Ulysses Neuroscience

[Walda Caesar]

Lifetime achievement Award
Professor John Boland received the Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his career-long contribution to innovative research. Professor Boland, School of Chemistry, is Director of the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN).

Professor John Boland receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from Provost, Dr Linda Doyle.
Prof Boland co-founded the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), a leading neuroscience research hub, and his work in nanoscience and nanotechnology, particularly with materials like graphene, has spurred innovation in electronics and energy storage. He directed Trinity's AMBER Research Center, driving material science innovation and fostering academia-industry collaborations, and actively engages with industry partners, with his collaborations leading to tech advancements and real-world applications.
Additionally, Prof. Boland's teaching and mentoring have cultivated the next generation of innovators, ensuring his legacy endures. He has also promoted interdisciplinary research, spurring innovative solutions through diverse expertise.

Societal Impact Award
Dr Esther Murphy, Principal Investigator in the School of Engineering and academic collaborator at the SFI Adapt Centre in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, was awarded the Societal Impact Award. Dr Murphy is the Principal Investigator for two research projects with a focus on digital inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Her work is person-centred and focused on principles of inclusion, accessibility and well-being for people with ID.
Dr Murphy is passionate about promoting digital and social inclusion via the co-creation of a digital skills education programme for adults with ID. The goal is to ensure nobody is left behind in today's increasingly digital world. She is working in partnership on real projects with Big Tech companies including Alphabet, EY and Microsoft to reach that goal and has secured extensive European funding to make the cultural changes required, by empowering people to provide the training required to and for their peers.

These innovations tackle a wide range of issues such as energy storage using nanotechnology, monitoring stroke risk, treatments for rare neurodevelopmental, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, and digital inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities. In addition, we are honouring the value of industry collaboration, as demonstrated by the exciting Trinity Quantum Alliance.

Professor John Boland received the Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his career-long contribution to innovative research. Professor Boland, School of Chemistry, is Director of the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN).

Additionally, Prof. Boland's teaching and mentoring have cultivated the next generation of innovators, ensuring his legacy endures. He has also promoted interdisciplinary research, spurring innovative solutions through diverse expertise.

Dr Max Bianchi, Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology at Trinity, and President/CEO of Ulysses Neuroscience at the Trinity Institute of Neurosciences (TCIN), received the Campus Company Founders Award. Ulysses Neuroscience creates innovative treatments for rare neurodevelopmental, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. It bridges the gap between researcher and patient in clinical and pre-clinical research, improving patient experiences and outcomes.

Dr Bianchi thought there was a need for a new way to do business in neuroscience; not as a pure contract research organisation, but as a private research and development organisation able to work with patients and to then provide the pharmaceutical industry this bridge with patients.

Dr Esther Murphy, Research Fellow in the School of Engineering and its Robotics and Innovation Lab, was awarded the Societal Impact Award. Dr Murphy is the Principal Investigator for two research projects with a focus on digital inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Her work is person-centred and focused on principles of inclusion, accessibility and well-being for people with ID.

Dr Murphy is passionate about promoting digital and social inclusion via the co-creation of a digital skills education programme for adults with ID. The goal is to ensure nobody is left behind in today's increasingly digital world. She is working in partnership on real projects with Big Tech companies including Alphabet, EY and Microsoft to reach that goal and has secured extensive European funding to make the cultural changes required, by empowering people to provide the training required to and for their peers.

Professor Stefano Sanvito, Professor of Condensed Matter Theory and Director of CRANN, and Dr John Goold, Associate Professor in the School of Physics, were jointly awarded the Industry Engagement Award for establishing the Trinity Quantum Alliance (TQA) in May 2023, which includes leading industry partners Microsoft, IBM, Horizon Quantum Computing, Algoririthmiq and Moody's Analytics as founding partners.

The TQA will embed research activity across quantum networks, HPC integration and basic quantum science in the university. There are also broader benefits to the Irish research eco-system as one of the founding partners, Horizon Quantum Computing, is using the alliance to build its presence in Ireland with the creation of 10 new jobs and co-location in the TQA premises.

Trinity Innovation and Enterprise supports investigative research from concept to implementation, enabling discovery and innovation and connecting researchers with a community of innovators. Trinity Innovation and Enterprise is supported by Enterprise Ireland.

I am trained in Neurobiology (behavior, physiology). My doctoral dissertation studied neuroanatomical substrates of drug (Methamphetamine) reward (Hippocampus). My postdoctoral training examined cellular mechanisms underlying (pre)synaptic inhibition on central synapse dynamics. Understanding how neurons encode and compute information is fundamental to the study of the brain, but opportunities for hands-on experiences with such techniques on live neurons are rare in science education. For the past decade, I have used my formal training to explore low-cost and hands-on approaches (using invertebrates) in neuroscience to explore behavioral and physiological questions (learning and memory, locomotor activity, drug-seeking, drug reward) with undergraduates. Broadening access in Neuroscience to historical underserved populations via low cost approaches has been the vision of my past and current interests.

is the Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of Philosophy, and associate professor in the departments of psychology and neuroscience, and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also principal investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory within the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

Now recall my earlier discussion of the discrepancy in the valence felt when attention is directed to the simulated content versus the act of simulating. My proposal here is that what underlies the motivational aspect of nostalgia comes from a pleasurable reward signal that the subject momentarily experiences when attention is allocated to the simulated content. As it turns out, this is exactly what the neuroscientist Kentaro Oba and colleagues in Tokyo found in a 2016 study, where brain activity in regions associated with reward-seeking and motivation was higher during nostalgic recollection. Entertaining the kinds of mental simulations that elicit the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia generates a reward signal that seems to motivate individuals to turn their ersatz experience into a real one, in an attempt to replace the (actual) negative emotion felt when simulating with the (imagined) positive emotion of the simulated content.

DAVE DAVIES, host: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Terry Gross is under the weather today. Our guest, David Eagleman, is a neuroscientist who says our conscious minds, the part of our brains we think of as ourselves, aren't the only forces at work when we make decisions. In fact, Eagleman says, there's a war going on, or at least a competition between different parts of the brain that have an interest, so to speak, in the outcome of our actions. If we keep a secret, we're protecting a confidence, which is what we think we want to do. But there's an urge to spill the beans because another part of the brain knows it will relieve stress in our bodies. In his new book, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain," Eagleman explores ways in which the subconscious brain affects our decisions, motivations, attractions and repulsions. Eagleman is the director of the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor's College of Medicine, where he also directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action. He's written several books and academic articles on neuroscience and the novel "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives." He spoke recently with Terry Gross. TERRY GROSS, host: David Eagleman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You describe the brain as the most wondrous thing in the universe. And you say the conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain. It's actually on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity. So what are you examining in the unconscious parts of the mind? Dr. DAVID EAGLEMAN (Author, Neuroscientist): Well, what we find when we pull off the cover and we look at the circuitry inside is that the brain has colossal operations happening all the time. And the part that struck me as so interesting is that we have essentially no awareness of that activity and no access to it. So if you imagine something like lifting up the cup of coffee in front of you, that's actually underpinned by a lightning storm of electrical activity that allows your muscles to reach out and grasp the cup and bring it to your lip. But the whole thing feels completely effortless to you, and in fact if it weren't for neurobiologists holed up in lab, we wouldn't even have a notion of electrical signals and tendons and muscles and neurons firing. You wouldn't even suspect the existence of that stuff because none of that's obvious to you in terms of awareness. And what struck me as really interesting is that it turns out all of our lives, our cognition, our thought, our beliefs, how we act, the things we're attracted to, the thoughts we have, all of these are underpinned by these massive lightning storms of activity, and yet we don't have any awareness of. GROSS: Now, your theory is that the brain operates as a team of rivals. For instance, there's a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. There's a rational and an emotional system. Can you explain a little more your team-of-rivals concept of the brain? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Yeah. Intuitively, it feels like there's a you. So when somebody meets Terry Gross, they feel like: Oh, yeah, that's one person. But in fact, it turns out what we have under the hood are lots of neural populations, lots of neural networks that are all battling it out to control your behavior. And it's exactly a parliament, in the sense that these different political parties might disagree with one another. They're like a team of rivals in this way, to borrow Kearns Goodwin's phrase of this. They're like a team of rivals in that they all feel they know the best way to steer the nation, and yet they have different ways of going about it, just like different political parties do. GROSS: So in describing how the team of rivals, your concept of how the brain works, in describing how that functions, you use it as an example - secrets, our desire to keep something a secret and our desire to just confess it and get it out of our system. I want you to elaborate on how that illustrates the team-of-rivals image of the brain. Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, this is something I found interesting because I thought, I realized at one point that we didn't really have any sort of neurobiological explanation for a what a secret is. Could a toaster hold a secret? Could a computer program hold a secret? And the reason I was interested is because there's a lot of other literature showing that it's quite bad for the body to hold secrets. You get an elevation of stress hormones and... GROSS: You do? When you hold a secret, your stress hormones get elevated just by holding the secret? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Yes, in fact there's a group at UT Austin that's been looking at this for a while. When they have people write down their secrets, even anonymously, or even just in a journal, their stress hormone levels go down. Their number of doctor visits goes down. So there's a large literature on this, about how bad it is to hold a secret. But I just got interested in thinking: What is a secret, actually? And, you know, it's - because you have competing populations in the brain, if you have one part that wants to tell something and another part that does not want to because of maybe the social consequences of revealing something like this, that's a secret. If both parts want to tell, then that's just a good story, and if neither part wants to tell, then that's something that's, you know, not terribly interesting. That's why it's not interested in telling. So that's just one way of getting at this issue of team of rivals. But more generally, the issue is we're always cussing at ourselves or getting angry at ourselves or cajoling ourselves to do something or contracting ourselves. And the question fundamentally is: Who is talking to whom here? Right because it's all you when you're angry at yourself. And what we're seeing here is that there are different parts of the brain that are battling it out. So for example, if I were to put a big chocolate chip cookie in front of you right now, part of you wants to eat that because it's a rich energy source, and part of you thinks: Don't eat it, you'll get fat. You'll have to go to the gym tomorrow and so on. And so there's an arm-wrestle that happens there. And the way that that battle tips determines your behavior. And essentially we just have one output channel of our behavior, and there's only one thing you can do in the world most of the time, and so this parliament is always battling. There's no one in charge. There's no sort of final arbiter of it. It's just which neural networks win out against which others. GROSS: So does doing research like this make you really self-conscious about the arguments that you're having within yourself? Dr. EAGLEMAN: You know, I have found this tremendously useful to build this framework of this team of rivals and to understand what's happening inside of me because one of the things this leads to that's quite useful is what we call a Ulysses contract. So you remember in the story of Ulysses, he was coming back from the Trojan War. He realized he had a unique opportunity to pass the island of the Sirens, where these women sang such beautiful melodies that it would beggar the imagination, and the sailors would crash into the rocks. Ulysses wanted to hear these songs, but he knew that like any mortal man, he would be susceptible to steering his ship into the rocks. So what of course he did, he lashed himself to the mast, and he filled his men's ears with beeswax, and he said: No matter what I do, just keep sailing straight. And what he was doing was setting up a contract with his future self. In other words, the Ulysses of sound mind in the present knew that the Ulysses in the near future would be behaving badly and making bad decisions. So he constrained his future behavior. GROSS: Give me an example with your own behavior. (Soundbite of laughter) Dr. EAGLEMAN: My own Ulysses contracts are private, I'm afraid. GROSS: Okay. (Soundbite of laughter) GROSS: Okay, somebody else's behavior who you're willing to expose, then. Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, take this as an example. When people are trying to get over alcoholism, the first thing they do is get rid of all the alcohol in the house because you don't want any bottles around. So in your moment of sober reflection, you get rid of everything so as to avoid future temptation. Or people who are on drug rehab programs, the first thing they're trained is don't carry more than $20 in your pocket at any time, and don't go down streets where you know drug dealers will be, things like that. So there are many ways that we can come to know that there are situations we'll be in that will be tempting. (Break) GROSS: You've been doing some very interesting research on the brain and our sense of time, and there's a very interesting New Yorker profile of you recently, describing this research. One of the questions you're asking is: How is your sense of time changed in high-adrenaline situations, for instance, like if you're falling from a high place or I imagine in a car crash, where people say that their sense of time is slowed down. A lot of accidents people feel that way, that while it's happening, their sense of time is slowed down. First of all, why are you researching this? What is the fundamental question you're trying to get an answer to? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, fundamentally, I'm interested in consciousness and how we perceive the world and what reality is out there. And one thing we've found from, say, visual illusions is that, you know, the visual world is not exactly what you think it is. Instead, it's a construction of the brain. Well, it turns out the same lesson applies in the time domain, which is to say although we think of time as a river flowing past, and we're passively tracking that, in fact time is an active construction of the brain. And in the last 11 years or so, my laboratory has shown that there are illusions of time where we can make you think in the laboratory that something lasted longer or shorter than it actually did, or we can make you think that something came before something else, even though it was the other way around, or that something is flickering at a different rate than it actually is. So what this tells us is that this notion of what's happening in time is something that our brains are involved in, and this opens this very deep question about what is reality out there, past us. GROSS: So one of the experiments that you've done is to have people, if I understood this correctly, get on an amusement park ride, where you're dropped about - was it 50 feet or something, and then... Dr. EAGLEMAN: A hundred and fifty feet. GROSS: A hundred and fifty feet, whoa. (Soundbite of laughter) GROSS: You're dropped 150 feet, and then you land on a net, which hopefully catches you safely, without any damage. But you ask people to do that - who were doing that jump, to give you a sense of how long they thought the fall was, and then you would... Dr. EAGLEMAN: That's right. GROSS: Then you would actually measure how long it actually was. What did you find? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, actually we had them retrospectively estimate how long they thought the fall was. But the key part of the experiment is we developed a device that we strapped to people's wrist that flashes information at them in a particular way while they're falling. So we could actually measure time perception as they're in freefall. And it's very scary, this fall, because you're falling backwards, and you're going very fast when you hit the net, and it takes about three seconds. And what we find is that people think it takes a long time. When you're actually doing the fall, it feels like it takes a very long time, and yet what we found is that during the fall, people are not able to actually see in slow motion, like Neo in "The Matrix." So what this means is - what we found from this is that time and memory and deeply intertwined, and so when you're estimating how long something lasted, when you say, whoa, that felt like it took forever, what that really has to do with, at least as far as we can tell right now, is the laying down of very dense memories during a scary situation. So when something is really hitting the fan, that's when your brain is completely focused on the situation and writing down everything, and when you read that back out, it seems like it must have taken forever because we're not used to being in the zone like that. We're not used to noting every detail and remembering everything. And so we - our estimates of time are often influenced by memory. GROSS: So would you explain a little more the thing that you put on the people's wrists that had information as they were falling? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Essentially it's flashing digits at you, randomized digits, in such a way that if you were seeing the world in slow motion, you would have no problem reading the digits off of the screen. But if you're seeing the world in normal time, then you're unable to read the digits. This has to do with - what we're doing is using LED lights, and we're alternating negative and positive images. So imagine a three written in LED lights, and in one moment, the lights that make the three are on, and then in the next moment, all those lights go off, and the background lights go on. And if you alternate these back and forth at a fast enough rate, then it just looks - you can't read the digit at all. It looks like all the lights are on. If it's just slightly slower, then you can read the digit with no problem. And so there's a very sharp threshold, and this is how we're able to see what is the speed at which people can see information. GROSS: So what did you find with that? Dr. EAGLEMAN: So what we found is that people are not actually able to see in slow motion during the fall, even though they feel like everything took much longer. So when people get in car accidents, for example, they feel like everything took such a long time, but it's not actually the same as a movie camera slowing down the footage. If it were, for example, then all of the sounds would become lower pitch, and just like in the movies, the person next to you who's screaming, it would sound like "no-o-o-o." But that's just a movie conceit, and that doesn't actually happen in real life, and it's because time is not one thing to the brain. It's not like a piece of footage that you stretch or squish. Instead, you have different parts of the brain that care about duration, those that care about temporal order, those that care about flicker rate, those that care about auditory pitch and so on. Normally, these work in concert, and we think that time is just one thing. But what we've been doing in the laboratory is teasing these apart and showing that time is really a construction of the brain. GROSS: Let me just say something about this experiment with the numbers flashing digitally on this apparatus on the wrist as the people fall. My interpretation of that would be if I were falling 150 feet, I would totally block out those numbers. I would be thinking: I don't really care about your experiment. I just want to hit the net safely. This is terrifying. These numbers are irrelevant. Please save me. Help. Do you know? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, that's - yes, you'd make a good scientist. That's exactly right. What we did is we stood at the top, and we monitored and made sure that everybody had their eyes on the clock. We had to rule out one subject who closed her eyes, but otherwise everyone kept their eyes on the wristwatch. And of course if we ran it at a slower speed, people are able to report the digits. So we know that people can watch the thing... GROSS: I see, okay. Who are these people? (Soundbite of laughter) Dr. EAGLEMAN: You know, these are all people who volunteered to come and do this experiment. We're not allowed to pay people to recruit them so as not to incentivize someone to do something so scary. GROSS: Now, the New Yorker article about you mentioned that when you were young, you were walking on the roof of your family home, not realizing that on part of the roof, it was just tarpaper, and there was no actual structure underneath it, and you fell through the roof. What was your experience of falling? Dr. EAGLEMAN: This was actually a neighboring house under construction. GROSS: I see. Dr. EAGLEMAN: But my experience of falling was - you know, I suddenly realized I had slipped off the roof. I immediately made lots of calculations about whether there was time to grab the edge or to grab the tarpaper. And I realized there wasn't. And then I was looking down at the ground, the red brick floor that was coming towards me, and I was thinking about "Alice in Wonderland," and I was thinking about how this must have been what it was like for her when she fell down the rabbit hole. And it was very calm, and it took a long time, it felt, and in the meantime - so that was when I was eight years old. Then I grew up, and I became a neuroscientist, and of course I did the calculations sometime in high school. I calculated how long the fall actually took, and it was just, you know, about .8 of a second to reach the ground. So I couldn't figure out why it felt like it had taken so much longer. So when I grew up, I just found I was fascinated with these issues of time, and I started researching it. And, you know, at this point, I've collected probably 600 narratives from people who have experienced this sort of effect in time, when just when they're about to die, when they're in some terrible situation, where everything's calm and slow, and there's no fear. It turns out I even found in David Livingston's diary, the African explorer, it turns out at one point he was grabbed in the jaws of a lion. A lion grabbed Livingston and shook him, and Livingston said he felt no fear. He was completely calm and just thinking bizarre thoughts. And this seems to be the thing that characterizes it. In his diary, he says something to the effect of, you know: Thank goodness that there's an omnipresent being who's so kind to us that in the moment of death, everything is so wonderful. And, you know, people, when they get in car accidents or bicycle accidents, or even when their child is in danger or something like that, they'll often have these just sort of calm, bizarre thoughts about what's happening. GROSS: Do you have a neurobiological explanation for that? Dr. EAGLEMAN: No, this is actually the next thing I'm working on now. I mean, as far as the calmness goes, it is likely to involve the endorphin system. Endorphin stands for endogenous morphine. And this gets released in situations like this. So it's at least in part to do with that. There's a related issue that I'm just trying to figure out how to study right now, which is often people will report panoramic memories in these situations, which is to say, this sort of life-flashed-before-my-eyes issue, and it's not actually like flashing in a cinematographic sense, but instead it's like all of your memories are there at once. Everything is there in front of you. And I'm trying to figure that out right now because in the '60s, it was discovered that if, during neurosurgery, you put in an electrode into the brain, and you give a little stimulation to certain parts, that people will experience a memory. They'll say: Oh, my gosh, I just had such a vivid memory. And so somehow in these situations, you're pushing the brain outside of its normal operating range, and people have all of these memories just come to the surface of consciousness. I think it's a terrific inroad for us to understand what the difference is between a memory when it's in its sort of normal unconscious state and what happens when it reaches consciousness. (Break) GROSS: I think that the work that you're doing on neuroscience and law is so interesting and has such kind of vast implications for social policy in the criminal justice system. You think that neuroscience should help us reform the criminal justice system. And your premise is that most criminal behavior is caused by problems with brain chemistry, and that we have to take that into account in both the courtroom and how we try people and how we sentence them and what we do with them. An example that you give is Charles Whitman, who in 1966, went to the top of the University of Texas Tower in Austin and killed 13 people -had a gun, killed 13 people, wounded 33. And why did you choose him as an example? Dr. EAGLEMAN: Well, he's a terrific example because there was nothing about his life that presages that kind of behavior, this murder spree that he went on. He was an Eagle Scout. He had an IQ of 135. He was an engineering student. He worked as a bank teller. And suddenly he gets up on the Texas Tower and murders a bunch of people. And when the police, after he was killed, the police went to his home and they discovered that he had killed his wife and his mother the night before. In his suicide note, Whitman said, I would like an autopsy to be done here because I know that something inside me has been changing for the past year. So an autopsy was done and it turns out he had a brain tumor and the tumor was impinging on a part of his brain called the amygdala, which is involved in fear and aggression. And so it gets us right into the heart of this issue. We know that we are our biology. I mean - or at least I can say we are sort of irrevocably tied to what's happening in our biology. And when the biology changes, so do you, and so does your behavior. And so this gets us right into the heart of the questions of responsibility and culpability. There's another example that I use in the book, which is this man who at the age of 40 suddenly became a pedophile and he started collecting child pornography and he made a move on his prepubescent stepdaughter. And when his wife found this out, she kicked h