Ashley: 0:00

You are a biological creature. Your mental life rides on the chemicals sloshing around in your brain.

Cat: 0:07

People have taken that to be like, okay, this picture of your brain determines everything that you can do, but you're saying the opposite. Like, hey, we're in dialogue with this brain.

Ashley: 0:16

You're on a trajectory that is in some part determined by your genome, but you are also modifying that trajectory every single day through your experience.

Cat: 0:32

We got a lot of interest from folks about Ashley being a neuroscientist and what we can think about here in this space.

Ashley: 0:39

Ooh, neuroscience.

Cat: 0:41

It's something that I love having in my house. What does a neuroscientist like you do every day?

Ashley: 0:48

I do feel like there's a difference between what people think neuroscience is and what a typical neuroscientist does in their day job. Throughout my training, I was working at this level that people would call systems neuroscience and systems neuroscience is about these questions about how neurons work together. How do they help us behave and make decisions and see things and move about the world. And, um, what that looks like on the daily is playing with mice, playing with microscopes, playing with lasers.

Cat: 1:21

All right. The lasers.

Ashley: 1:22

Playing with genetic engineering techniques to get at all of these things in really precise ways. That's one flavor of neuroscience. Neuroscience is so many different things depending on what you're doing.

Cat: 1:33

It's an example maybe of a field that we couldn't have even had if we hadn't had all these other, you know, technical and creative breakthroughs in many different fields. And they kind of all come together to help us study the brain, right?

Ashley: 1:45

Every time I talk about neuroscience, especially to trainees. One of the biggest messages is that this is a constantly evolving field, and it's a field that's been catapulted into the future because of technology, because of our ability to record lots of things simultaneously and take really high resolution images of the brain and sequence our genomes. That's all a part of this as well. I obviously care first and foremost about at the end of the day, these kinds of things being able to help people, right? And that's like where a lot of neuroscientists come from. It's not the same as being a doctor where you know that every day when you go in, you're going to help someone. I think as a neuroscientist or any kind of scientist, you hope maybe in five years or 10 years or something, it's going to help someone. So it's a really different sort of timescale And then a second piece of it is just the basic understanding of how these things work, because at the end of the day, you don't know when that knowledge is going to be useful, right? And in neuroscience, like we don't really know, like we're trying to just understand how the brain fundamentally works, both on the order of like single neurons and then all of those neurons talking to each other and across brain regions. We don't really know how that works and we don't know what we're going to learn or what we're going to be able to do with that information.

Cat: 3:09

Wow, yeah, that's a really beautiful perspective. I feel like being able to stay when I hear this as a psychologist, I think you have to stay motivated for these like really long term things, you know, and you have to kind of like, care about, you know, it's, it's, it's an intrinsic motivation, isn't it? I remember one time I was in the grocery store and I'm always on the lookout for something that says like neuro on it. Most especially when it's a form of marketing. So there's like a, a drink brand that's named neuro something, um, and it's supposed to be good for your brain. My favorite one that I ever found was a line of hair care. No hairstyle products. It wasn't even like, uh, it wasn't even shampoo. It was a blow dryer

Ashley: 3:51

yeah, yeah. It's like neuro blow. I don't know.

Cat: 3:54

That sounds bad. I'm pretty sure it wasn't that. But it was neuro something and, and I sent a picture to Ashley immediately. I mean, at light speed, I broke the sound barrier to text this, to my neuroscientist wife, because, um, this is so funny to us. So what do you think is going on there? Hmm. Hmm.

Ashley: 4:19

cutting edge or cool. Um, and Like, yeah, like, why put it on a hair product? I don't know, like, unless that's like seeping into your brain somehow, people have what are called field specific ability beliefs, right, and we have these, you know, Ideas that like specific fields are more brilliant than others. And so like, you know, a classic example might be like mathematicians, right? We think like mathematicians are brilliant and versus like, you know, maybe economics, like we consider like sort of less brilliance in that same

Cat: 4:50

Yeah, I think a stronger contrast might be like poetry, you know, or

Ashley: 4:54

Yeah. Yeah.

Cat: 4:56

well, you're really creative, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're cutting edge or, or, or technological.

Ashley: 5:02

Right. Right. But music is actually like a really, a high brilliance field, which is kind of interesting, like, but not literature.

Cat: 5:09

I remember that. So what you're talking about is, um, for instance, Cimpian and Leslie are the researchers who put out a lot of work on this, but they've looked at this in specific fields, like within chemistry, within physics is one I remember. They've also looked at it around the world. So it kind of emerges globally and it emerges when you, you ask people, Hey, what do you think it takes to do really great science in these different disciplines? And one of the things that I thought was so cool about the field specific ability beliefs research that's been coming out the last decade or so is it doesn't always map on to just STEM or not STEM. As you pointed out, it's sometimes it's a little bit more complicated than that. So for instance, you're actually in biology, where we tend to sort of think, Oh, okay, if I have sort of stereotypes about a biologist, it's not usually the same kind of stereotypes as I have about a chemist. So our beliefs about different kinds of STEM fields, different kinds of technical work are a little more complicated than just saying STEM or not STEM, right?

Ashley: 6:15

totally. And I think it's interesting to contrast even like neuroscience with biology. Even though a huge piece of neuroscience is biology, people don't react to the fact that someone is a biologist in the same way that they react to to the fact that they're a neuroscientist, right?

Cat: 6:33

do you experience this? Do you mind introduce yourself both ways? Something,'cause you're a, you're a neurobiology faculty member

Ashley: 6:39

Well, it's interesting. Yeah, totally. So like my PhD was in neurosciences plural, which is like a weird thing we do sometimes. Um, but neurosciences and then, my postdoc was in neuroscience, but now I'm a neurobiology faculty member and I did. I do feel like there's a different vibe when people say neuroscientists versus neurobiologists you wouldn't put like neurobiology on a hair product to try to sell it.

Cat: 7:04

This made me think about computer science and how we just get to tack science on certain things and psychologists absolutely do this too. Some psychologists say the psychological sciences or a psychological scientist, and this is a really. Important helpful thing sometimes because like I go to a party and I tell people I'm a psychologist. They immediately say, where's the couch? Let's talk about my childhood, which is fine But then I have to say I'm I always say I'm lab lab psychology not couch psychology I'm not a clinician. So there are all these all these complicated divisions in these things Different disciplines that you might not know from the outside. And I think that's one reason we like to use the word science, because we're trying to tell people we do research, you know?

Ashley: 7:50

Yeah, totally. I've heard you introduce yourself as an experimental psychologist, like, many times, sometimes when I say neuroscientist, people think neurologist, and like, I've had people, like, this woman on a plane one time was like, oh, like, I've had this twitch in my eye for weeks, and I'm like, okay, cool, like, I don't know about that.

Cat: 8:08

I could do some statistics if you gave me a lot of images across 20 different people.

Ashley: 8:13

We have these beliefs and then it impacts the way we think about these different fields, and it impacts the kind of funding that those fields get. Like, I can't complain that neuroscience gets all of this, you know, spotlight and excitement Because it means like a lot of research is getting funded, like the Brain Initiative and all of the NIH funding that goes towards neuroscience research. These are important problems for sure, but we just have to inspect, like, why we're so excited about neuroscience,

Cat: 8:41

It's so powerful and cool that you are a neuroscientist and you are someone who, who goes out there and has people say, Oh my gosh, you're a neuroscientist. You know, I will trust your opinion on hair products. Um, but you're actually still, you know, ready to question this and ready to say, are we always throwing our money at the right thing? Because we had these conversations, during the early days of, like 2020, for instance, where we were talking about, are we putting enough work into understanding behavioral science and understanding the choices people are making versus, our willingness to say, well, if something is, looking at cells, then it must be real. But if it's looking at human choices and human behavior, you know, that's sort of more intangible and less real. Yeah,

Ashley: 9:26

married to you and being so familiar with your work has really made this like super super clear to me there's times when people need answers in the form of cells or neurons or like brain regions, but then there's times when And this is probably most of the time, honestly, when people actually want a response in the realm of psychology, like they want to know how people behave. What are the knobs we can turn to like help people feel a certain way? What are the ways in which people act given different like environmental pressures or whatever it is, right? Like there are times in which a neuroscience perspective and that kind of mechanistic understanding are necessary, but then there are times when change is possible with Without that kind of understanding.

Cat: 10:13

It doesn't have to be competitive. like psychologists, can so benefit from this deep work that's going on, turning up and down the luminescence of cells is something that I can't do. But I can change the mindset, you know, that someone goes to work with, and that actually does involve their neurobiology at some level, we don't have to be competing with each other. That's, of course, you know, a lesson of our, like, life together here. I think it's often really disheartening when you have a really good solution, something that really seems to be helping in the real world, like help build trust, you know, in reaching out to doctors and getting sound information. And that work comes from psychology. But then someone gets on a platform and sort of says, well, you know, your serotonin drives you to do this. And people walk away from it feeling like they don't have any choice or any agency. And that's just not accurate to modern neuroscience. But I think that's what we take away a lot of the time from hearing about a sort of mechanistic thing in neuroscience.

Ashley: 11:17

This is a really good point. And this is the double edged sword of biological reductionism, which is like, you can tell people, Oh, you get like a burst of dopamine when you get into your flow state while you're programming or something like that. Right? Like you can tell people that. I'm sorry, I did it. Let me just say as an aside that we have limited ways to actually measure dopamine release in humans. So almost everything you've ever heard about dopamine is from an animal model. So let me just say that.

Cat: 11:48

What, what should, what, what does that mean for people?

Ashley: 11:50

It is true that humans have dopamine and plenty of people have put people in a pet scanner and that's like the, one of the ways we have to measure dopamine in humans. And they've seen that particular areas of their brain are like more active with dopamine specifically. It is true that most of the research happens in animal models. So I do think it's just like good to know where your information comes

Cat: 12:13

Yeah. And what we don't know yet,

Ashley: 12:15

and what we don't know yet and what we can do and what we can't do. The main thing I see my role as, as a neuroscience educator is like for people to be able to see a study or see a news release or whatever it is and understand What study actually would have gotten us to that headline? Coming back to this like double edged sword of this kind of reductionism is Okay, like so let's say You know, we do know that dopamine gets released while you're like, in this like, passionate moment of programming. Does that change the way you behave? Does that change the way others should treat you? Does that what does that actually do for you besides just a fun little fact about what your brain is

Cat: 12:55

Some people to get really real about it have this belief that. Some people are doing this better than others. And they're maybe born that way, right? there's some people whose brains are programming brains.

Ashley: 13:07

Mmm.

Cat: 13:08

And they really think that and then they're looking for kind of biological reasons that that might be the case. And something you and I have talked about a lot is hey, it's not so deterministic, like this could be a thing that happens for some people. And other people might have a different sort of thing going on. The absolute brilliance of our cognitive strategies and working many, many different ways is something that we need to take seriously. And whenever I hear people talking about Oh my gosh, I went to the real science, which is like the serotonin and the dopamine, you know, and it's chemical. So it's real. And that's what's driving developer productivity. For instance, you and I are often having these conversations where, where I'm like, Hey, babe, like somebody said it was dopamine.

Ashley: 13:56

Not to be too reductionistic about it, but like, dopamine is the thing that helps you feel good, so if you feel good, it's probably dopamine. It's, like, not that interesting, actually, at the end of the day.

Cat: 14:08

So we know that, you know, you're not magically going to get all the problems solved in the world by giving people pizza, but people might still get dopamine when they get pizza, you know?

Ashley: 14:17

This brings up is like this nightmare scenario, which you could imagine, which is like, what if we started interviewing people for our software teams and instead of actually having them do like a behavioral test or, you know, what you've sort of proposed, right? Like, what did you call it last time? You called it like, um, Yeah, What if instead of talking to people, you just measured, like, let's say you could do this, which you can't right now, but imagine you could just like put a little cap on them, be like, let's see how much dopamine gets released while you're programming.

Cat: 14:46

I'm pretty sure some companies might already be trying to do this.

Ashley: 14:51

I mean, this is horrific,

Cat: 14:52

put them in a scanner and fMRI.

Ashley: 14:55

We sort of think about these things, That as if they're like built in like how much dopamine you release is somehow like some intrinsic fixed thing about you Right, which that assumption and as you pointed out, we have to be more holistic in the way we evaluate people, for one. But also, these things change. And dopamine is literally a learning signal. This is one of the main things we know about dopamine, is that it changes. It's indicative of your brain learning and growing. And these things also change over time. So anything you measure about your brain for the most part, Is changing and it can change. And so taking a snapshot of what someone's brain might look like today is really different than like a year from now. And what it looks like a year from now is entirely dependent on what you've done in that year.

Cat: 15:48

Ooh. Well, see, I think this is sort of scary and hopeful at the same time. Like, what we do changes our brain. And people have taken that to sort of be like, okay, this picture of your brain determines everything that you can do, but you're saying the opposite. Like, hey, we're in dialogue with this brain. We're, we're, we're choosing the ways that it's working in some sense, or the things we get exposed to, at least, you know,

Ashley: 16:17

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, there is like genetic determinants of these things too. Like, I don't want to say it's like entirely experience dependent, but it's both. You're, you're on a trajectory that is in some part determined by your genome, but you are also modifying that trajectory every single day through your experience. Mm.

Cat: 16:36

Wow. Boom. So for the people who think stick you in a scanner, take a snapshot of your brain. That's who you are forever, you know. I think that this is a really powerful counterexample because I, you know, I always think about this. We're always obsessed with this idea of comparing between people and finding individual differences. So like in psychology, we talk about it like group differences or the differences between individuals, but you know, between individual differences, the jargon, but there's also within individual differences is this huge, amazing, fruitful realm. And it's often the stuff that you really care about trying to change. Like if someone is at level 6, you know, or whatever, you could help them get to level 8. You know, they have this range available to them. And so the really impactful question in the world is much more like, can I move people? You know, within their own range available to them. Can I help them meet their potential? And it's not always the questions about, Oh, if I had a thousand people for this one snapshot in time, how would I stack rank them?

Ashley: 17:40

This is actually some of my favorite use of, like, fMRI, which you brought up, right? Functional MRI, you put people in a scanner, you measure their blood flow, not even their neural activity, but you measure their blood flow, and it tells you something about which areas of the brain are active. Um, my favorite use of that Yeah. Technology is not actually to compare people to each other, but longitudinally. So my earliest work in grad school, when I got here during my first research rotation, was trying to, essentially, predict whether people that had some really early stimulant use would progress onto being stimulant addicted people. And the idea was like, could you take brain scans? Like, is there something in the brain that changes over time differently in the people that progress into stimulant addiction? And for me, that's a, that's a really useful way to look at that technology. Cause as you pointed out, like it's within an individual and we can. take a baseline and then measure them like every year and see what happens. It just, and it gives us this power to try to understand, is there anything early on? That you could measure with an fMRI, which is limited, but has some power is there anything you could measure early on that might tell us who to intervene on more intentionally, you know, that's starting to use like stimulants in this case?

Cat: 19:07

We are in this place where we just throw stuff at our brains. And the stuff that we can throw at our brains is really high level sometimes like, Hey, here's a medication that just pulls this huge lever, you know, and that we're on this path to trying to get more and more targeted and trying to understand not just your brain as a static picture, but like your brain in this moment doing this one thing.

Ashley: 19:30

Yeah, totally. Totally. I think that's super, super important to remember. I'm demonstrating a lot of skepticism. About neuroscience, but, there are. Many different ways in which this understanding of how the brain works has been absolutely necessary for things, right? So, so to give one specific example, in like the 1960s and 70s, it was hotly debated whether schizophrenia was like a real mental illness, right? And someone actually literally wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness. And The idea was like, oh, these people are just kind of making it up. Like maybe they're like a little strange, but there's nothing actually going on in their brains that's different. It was just a myth. Right. And it wasn't until we had something biologically to point to that people started being like, Oh no, this is a real thing. We can actually treat schizophrenia with dopamine antagonists. And it turns out. That that dramatically changes the symptoms of someone with schizophrenia. They stop having hallucinations. So that's a case in which this kind of understanding was necessary and necessary for treatment, necessary for societal understanding,

Cat: 20:43

necessary to stop blaming people for what was happening to them.

Ashley: 20:46

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And you see that same thing happening, um, you know, more recently with, um, things like depression and anxiety, right? We no longer immediately tell people, just pick yourself up off the floor, right? We have this like, right. Some of us might, but like, we have this sort of broader understanding that some people's brains are built a little different and there is meaning in that. You are a biological creature. Your mental life rides on the chemicals sloshing around in your brain.

Cat: 21:17

think that's really compassionate. And what we need here is like compassionate science, and we need to be able to say, wow, we're thinking about all these levels and Yeah. I guess the question I would throw out to you, because I think it's just constantly one that people carry around with them is, what can I do? I'm riding around on all this chemistry and biology and like, what can I do for it? How can I try to take care of my brain?

Ashley: 21:41

I was buying running shoes like a couple of months ago and the guy who was helping me was like super chatty and he was like, oh cool you're a neuroscientist, like, so what should I do? And like what's the one thing you would tell me? And I said get some sleep.

Cat: 21:53

Yeah.

Ashley: 21:55

Like we know quite a bit about how sleep is necessary for your emotional health, for your physical well being, for everything. Okay, sleep well. And that's The truth is we've known that forever. Um, we also know that you need to eat well and you need to exercise like. These have been tried and tested over human time.

Cat: 22:18

These are the biggest effects on your, biggest effects on your

Ashley: 22:21

biggest effects on your brain, and it's, these things aren't trivial, like some people have trouble sleeping and I don't want to like minimize that, but if you can prioritize making space for that and putting attention to it, you know, that actually could have a much bigger effect size than many of these other like flash solutions that you might sort of see out there.

Cat: 22:42

so that raises another question, which is how are we I'll use this word, normal people, supposed to evaluate scientific evidence, like we see a headline come out and it's like, Oh my gosh, you know, if you, you give mice macaroni and cheese, you know, they all get dementia. There's all of these, all of these headlines about neuroscience and, and how do you evaluate it as a person in the world? How do you teach your students about

Ashley: 23:12

Yeah, this is, this is a tricky one, right? Cause I don't think we can expect everybody to become experts, right? You're already, you are an expert in your own field. You know, the listeners of this podcast have their own expertise, right? I don't want to ask everybody to become a neuroscience expert, but. I do want people to ask maybe like two or three different questions. One of them is what is the evidence for the headline, right? And does it come from a mouse study? Immediately, if it comes from a non human study, we have to go, okay, in mice, and there's actually this I don't know if it still exists, but there was this Twitter account for a while that would republish scientific headlines, but add in mice, if it like happened in mice, you know, it's just a,

Cat: 23:56

And in male mice, mo in male mice, most of the time.

Ashley: 23:58

Totally, in male mice. And it's, that's not to say we can't learn things from mouse models. Like, we can. However, it has to be evaluated and we have to

Cat: 24:07

It's one step in the ladder of evidence.

Ashley: 24:10

totally. So, like, the first question is, okay, how do we know the thing this article is claiming? The second thing that I would have people ask is, you know, is this just one study? Or is it a study that's embedded in like a whole series of research about this thing, right? And, because the way science is built and the way understanding is built and textbooks are written, not on a single study. Nothing ever rests on a single study, right? And things rest on bodies of research, lots of iteration, lots of redoing and rethinking and re evaluating what we've already done. And so, you know, the second question is just like, does this stand alone or is there other stuff? And obviously, you're not going to be able to like do a literature review on every single finding you find, but hopefully wherever you're finding that scientific Evidence, like whether it's like a headline, a news article, whatever, hopefully the journalist who wrote that piece is giving you the context that's necessary, right, to say like, okay, this is built up. It's like one of several studies pointing at, you know, mac and cheese being a contributor to dementia, whatever it

Cat: 25:18

Not only are you a neuroscientist and a teacher, you know, you also have done scientific journalism. And the difference, I think, between a piece that's like very sensationalist, it's kind of like misinformation anywhere, right? You can start to develop your spidey sense that's like, oh, this seems a little extreme. You start to see that things are written in such a way to like scare you or to alarm you or to, you know, to really make an extreme, to say, don't look any further, just react.

Ashley: 25:45

Yeah, totally.

Cat: 25:47

And the difference between like someone like Ed Yong, who does this beautiful journalism, that's like very rich and kind of goes into, this is not just what we think we know, but why we think we know it and how we know it and what there's left to know. And

Ashley: 25:59

I actually spent an entire class period with my neurobiology class talking about this one article. Where the headline is, your life may flash before your eyes now we know it, or something like that, or before you die, sorry, your life may flash before your eyes when you die, and that's the headline, and we look at it, it's one paper, it's a wild paper, because we actually were able, they actually were able to record from someone as they died, while they were recording from their brain, Right? So it's like this rare instance of actually having a recording during death, and they measure all the changes that happen in this person's brain before they die, and they conclude that there's like this uptick in gamma activity, and therefore this person relived all of their memories. Okay, so there's this like major, major jump in this, which is like, okay, having gamma activity in your brain doesn't mean you're like thinking about your mom and where you went to high school and like reliving your marriage or whatever it is, right? It just means you had an increase in gamma activity

Cat: 27:02

what's gamma activity?

Ashley: 27:03

gamma activity is a particular frequency of brain activity. So if you were to record from the brain, you'd get this, like, big squiggle over time. You could take that squiggle of voltage over time and break it down into different sine waves. Um, and so think about it in like the frequency domain, in other words, so rather than describing what the signal looks like over time, we would describe the signal in terms of what frequencies are contained within. And gamma is one of those frequencies, it's high frequency activity. And like, if you look online, you'll find a bunch of stuff about people trying to improve their gamma and blah, blah, blah. Um, in this particular paper. They selectively choose this one explanation for what Gamma is, which is that it's memory retrieval, which is one thing that Gamma does, but it's not all of the different, um, it's not everything you'll find when someone has Gamma activity. Like, you have Gamma activity in your mind right now, for sure. Most people do when they're awake and, and attentive. So the paper makes this big leap about, like, you reliving your life, and that's just, that's a leap, right? And I should say the article makes the leap more so than the paper. The paper is kind of like, oh, maybe this could be a little bit of, uh, memory retrieval

Cat: 28:13

We always see this happen as scientists, like the, the second you speculate on something, a journalist takes it and they're like, This is it y'all, the scientist discovered this, and then people get really mad at you when it, you, you, they say you discovered something, even though maybe you were just saying, hey, I noticed this.

Ashley: 28:30

totally. And you wonder why scientists are so tight lipped, Right,

Cat: 28:33

Right, scientists are sometimes scared of talking to the media, for

Ashley: 28:37

totally because of stuff like this. I think like a savvy reader of these things would just like think twice, right? Like think twice before you repost that, like, Little flashy Instagram thing. I found out about this article from a student cause it was on Tik TOK like, oh my God, like we, you, you see your whole life before you die. And then my student was like, wait, is that true? And I was like, all right, let's talk about it. And now we spent a whole class.

Cat: 29:02

No, it's amazing because you get people come into your class, right? Because maybe they saw something about the brain on TikTok, you know, but that those stories are being used to sell a lot of stuff, a lot of different stuff. And

Ashley: 29:15

Yeah, and that's a pretty innocent one, right? Like, that's like, okay, it's a nice thing to think, like, I would like to think, like, right before I die, I get to, like, see our dog and our house and, like, relive all those beautiful moments. Like, that's a lovely thought. That's not hurting anybody, really, to, like, think that way, but there are examples that could be hurtful, right? And that's the stuff I would really, really be concerned about.

Cat: 29:42

I saw you give this talk that was like, You can be a neuroscientist. Like anyone can be a neuroscientist. Tell me about this thesis that you have about getting more people involved in neuroscience, including technical people, maybe out there who haven't ever thought about this for themselves and their skills.

Ashley: 30:00

Neuroscience. is one of these fields that we think of as being closely associated with brilliance, right? There's, there's often this like, barrier for people getting in. And so it has been a mission of mine for many years. And I wrote a book that came out in 2020 that was like, so you want to be a neuroscientist. I would go back and retitle that like anybody can be a neuroscientist. So this has been like a particular interest of mine because I see that there's this barrier and I really do believe it. It's just another field. where you need to learn things and you need to get particular skills to succeed, um, and The cool thing is now that most of this actually doesn't live behind closed doors. So the talk I gave that you're referring to is for Nerd Night, which is an event here in San Diego. And it's like a drink beer and listen to scientists sort of event. My message was kind of like, look, if you want to look at neuroscience data, like when you go home or even on your phone right now, like you could do it actually, here's a, list of datasets, you know, you could just like, if you know, a little bit of like, How to wrangle some data. Go open it up. Look at some neurons firing. You could play with that right now because neuroscience is opening up in like some really beautiful ways. Like different funding agencies are requiring you share your data. We have these like cool new data standards where like everybody's fitting their data into these standards so we can share them and try to reuse them. And this is the stage of neuroscience and it's cool for the potential of like citizen neuroscience as well.

Cat: 31:28

What are the needs of neuroscience? Say you're a programmer listening to this. We had a friend who came up to you and said, I never realized, I didn't have no idea there were these big open data sets and you were describing all this stuff that I know how to do.

Ashley: 31:41

Yeah. Our friend came to this nerd night event and yeah, he was like, can we get coffee and just talk about like, what does neuroscience need from someone who knows how to code? I love that question. One, if you live on the data science side of things, just know there's a ton of open data sets and there's also some pretty good, like documentation about typical, um, approaches people would use with that kind of data. Cause it, it's probably different than. Other data you might've worked with as a data scientist. So be a little bit more time series, maybe more images, like stuff like that, but still it's in the same kind of wheelhouse. So that's one thing you could play with data,

Cat: 32:18

What are some examples of those data sets?

Ashley: 32:21

Everything from like, um, you know, single recording of, uh, individual neurons. So recording the voltage from inside of neurons and maybe like hundreds of those neurons simultaneously. To whole brain recording or like when we were talking about fMRI earlier, you can find lots of open fMRI data for basically anything you might be interested in. Let's say you have kind of a pet interest in like Alzheimer's disease or something, right? I am willing to bet there is some open access data set. where there's like patients with Alzheimer's disease and controls and you could like go in and like compare, you know, the brains or something or look at them over time.

Cat: 32:59

Are there any big names? Places, websites people should go visit?

Ashley: 33:03

I'm a huge fan of the Allen Institute, which is a big, uh, research institute in Seattle and they make all of their data public and it's also really well documented. Most of that's going to be, Like on the single cell side of things and not really disease oriented, a little bit more like basic science. There's also a couple of data formats that are really cool. So there's one called B I D S I actually don't know if people say bids, but that's EEG, fMRI or whole brain stuff. They have a lot of awesome documentation and a ton of data sets are in that format. There's one that I work really closely with called NeuroData Without Borders. Um, so yeah, we'll put them in the show notes. I have like a growing list, a spreadsheet of all of these datasets that exist out there. So that's like thing number one you could do is like play with data. If that's your thing. The other side of it is actually software development, you know? So there's this like whole field of research software and a lot of it is open source and people are all the time. Like releasing cool packages for doing particular things with, um, data. Right. And like, maybe you have to do a little bit of legwork to understand what are the challenges that people are trying to overcome using these different software. But, at the end of the day, like. Those projects, many of them are open source. Many of them could probably benefit from a lot of the expertise. So one thing I ended up talking about with our friend was like, data formats and like data compression. And he's like, okay, like my expertise is on, you know, data compression. Like, is that a problem in neuroscience? And I was like, Oh man, are you kidding me? Like, do you know how big these data are? Like, it's insane.

Cat: 34:40

Yeah, we're drowning over here,

Ashley: 34:42

We're drowning! I would just spend hours moving shit around my lab computers when I was, like, a postdoc,

Cat: 34:48

well and it's like these PhD grad students doing their absolute best to learn software stuff also, but you know, not everybody can be everything.

Ashley: 34:56

There's a ton of opportunity for stuff like that, whether it's just, like, writing a package for visualization or it's writing a package to, like, help compress a time series or, you know, whatever it might be. Um, there's

Cat: 35:08

And then you get to contribute to science and I think that would be really lovely and cool, you know, imagine you're a software developer and hey, you know, maybe you're not feeling so appreciated in your work. I know there's a lot that comes along with that. deciding you have the time and energy and bandwidth and motivation to do open source work we we're not going to gloss over that but it is like a beautiful thing to get to be a part of. You know, helping us learn more about depression or helping us, you know, get more of a picture of the brain.

Ashley: 35:39

there's like an amazing organization, I'm sure many of you know, called the Carpentries. They've got a few different branches. They are always looking for instructors to teach programming and computing skills to folks in research. You can get certified as an instructor with them. You can do stuff virtually or in person. Like we need people who can teach these skills to researchers. And that's an amazing way for someone who, you know, knows how to program and wants to influence the next generation, wants to get involved. The friend I had talked to, that's the place he came from too. It was like, you know, my job's okay, but I'm not, I'm not getting like a ton of meaning out of it at the moment. And it would be really cool to like get involved in some science stuff to just have that little dopamine,