Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Sure! From WNYC.
And NPR. Hey, I'm Jana Boomeran. Hi, I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast.
Yes, and today on the podcast, we're going to present a story that, uh... The whole thing is an accident, really. Yeah. We were on tour a few months ago doing this imagery thing.
In San Francisco. And right as we were there, we got an email from a woman who lives there telling us this nutty story. Something odd had happened to her, and she wanted to share it with us, so we met her in the lobby. I missed, I didn't hit the record button fast enough.
Could you just tell me your name again and, uh... My name is Liza Schumfeld, and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Now, Liza is just getting started with her scientific career. I finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago.
And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step for college and apply to grad school. And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain. Part of your brain called the basal ganglia.
Basal ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying. Just so we understand, basal and ganglia. So basal is not the thing from which Pesta was made in your case. What does basal mean?
I'm going to pass some else about that. Okay, let's go on to ganglia. So things like that, you know, collections of neurons. Big collections.
So basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain. It's actually this big hunk deep in the center. And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement. Well, when I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia?
Yeah. When I wink, am I using my basal ganglia? Yeah. When I make an expression in my face, am I using my basal ganglia?
What about if I'm reading The New Yorker? I don't think so. Apologies to The New Yorker, please. The point is, this part of your brain is really basic.
And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick. Using this really cool technology called optogenetics. What they've done is, they've found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia. So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains.
They can actually turn its basal ganglia, or parts of it, on, or off. And this is in a live mouse? This is in a live mouse. So we have this really cool video showing a mouse running around, having a great mouse time.
You turn the light on, and we can get him to freeze. In mid-strike? Yeah. So you hit the laser and boom, the mouse stops.
The mouse is like this. So you use light to, like, pop the ties of the mouse. If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try. Move, feet.
Move. Move. As long as that light is on, come on, move. You can't do it.
Liza is holding the strings. Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much. I'm kind of like, I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting.
It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another. I'm working on my pipettings. I'm working on my pipettings. Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb wrestling competition right now.
So, at a certain point, she was like, enough of this. It's time for me to apply to grad school. Yeah, I applied to five. University of California, San Diego, University of Washington, Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University, and Harvard.
So you're going big. Yeah, go big or go home. Right. Exactly.
So she heads off to her first interview. University of Washington. Went great. I loved it.
I went to Penn, University of Pennsylvania. Went down to UCSC in San Diego. It's a beautiful place. Great scientist.
It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world. So far, so good. Did you ever go back to San Francisco, where we are now? This is where things get strange.
Yeah, so my last interview. My very last interview was at UCSF. And she says about a week before that interview. I got really sick.
So I think it was some kind of stomach flu, but it was pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything. There we go. Yeah, I'll all start.
I don't know. I had some bad dim sum the weekend before. That could have been it. Yeah, that's it.
So she goes to the doctor. He gives her some pills to affect the nausea. And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview.
So I went. You know, there's a nice introduction. They give you breakfast. At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine.
Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice. They tell her about their work. I have to think of a couple of witty questions. I ask my questions.
What's a witty question? Do we even have a witty science question? It's a witty science question. Okay, never mind.
Anyhow, she's raring to go and she heads into meet her first basal ganglion of the day. And he studies, one of the things he studies is dopamine. In the basal ganglia. He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I know.
But we had a good conversation about dopamine. And at this point in the day, I was feeling okay. No, no, no. Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman I was so excited to talk to.
Her name is Allison Dope. And she's pretty well known. Her name is Allison Dope? Allison Dope.
Wow, she studies dopamine? She studies songbirds. Songbirds. Which is what I really want to study.
So birds have basal ganglions too. So she's pretty fired up. And kind of at the beginning of that interview, my face just started to feel a little bit strange. And I was wearing glasses that day.
So what I felt was happening was that my glasses were, you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose and you have to kind of tighten the muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, God, why can't I stop tightening that? It was kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students.
And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch, my head just started suddenly turning to the right. Like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, all right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him, and instead I'm just turning over here and turn it over here and turn it over here. Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc.
Yeah. You are turning away from the professor. So I remember at one point at lunch turning my chair like this. You're trying to rotate.
A permanent side long glance. But you figured, it's not that painful, so it must just be a cramp or something. And I'm kind of thinking, oh, okay, so I slept funny last night. I must have slept on a weird angle on my pillow.
Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just got to tighten the glasses. Yeah, everything under control.
So then I, after lunch, was going to go to my third interview. It was with Allison Joe's husband, who also studies the songbirds. So he's familiar with the basic thing they do. They meet up to walk over to his office together.
And so I explained to him on the walkover, I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad? He says, sure, let me try point down. But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back.
Involuntarily. Yeah, it's snapping back. So suddenly your eyes are pointing out at the sky. And as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly.
So I look like you're doing right now. So you're in a state of deep surprise. I look surprised at everything I'm saying. I can't stop it.
So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then the mouth, then all this area starts to go. And the lower face. Yes. What is it doing?
It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile. What do you mind? I'll demo it. I'll demo it.
Okay, so I've got the neck. It's like this. Crane back. The eyebrows are like this.
Piddle surprise. I take a look like this. Crazy Frankenstein face. This is not the obvious.
It's the best demeanor for a graduate interview. No. Yeah, it's not. It's not at that point.
And I'm doing it. And is Michael now noticing that something is... Yeah, I think at that point she thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience. And I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth, like, try and just calm down a little bit.
And it was pretty painful, too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charlie horse in your face. Oh. Yeah.
But she gets through the interview. I actually do okay. You know, he asked me tough questions about science and I can answer them, I think. And I leave the interview and then I met by the woman who's the head of admissions weekend.
And she took one look at Liza. And she said, I don't know if you should do the rest of your interviews. And with her is my student host. And Liza decides, all right, you just call my dad just to say, dad, I'm in the middle of my interview and someone comes trying to stab me with my face, I can't control it.
And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't, I can kind of talk, but it's, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Is your dad a doctor?
No. Imagine your kid calling me, like, I'm losing control of my face. And as they're telling you that, I started to think, something's really wrong. And then my student host comes rushing back and running.
And he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face and he says, so now we need to go to the emergency room. So they throw into a taxi. And in the taxi, I went from, I can't control my mouth to a, I mean, a complete, I did not look good. And I just, I couldn't, I remember frantically sending messages like, you got to cut this out now.
But she wasn't in control. And it turned out that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mice and seized control of their basal ganglia, the compazine that I took, that nausea drug, was actually affecting the dopamine systems in my basal ganglia. In other words, that drug had been doing to her pretty much what she'd been doing to those mice. One to two percent of people who take compazine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me.
During all those interviews. And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed in the vesicles? How does it get released?
And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems level people who studied the behavioral output of the basal ganglia that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia. So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs and they are failing. Yeah. Did you get into San Francisco State?
Are you CSF? Are you CSF? No. Damn it, basal ganglia.
We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing okay. Back in the ER when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl of all things. And actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better. She could breathe.
Her face unclenched. When we asked her, how has this little adventure changed you? She said, well, I'm still working with those mice. Because when we talked to her, grad school hadn't started yet.
And now, when I go into that room with a little laser. I go in now and I just really, I empathize with them. Come on, this will just be for a compliment. You can do it.
Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that. Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington. And thank you to Brenna Farrell for production help on this podcast. And that is our podcast.
There it is. I'm Robert Coleridge. I'm Chad Abumrad. Thank you for listening.
Hi, this is Samantha from Sacramento, California. I'm a radio lab listener. Radio lab is supported in part by the Office of Peaceful Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.coans.org.
Thanks.