Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, short wavers, producer Rachel Carlson in the host chair today with a story about brain machine interfaces, brain implants. Paul Niyajukian studied this for a long time. He's at the Brain Interfacing Lab at Stanford University. And you guys, Paul does so many things. He's a medical doctor, an engineer, a neuroscientist.
I have a lot of hats.
Around 10 years ago, Paul was at a
just think about what they wanted to happen, and a little cursor on the screen of a tablet would sort of move around and let them type on the screen, send emails, text messages, play games.
Which was so exciting for Paul. So one day, he's at a big medical conference on brain-machine interfaces.
I distinctly remember a conversation with a director of a very prominent medical device company.
Naturally, he's eager to show off all the strides he's made in his research. So he pulls out his phone and starts to show these industry guys a video of his work.
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Chapter 2: What is the main focus of Paul Nuyujukian's research?
You know, if I wanted to help these individuals, if I wanted to see my work make it past the finish line, I would have to go after bigger problems in brain disease.
Meaning problems affecting more people. And one problem that affects a lot of people? Stroke. One in four adults are predicted to have a stroke in their lifetime. That's according to the World Health Organization. So... Paul pivoted. Today on the show, how does the brain recover from stroke?
We go down to the individual neuron level with Paul to see how studying single cells could be the key to getting a bigger picture of the brain. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. We're talking to Paul Niyajukian, whose lab at Stanford Studies had the brain controls movement, including after neurological events like stroke. See, brain tissue needs blood flow to function.
And when that blood flow is interrupted, like in a stroke, that tissue starts to die. Strokes vary from person to person. They can be so small, someone doesn't even know they had one. Or a cause of death. And in between, they can cause speech problems, numbness, paralysis. And Paul studies the brain, mostly monkey brains. But he does it in sort of an unusual way.
A lot of the times, neuroscientists look at groups of neurons, brain cells. But Paul's lab uses single neurons, which lets them get finer details than they could by looking at the group. In our conversation together, Paul compared the brain to a stadium. And if you want to capture what's going on inside the stadium, you could just put a microphone in the middle of the field.
You will hear the crowd roaring, the crowd falling silent, right? The crowd just sort of, you know, being bored and not very excited. But I believe that in order to advance brain disease treatment, right, to develop the most sophisticated brain machine interfaces, we got to get into the stands with the microphone to hear those individual conversations between neurons.
Paul, you study individual neurons in the brains of monkeys mostly. How do you do that?
Well, we do it with these tiny little wires that are implanted surgically into the brain. These little wires called electrodes measure the individual voltage changes that one neuron signals to another. The little digital event that says, I've got something to say. That's one millisecond.
Got it. So you do neurosurgery, you implant these wires, electrodes, and then they're measuring the little blips in the brain of the monkeys. What kinds of studies do you do after you've implanted these electrodes?
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