to live because the world was a supermarket. So that was a lot of fun. In terms of quirky, funny things, this wouldn't happen

43:15anymore. We'd be thrown in jail. But back when I was a graduate student in San Diego, I used to make beer and wine in the cold room. Oh, wow. Now that's all illegal. I don't think that would fly. Yeah. It's all illegal, but it was just fun. It's just interesting. And it's all science. Fermentation is science and animal husbandry. So that was kind of weird and it shows how things have changed so much. Absolutely. So what is your favorite drink of choice to make? Well, I like making beer because you have control. When you make wine, it's very limited by the grapes.

43:47So you can do everything right, but it'll come out mediocre. But you can make any kind of beer you want. You have complete control. Phenomenal. Well, thank you for sharing some of these examples that, like I said, go contrary to some of the stereotypes that people have about what life is like as a scientist. And earlier in our conversation, Doug, you mentioned that you have some dream questions that you would love to get back to someday. But oftentimes, there's things like funding, staff, technology, feasibility, barriers standing between you and those dream questions. So if we gave you all of the resources you could dream of, all of the time

44:18you could desire, what is the one question that you would most want to answer? What I want to answer most right now is this new mechanism of memory and learning involving glial cells that make myelin. There's just so much more to learn. What I've told you about shows finally that myelin can change. And new research is coming out. Actually, just on Monday, there was another paper showing that many kinds of learning, fear conditioning, learning amaze, involves changes in myelin. But I need to understand if this new mechanism that I was telling you about,

44:51in which myelin can change its thickness to adjust conduction velocity, how that's involved in learning. So that's what I'm most interested in doing right now. And it's difficult because learning, just the field of learning, the process of learning is very complicated biology. There are different phases of learning, recall, consolidation, different parts of the brain involved. And now we're laying on a completely new idea. It doesn't involve synapses. It involves impulses and non-neuronal cells. So vast amount of area that we need to uncover there. I love it. Well, thank you for giving me and our listeners something to ponder for the rest of our

45:24day here. And we've covered a lot of ground during our conversation. But one thing I'd love to share with our listeners here at the end is advice. So Doug, can you think of one piece of advice that somebody gave you at some point that really helped you that you can pass on to all of us today? I don't know if it was ever articulated as some advice, but it was definitely a feeling reinforced to believe in yourself. The job of a scientist is to do something that's never been done before. That takes something. You can't cure cancer if you say, oh, that's impossible. You have

45:55to say, I can cure cancer. And that's pretty crazy, actually. But that's what you have to do. The job of a scientist is to do something that's not been done before, to predict the future and to get there first. None of that happens if you don't believe in yourself. I love it. Wonderful advice for me and our listeners, Doug. Can you tell our listeners if they want to learn more about you and the wonderful work you do, where should they go or how should they get in touch? Well, you can find out about my research at the NIH by probably just doing a Google search on the NIH. I work at NICHD, Child Health and Human

46:28Development, and you'll find my lab website there. I have a website for my outside activities of writing, which is rdouglasfields.com. And my email for general contact is just rdouglasfields at gmail.com. Perfect. Well, listeners, definitely check out those resources. Get in touch if you have any questions. And Doug, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you on the show today. Thank you for joining us. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you again. And listeners, it's been great to have you here as well. We'll see you next time on

46:59another episode of People Behind the Science.