Changing the Brain

How does the brain change itself, and can those changes be passed on to the next generation? ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’ according to Dr. Bryan Kolb, a neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge, author of a classic neuropsychology textbook and a recipient of Canada’s highest civilian honor.   Listen in to learn about brain plasticity as well as epigenetics, the science of how genes flip on and off and can be inherited in their new state. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Brain plasticity, and epigenetics. What do those terms mean? And why do they matter? I’m your host Richard Miles, and I’m very pleased to welcome a very distinguished guest, Dr. Bryan Kolb neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, the author of numerous books and articles on neuropsychology and the recipient of the order of Canada, Canada’s highest, Civilian honor. Welcome to Radio Cade Bryan.

Bryan Kolb: 0:59

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 1:01

Bryan. I read somewhere that your groundbreaking textbook Fundamentals of Neuropsychology, is the most stolen book in England. What is up with that?

Bryan Kolb: 1:08

Well, apparently it’s true. It’s stolen form libraries that obviously doesn’t happen in Canada or the U.S. People buy the book. We had a heck of a time getting it published in the late 1970s, because nobody believed there was such a field and it turns out there is and the book did very well.

Richard Miles: 1:24

For an author obviously an author would like to get paid on the sales, but to have your book stolen probably better than your book being dropped off at used bookstores. But let’s talk about that. The book itself was very important because it was pathbreaking breaking . It’s published in , I think in 1980. And you talked about brain plasticity, not just that, but that was one of the fundamental things. And basically your definition, I believe is the ability of the brain to reorganize its structure, function and connections in response to experiences. So why don’t you sort of walk our listeners through, what does that mean? How can we think about brain plasticity in a useful way?

Bryan Kolb: 2:01

If you imagine being born into the world, the brain has no idea what world its going to be, could be in Alaska? It could be at the equator. You could be in Africa. And so the brain biologically needs to be able to change itself, to adapt to the environment that it’s in. That’s sort of the background as to why evolution would have done this. It’s not just true of us. It’s true in worms. So all animals have this capacity to change their brain response to the environment that they find themselves in. And of course, if your listeners would learn anything from this discussion today, we have to change their brains. Somehow distorted material, the brain has to change. It’s just not magic.

Richard Miles: 2:39

So If I understand this correctly and we’re not stuck with the brain were born with right? Basically from the minute we’re born, the brain is constantly reshaping itself. Give me a magnitude of the degree to what we’re talking about. Is it just a little bit that the brain sort of prunes a few neurons here and there and adds , or how dramatic is it? Say we take a , a new born and we look at them when they’re one year old or five years old or 12 years old, what kind of changes have occurred in the interim in terms of the brain changing itself?

Bryan Kolb: 3:11

So they, the changes are not small there quite dramatic. So when we’re born, we have twice as many neurons as we’re going to need. Twice as many as we have now, which seems a little odd. And then over the next couple of years, we make connections at an enormous rate. And we ended up with far more connections than we need. And so around age two, we start getting rid of them. And depending on which part of the brain we’re looking at, it’s going to begin around to other regions. The higher levels of cognition is later. Let’s say, we’re starting to lose the frontal connections and neurons around age five. We will lose half of them and at the beginning of adolescents or puberty the rate we lose them at is remarkable. It’s about a hundred thousand connections per second. It’s a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand. So if you think about 13 year old girls, they are not the easiest group to deal with because their brain is changing so fast. The kids of course are inventing themselves at that age. They’re becoming who they’re going to be. And what that means is they’re creating the brain of the environment that they’re headed into. So if you look at a one year old, the one year old still doesn’t really know what the environment’s going to be certainly is growing connections. The neurons aren’t being born or not many, any longer. And then as the child begins to adapt to the environment that it’s in, whatever that happens to be, then it starts to change. So if you think about language, if you imagine a child who’s born in a house, or a home that speaks Japanese or Korean, they’re not going to hear the sounds L or R. But they can discriminate those sounds when they’re six months old, but as time goes on, they start losing the ability to make those sound discriminations . And so as an adult, they have this difficulty discriminating, L and R. Similarly, if we’re born in a house that speaks English, there are sounds that other languages that we simply cannot discriminate once we’re adults, because we lose that ability. So the brain is getting rid of things it’s not going to use, getting rid of connections that are not necessary. Now, one question you could ask is what happens if you don’t get rid of these connections? What happens if you keep them all? And the answer is cognitive disabilities. So children who do not lose a lot of these connections, cognitively are impaired. So we historically would have called them retarded. We don’t any longer, but that’s basically what it is.

Richard Miles: 5:34

I remember watching one of your talks. And you talked about language and it was somewhat similar to when you buy like a new Apple product that’s sold all over the world and you see it installing the files. It installs with all sorts of Russian and Japanese and Portuguese, I guess, to make your keyboard compatible or something like that. Is that sort of what we’re talking about, that a newborn has basically all of this software loaded to do lots of different things, but based on the environment, they’re not going to need all that. And what I found was fascinating is that it’s counterintuitive that that loaded up brain, I guess, is somewhat of a disadvantage and that you want to sort of prune or make it more efficient. Is that more or less accurate?

Bryan Kolb: 6:14

That’s a wonderful analogy. Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’m going to use that in the future. Yeah. That’s, it’s fully loaded, ready to go, but it’s not efficient. And so if we can make things more efficient, then we’re going to have a greater cognitive capacity.

Richard Miles: 6:29

Well, good. I’m glad I got the analogy, right . I’ve had guests where I rolled out an analogy and they, and they said , no, that’s completely wrong. Okay. Well, I clearly didn’t understand the concept. So we’ve described plasticity the ability of the brain to change itself. And you’ve also done a lot on something called epigenetics. So before we go into the implications, all this, certainly from an educational perspective, why don’t you also define what epigenetics is? So that way we can talk it both in the same conversation.

Bryan Kolb: 6:57

Sure. So if you look at any cell in the body, it has the same DNA. So cells that make your skin and your bones, your eyes, your brain all have the same DNA, yet the cells are different. And so the question is, why are they different? Well, they’re different because different genes are turned on and different genes are turned off. So the idea of epigenetics is that gene expression, the turning on or turning off of genes is regulated by experience, by things that are going on around us. And those things could be inside us or those things could be outside of us. So the idea is that if you’re going to change the brain, if you’re going to have plastic changes, the changes are going to result from changes in the activity of genes. This activity of genes is affected by experience. And so the idea of epigenetics is that we have a certain experience that might be a stressful event. It might be a wonderful event, might be a drug who knows what it is, but those things will change the expression of genes, which changes creation of proteins, manufacturer proteins and so on in the body or in grand (inaudible).

Richard Miles: 7:59

So this is really a revolutionary insight because I think prior to this, you’ve had this debate for centuries about nature versus nurture, right? What you’re born with, what you inherit as part of your genes and then your environment and all of your experiences, whether that’s the way you were raised or the way you’re educated or whatever happens to you that shapes you. But this seems to imply that it’s not just a mix of those two, they’re actually together in the form that your experiences can make you well, why don’t you explain it particularly with the role of the father, which that’s really, really fascinating that these changes occur even before somebody essentially is conceived.

Bryan Kolb: 8:38

That’s right in fact, it’s paradoxical. It seems at first that the father could have a bigger influence on the gene expression of the offspring than the mom. But it’s related to the fact that the changes in gene expression can be transmitted by the sperm. So the idea here is that if you take the father, who’s had some sort of stressful event, maybe was a soldier in Iraq or something, just a horrible experience. That’s going to change the gene expression in the sperm of the dad, which as a result is going to change the way in which the developing brain or his offspring is going to progress. It’s true that the mom has also evolved but her eggs don’t change. So the eggs that she is born with that will eventually be used to create babies. They don’t change. They’re not changed by experiences, but the sperm is, cause the sperm dies every 40 days or so when you create new sperm. And so that new sperm is being affected by the experiences that the dad has had. That means that the same dad could have a different kind of gene expression transmitted to different children, depending on the experiences that they’ve had in the previous two or three months or maybe longer. So that’s the idea there, and these changes can cross generations or can be shown in the grandchildren. Maybe the great grandchildren who knows defect gets much smaller over time. So if you have your daughter or your son and they have experiences too, and so it’s going to affect change expression. And so the influence of that event, that the father had pre conceptually to you, is going to start decreasing, but nonetheless, there is a footprint of it there. If you go back to this idea that epigenetics, if you remember, there was a scientist called Lamarck. Lamarck believed there was, that genes could learn essentially that learning, could it be transmitted from generation to generation. And people thought decided this was crazy. It’s not like that. Well, it turns out he was correct. He didn’t know the mechanism, but in fact it looks like that’s, what’s actually happening. So you’re right. Nature and nurture are working together, back and forth, back and forth.

Richard Miles: 10:38

So just so I understand this correctly, Bryan, I can’t change my own DNA. I’m stuck with my DNA and not all genes can switch on or off. Right. You’re only talking about a certain subset of genes or do all, all genes, have the ability to essentially be turned on or turned off.

Bryan Kolb: 10:55

I don’t know the answer to that, but my guess is that most of the ability to be turned on or turned off. But I imagine some can’t. Good question.

Richard Miles: 11:03

You talked about the example of PTSD from someone in Iraq or war zone. I assume that also goes the other direction. For instance, if I inherited the DNA of being a very good baseball player, for instance, and then I became a great baseball player, I hit the major leagues, the likelihood, then that say my kids would inherit , that ability are now much greater, right? Because I’ve done that gene for pitching or catching or whatever I’ll ask you. Does that explain why you often see sports stars? You know, fathers and sons who are in the major leagues, whether it’s baseball or hockey or football at a rate that would be implausible, unless there’s some sort of genetic connection, right?

Bryan Kolb: 11:42

Correct. We should make it clear that there’s not a gene we’re talking about multiple genes. Nothing is, it’s usually aging, the odd diseases for the most part. That’s not the case, but yeah, that would be why you get somebody like Gordie Howe and his three sons, all playing pro hockey at the same time.

Richard Miles: 11:58

I always felt a little bit, sorry for maybe the one kid that didn’t get it. Right? Like there’s no Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. And I think their father was a famous quarterback as well. Right. But there’s one son that doesn’t have it. So I’ve always wondered what his Thanksgiving dinner is like at those households. Okay. So Bryan, I think I’ve got it. And I hope our listeners have got it that basically brain plasticity brain can and does change itself a lot, but there are certain windows, right? So it’s not like a continuous process that every year your brain either grows a certain number of neurons or loses them. There are windows in which that’s sort of concentrated and that your research and other people’s have found has a tremendous influence on particular education. And then everything that sort of flows from good or bad education, a lot of life outcomes are going to stem from whether you were well-educated or did well in school or , or not. So why don’t you talk a little bit about what research has shown is the correlation between those windows of brain development and future outcomes?

Bryan Kolb: 13:00

Well, the earliest window obviously is the prenatal window, but the first one to three years is a window of a lot of change. Then a period it’s not quite as soon, but it’s not changing as much until the onset of puberty. And then we have this period in adolescence of huge change. Now we used to think that the brain was pretty much finished developing by about age 18, but it’s not. And so it continues on into the third decade. And so we’re looking at changes going up to say 30, 32, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman. If you ask people who are say over 40 or 50, when they became who they are, most people would say somewhere around 30, clearly there are changes that when we look back on. We can see what are going on for a long time. Then we have a reduction in plasticity, but mercifully it doesn’t stop. So that even at my age, I’m 72, I can still learn things. I don’t learn them as quickly as my grandchildren unfortunately, but I can still learn things. The brain is still plastic . However, there are disorders which the plasticity really does decline like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and other demanding diseases where we now see that the brain really isn’t changing very easily. But for most people the changes can continue on into senescence, but at a very much, much slower rate, for sure. So we have these two windows one shortly after birth and the other one in early adolescence in particular. The second one’s really important because we’re worrying about kids experimenting with drugs when they’re 13, 14, when the brain is really changing. One of the things that Terry Robinson and I discovered about 20 years ago was that every psychoactive drug that you take actually produces permanent changes in the structure of neurons. And those changes that occur with kids who are experiencing with drugs have different consequences than they do with you, or me, particularly cannabis is a worry investigating the effects of cannabis at age 13, 14, 15, the effects can actually be dramatic in the twenties with respect to mental health and so on. So that’s a big worry about plasticity. There’s something that’s pathological. I just want to throw one other thing in here. That is, if you have an idea and you can remember the idea, it means that you changed your own brain, but that idea has changed the brain, which is you think about it quite remarkable, but that’s the only way you can remember it.

Richard Miles: 15:20

One of the things we talk about at the Cade Museum, particularly with regards to education is the value of interactive experience that a lot of inventors, a lot of entrepreneurs often don’t do well, or haven’t done well on a classic school system. They have sort of different experiences and what I found fascinating, about one of the things that I saw you talk about was the language development skills in the first 18 months of life. And that it’s not enough to be simply exposed, to say a large vocabulary passively. You really have to get in the rhythm of being able to have a conversation in a given take away. And that has profound differences or profound outcomes on how somebody does later in life. So can you explain how exactly that works and what the research shows about those differences?

Bryan Kolb: 16:08

You know , one of the metaphors we use here is serve and return. So the idea is that if you are passively listening to the language, whether it’s on TV or the radio or whatever artist in the background, you’re not actually actively engaged socially with the center of that information, but you need to be. So if I say something to you and your child, and then you respond, that’s the serve and return idea. There’s a really nice experiment, trying to teach kids. I believe it was Japanese, but it was not English, English, speaking kids. And they either saw this woman trying to teach them on TV. Or she was in the TV, the old kind of TVs , where there was a big Catholic retreat . So she’s actually there see woman , but she can actually serve and return with the kids in the one case and in the other she can’t. And I guess which kids learn Japanese, the ones who actually have the personal interaction. So the social support, the social interaction is really critical to the plastic changes in the brain.

Richard Miles: 17:05

So I guess one question really is we’re recording this and then, you know, the middle of 2020 in the midst of the 19 sort of lockdown , what that means for education and schooling. Is there anything to suggest that a serve and return as you call it style online is just as effective or less effective than face to face? Because obviously there’s a whole bunch of other types of communication that go on between people face to face the visual cues and facial cues does a lot of that get lost during an online experience or the fact that you can actually talk to and be taught from somebody online. Is that good enough?

Bryan Kolb: 17:41

It’s a really good question. And I’m sure there are people studying that as a professor who is going to have to be online. These students their not going to be on my screen. I won’t be able to see them. That’s impossible on Zoom to do that. And so are they going to get the same education? I doubt that, but if it’s two people as you and I are an hour on screen, I suspect that we’re going to get a lot of the serve and return affects whether children can be engaged in the same way as empirical question that I’m sure that many developmental psychologists are studying right now. It’s , it’s a really, really good question.

Richard Miles: 18:15

One of the things I really want to ask you about is it seems like the most important window. If I understand your research correctly is that sort of first 18 months were certainly the absence of direct communication with an infant is really disastrous. And I think it’s from those remaining or some studies and other studies have just shown. It’s just terrible, but there are these other windows later on where you’ve got a window of learning, I guess, let me give you three scenarios and give me your reaction to these three scenarios in terms of what does the research say? If anything, about practical decisions as people trying to sort out scenario number one would be you have a 12 year old and you’re trying to decide, do I have them study music or do sports number two you’re 18 years old. And do you study chemistry or you study history and then number three late in life, you’re , let’s say 56. And should you learn French on Duolingo or just drink Bordeaux all day. Very specific nature. The third scenario it’s asking for a friend, what can you tell us about brain plasticity at those other stages, adolescence early adulthood, and then middle age ?

Bryan Kolb: 19:22

Well, one of the most important things that children can do using your, I think it was age 12, piano lessons versus sports is music has a profound influence on how we age. So basically it’s like learning a foreign language. So we know that people who have musical training prior to say age 20 age, better incidence of dementia is much lower. And so on later in life music engages the entire grid. It’s a difficult decision will be, not be in sports because you need the exercise, exercise increases the blood flow into the brain. So you’d want to do both in a sense, but it’s not impossible chemistry versus history. The person in the 20th, the brain is more likely to change in positive ways. If you’re doing things that are interesting, if you’re not engaged, if I’m taking chemistry and I hate it, which was true, but let’s imagine it was, I’m not going to learn it and they’re not going to remember it. So you may be that I was fascinated with European history and I got really engaged in that. So I think it the amount of engagement that’s going to make a difference to how plastic the brain will be. In terms of the 56 year old. I’ve been playing the guitar for over 50 years. When I bought a banjo in 1988 , I never learned to play it. And so I decided this year to learn to play it. And my wife got a new piano. And so she’s taking out the piano. She took piano lessons as a child for 8 or 10 years. And then once she went to vet school and she never play it again, we’ve carted this bloody piano from place to place. So I keeps saying nobody plays it. So now she has luckily a new piano, a little baby grant . She’s taking piano lessons again, she’s close to my age. So we’re both learning to play these instruments. And now we’re playing duets together. It’s really not the Banjo, or the piano, the guitar. It’s really a lot of fun, but the brain clearly can change in the older person. I have to say, the Bordeaux helps make it fun.

Richard Miles: 21:13

Well, I have another banjo story, not quite as successful. My wife gave me a banjo about 15 years ago, hoping that I would learn how to play it. I did try to learn, but it turns out we had a friend who really was quite good. And we decided just to give the banjo to him because the, some benefit for humanity would be much better fee on the banjo and not me, but he actually answered the question. I was about to ask how much research has been done, particularly on people in their later years, let’s say 50 or 60 above those who choose to do something new or resurrect something that they used to know how to do well, versus those who don’t. Are there different outcomes in terms of health or cognitive disability? Or what do we know about that stage?

Bryan Kolb: 21:52

Yes, there seems to be. And music is one of the ones that looks like really beneficial later in life. You can buy all these games and so on that are supposed to improve your cognition and later life there’s absolutely zero evidence that, that really generalizes to anything music is one thing that does, probably the only other thing that has as big an effect would be learning a new language, which is like learning music and exercise and the exercise again, because of the increased blood flow in the brain and elsewhere in the body. But those three would probably be the most beneficial ones.

Richard Miles: 22:22

One of the insights is it . If you do choose to do something later in life, it sounds like it should be something new, right? Rather than doubling down on a skill that you already have and you decide, well, I’m already a good musician. I’m going to be a better musician or I’m a really good whatever I ski well, or I’m going to do better at it. Does that not challenge the brain as much as if you take up something, even an elementary level that you really don’t know how to do, let’s say learn Chinese or learn to play an instrument that you’ve never picked up before. Is that better exercise or better stimulation for the brain at that age?

Bryan Kolb: 22:55

I would think so. As long as you’re engaged with it and not frustrated by it, you will do to some extent obviously, but one of my colleagues was saying, well, he’s been playing the guitar for so long and he plays the same music over and over again. I said, you really need to play new music, brother . It’s a different style of music or different materials playing the same songs over and over again, really , isn’t engaging the brain very much. It’s just a motor skill. It’s , it’s a program that comes out and it’s not really changing anything.

Richard Miles: 23:21

Bryan, I always like to ask guests about their background, sort of what influences them. And since we are talking about brain plasticity and education and new experiences, can you tell us a little bit about your growing up, your father worked in the oil industry, right. And your mother was a dancer for a while professional dancer. What was it like growing up? What do you remember your early influences and when do you feel your brain changing? Let’s go with that.

Bryan Kolb: 23:47

I’m not sure I felt it changing, but I grew up in Calgary and yeah, my dad was in oil business. He liked to say that he went to the University of Turner Valley and people would , oh yeah I’ve heard of that. Well, Turner Valley was the first big oil field in Canada and he was a rough neck prior to the war. And so he never actually went to university because there was no money. He did extremely well in school. He still had his high school marks and he liked to compare those mine . And I didn’t shine compared to his, my mom was a dancer and she would spend a lot of time sort of dancing around the house. I remember, but she was a house flyer . The thing that I kept hearing was you’re going to be the first person in a family to go to university, which I was. And when I went, I didn’t know what the university really was just more school. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll be a lawyer not realizing what lawyers do, well it sounded okay. As I was finishing my first degree, one of my professors asked me what I was going to do. And I said , I had no idea. And he says , well, why don’t you go to graduate school? I didn’t , you know what that was? So he explained it and he says, come with me. He was the Associate Dean of graduate service. He said, fill this form out. And so I did, and I was accepted at the University of Calgary to do master’s work. And I did it in what, at that time, basically it was in animal behavior that I was studying since I’m pretty dumb in 2020, but the learning ability of squirrels and chipmunks and rats and so on comparing them. My mother was convinced this wasn’t my father, particularly this wasn’t going to be a career. So I had become interested in the fact that these animals were so different. Behaviorally had to be related to their brain . So decided to sort of look doing neuroscience, what we now call neuroscience . It didn’t really exist. Then handed off to Penn State and worked with somebody who was one of the leaders in the field, particularly with respect to the frontal lobe , did my PhD with him. Then I went to University of Western Ontario to do a neurophysiology for two years. And then I went to the Montreal Neurological Institute to study humans with brain injuries, surgically induced brain injuries, which was going back to my PhD kind of stuff. And that’s when I discovered neuropsychology and went, you know, there must be a book on this and I would talk to the graduate students and other postdocs and everybody agreed there wasn’t a book. And there was no such course. So I decided to design a course. And when I moved back to Alberta people in the Mcgill that I was nuts to leave Mcgill and go to this little, very new University (inaudible), but it was not far from where I’d grown up. And I just thought, I want to go home to the mountains. I decided, you know, we really need to write a book. Now I was 28 and you know , 28 year olds don’t start fields. They don’t start writing books in the field, but I didn’t know that. And so I convinced my new colleague in which I had to do it with me. So we wrote this book and the rest was history. We were just finishing the eighth edition, which I think will be the last one, 40 years later. So that’s sort of the nutshell of the educational history.

Richard Miles: 26:40

So you were 28 when you wrote the book, meaning your brain wasn’t quite done being developed. So that’s probably right . We wrote the book, right? Bryan is, cause you didn’t know any better, but as you said, one final question, you’ve been a pioneer in this field of neuropsychology . What is sort of the next chapter, which does the field look like now? What are your grad students or your young postdoc fellows? What are they working on? Can you give us a sort of sneak peek of what sort of research we might see coming or being published in the next decade or two?

Bryan Kolb: 27:08

Sure. So the biggest change in behavioral neuroscience has been the advances in noninvasive imaging. So MRI functional MRI and all the various variations of this. So historically in order to understand how the human brain work, we studied lab animals and we induced and we still do induce injuries in these animals and then see what happens. We measured electrophysiology and so on, but we couldn’t really do to any noninvasive way. I remember when I was at the MNI in 1975, the first CT scan in Canada was installed and the radiologists were going crazy over this cause they could actually see through the skull. In hindsight, it was pretty crappy because it was new, but now it’s fabulous. The MRI can really make a difference to how we study the brain and functional magnetic resonance energy means that we can see the brain in action online. We can see the blood flow moving one place to another as we’re doing things. And so this has really made a difference. So that’s one big difference going to where I think students are going. One of the things we’re doing is we’re trying to do grand rounds presentation to the pediatric neurologist at the University of Calgary children’s hospital. It was mostly on animal work and they wanted me to come and see the kids in intensive care. And I said, well, what’s the standard of care? What do you do with these kids? And basically they said, well, we cool them down for 24 or 48 hours to reduce the inflammation. And then we hand them to the parents and say, good luck. We can do a lot better than that. We can make a program up is based on our animal studies, trying to work with these kids. So tactile stimulation is huge. So tactile stimulation or animal studies, we’ve shown that tactile stimulation produces profound changes in brain. We can really reverse or reduce the effects of early brain injury , the effects of drugs, all kinds of stuff with tactile circulation. So we have a program that just kinda got messed up a bit with COVID, but we’ll resume doing that. We have another program that students are really interested in applications to indigenous communities, where the early experiences are often not very good. The information about brain plasticity is absent for the moms and the dads. They don’t realize that this serve and return is so crucial to language development and cognitive development. So I think there’ll be more and more of this kind of activity. And I think the use of animals is going to go down in large ways. We can use far fewer animals by using imaging techniques in the animals as well. So these are the changes that we’re going to see. And of course this is flows in humans with noninvasive imaging but one of the things we have to remember is that when you’re looking at the noninvasive imaging, the whole brain seems to be involved in everything, but when you damage the brain, it doesn’t look that way. So we still have to keep studying patients to try and get some sense of what the crucial regions are for particular kinds of coordinating activities.

Richard Miles: 30:06

Bryan, that is tremendous research that you’ve done and what you’ve sketched out of what’s coming. And the implications I think are really just enormous across, not just the field of education, but a whole bunch of different fields and will impact a lot of the research that’s going on and the application I want to thank you very much for joining me on the show today and stay safe up there in Calgary and hope we can have you back on the show at some point.

Bryan Kolb: 30:27

Thank you it’s been fun.

Outro: 30:30

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinists , Jacob Lawson.