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Welcome to UCL Brain Stories, the monthly podcast series from the UCL Neuroscience Domain presented by Caswell Barry (UCL Division of Biosciences), Steve Fleming (UCL Division of Psychology & Language Sciences) and Selina Wray (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology). UCL Brain Stories aims to showcase the best of UCL Neuroscience, highlighting the wide range of cutting-edge research going on within the Neuroscience Domain as well as bringing you the people behind the research to share their journey of how they ended up here. Each month we’ll be joined by a leading neuroscientist to offer their perspective on the big questions and challenges in Neuroscience research, to find out what stimulated their fascination with the brain and hear how they ended up becoming part of the UCL Neuroscience community.
For more information and to access the transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research/domains/neuroscience/brain-stories-podcast
0:02
Hello and welcome to Brain Stories.
0:04
I'm Caswell Barry and I'm here with my Co host Celina Ray on Brain Stories.
0:09
We aim to provide a behind the scenes profile of the latest and greatest work in neuroscience, highlighting the stories and the scientists who are making this field tick.
0:19
We don't just ask about the science, we ask about how the scientists got to where they are today and where they think their field is going in the future.
0:28
And we're really delighted today to be joined by Doctor Jenny ****** for an episode that will be slightly different to our normal format.
0:37
So welcome to our Halloween special.
0:39
I was just going to say I was tempted to make a spooky noise there, but I'm glad you did it.
0:45
As said, Jenny is a senior postdoctoral researcher in the UK Dementia Research Institute, but she also has a alter ego or alternative side to the work that she does, which is as the Gothic scientist.
1:03
And Jenny has a long standing interest in Gothic novels, Gothic, Gothic literature, the intersection between arts and science, and how the Victorian arts influenced scientific development and scientific stories.
1:17
So we're really excited to dive into that a little bit more today.
1:20
So welcome, Jenny, Thank you for joining us.
1:23
Thank you so much for having me.
1:25
So maybe we can start with a little bit of a, our traditional opening if you like.
1:31
And maybe you can start by just spending a few minutes telling us what you do in your day job.
1:37
What's your research about and why are you excited about your research area?
1:41
I am working on too many projects, so I'm going to have to focus somehow, but I'm currently working with Doctor Soyun Hong on Alzheimer's disease and focusing on lysosomal dysfunction in I've induced pluripotin stem cell derived microglia.
1:59
And I'm especially interested in lysosomes because my PhD was actually on a form of childhood dementia, lysosomal storage disorder.
2:11
So childhood dementias are individually individually very rare, but a lysosomal storage disorders such as patent disease are actually the most common cause of childhood dementia.
2:22
And that's currently also my site project.
2:24
And so I'm looking at the role of astrocytes in the infantile and late infantile form of patent disease.
2:31
So I'm very much interested in stem cell derived models of diseases with a heavy focus on glia.
2:38
Thank you.
2:39
And I think it might be a surprise for a lot of our lead listeners, actually, the childhood dementias exist.
2:45
It's not something we think of as being a childhood condition.
2:49
But from what you said, the thing that kind of unifies a lot of these neurodegenerative conditions is the lysosomes.
2:57
So tell us a bit, why is the lysosome so important for brain health?
3:02
In fact, can I take a step even further back for the people like me who had no idea, don't really know what a lysosome is.
3:09
And maybe you could tell us what lysosome is to start with just for the the non experts.
3:15
So I actually had a discussion with a friend yesterday how best to describe lysosomes.
3:20
I like to describe them as kind of the waste men of the cell.
3:25
She said they're more like little stomachs within the cell that gobble up all the stuff that the cell doesn't need and then kind of recycle it.
3:33
So they're very important for cellular health and they're important in all different cell types in the brain, but they have slightly cell type specific functions.
3:43
So we can't just, for example, look in astrocytes and say, well, lysosomes do this here because lysosomes and microblia or neurons might behave slightly differently.
3:55
So I should really clarify that lysosomes are also commonly affected in adult neurated innovation.
4:01
But also when I said the most common cause of childhood dementia, it is specifically Batten disease.
4:06
So there are other lysosomal storage disorders that affect young adults as well.
4:12
But specifically in Batten disease, it's a group of 14 different diseases, each caused by mutations in a different gene, but they also remarkably similar kind of clinical presentation.
4:28
So loss of vision, epileptic seizure and obviously neurodegeneration.
4:35
One of the things that differs is age of onset.
4:38
And they're obviously devastating diseases and they're invariably fatal.
4:44
So, and before I started my PHDI had no idea childhood dementia has existed.
4:53
I went into the project to meet my supervisor and I knew nothing about it.
4:58
And I was just very intrigued by his description of the project.
5:01
And yes, I've, I've, it's one of those things that I'm really passionate about and it's under research, but it can also give us clues for adult neurodegeneration because, for example, one of the genes that causes a late variant infantile form, CLM 5 is also a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.
5:21
So does that mean that we think the lysosomes are also degraded in Alzheimer's?
5:27
Do we, do we know that or Yes, we know that lysosomal dysfunction is a major part of Alzheimer's disease.
5:34
And yeah, that's something that I am currently working on as my main job.
5:40
And I was interested actually, we the nature of the podcast is that we talk a lot about neurons.
5:45
As you can imagine, it's it's the neuroscience podcast.
5:49
But of course they're not the only cell in the brain.
5:52
And the other cells are really important and crucial for health and and also go wrong in disease.
5:58
And you mentioned that you focus a little bit on lysosomes in astrocytes.
6:03
I'm can't remember if we've discussed astrocytes in a previous episode, but I think maybe it's worth doing so now just in case.
6:11
So can you tell us a little bit about what are astrocytes?
6:14
Why are they so important?
6:15
And why look at the lysosomes in the astrocytes as well as the neurons.
6:21
And yeah, so astrocytes are the stars of the brain.
6:26
They're my favourite cell type, so I'm biassed.
6:28
But they have, they're the most numerous glial cells in the brain.
6:32
So and we know there's different neuronal subtypes and just the same, there's different subtypes of astrocytes.
6:39
They show they have different morphologies across different brain regions and they play really crucial roles in neurodevelopment in the healthy brain.
6:51
They have a role at the blood brain barrier, they support neurons with nutrients.
6:56
They're hugely important at the synapse and cell cell signalling.
7:00
So when something goes wrong with the astrocytes, it's likely also going to affect neurons in Batten disease specifically, especially in the infantile form that I did my PhD on.
7:13
What happens in the mouse is that you get these areas of early inflammation of astrocytes, so they kind of become reactive and respond even before we lose the neurons, which is very interesting.
7:30
So this is what my PhD was based on and I did a lot of cultures and I grew up healthy astrocytes together with fat disease neurons and fat disease astrocytes with healthy neurons.
7:42
And what we found is that these astrocyte actually trigger cell death even in healthy neurons.
7:49
And this is amplified when you add microglia.
7:52
So that's that.
7:53
We know that the astrocytes are doing something, but we don't know what.
7:57
And that's kind of what my side project is focusing on, figuring out what's going on with the astrocytes.
8:03
And we know it's something lysosomal, but you know, how is that causing the astrocytes to become so toxic to neurons?
8:12
That's amazing.
8:13
Do you think, do you think there's a route to recover the function of astrocytes?
8:16
Is this a, is it reversible process or are we looking at something where it's about early detection and avoidance in the future?
8:23
The gene that's affected, NCLN 1, is a Lysosoma enzyme.
8:28
So obviously enzyme replacement therapy would be the optimal outcome and people are working on it.
8:36
But so far, as far as I'm aware, and this has not been in a clinical trial.
8:43
And the thing with ostracise, depending how late you detect it, because obviously there is inflammation and yes, you can reduce hopefully inflammation.
8:55
There's several small molecules are something that have been tested that actually slow disease progression in mice.
9:02
But once they're primed to be inflammatory, they will always be Trump prime.
9:09
So and for me, what's interesting about inflammation is also a lot of the field initially focused on, you know, up regulation of, you know, cytokines that are released.
9:19
But astrocytes when they become reactive, also lose some of their crucial function.
9:25
And I think that's very important to restore because, you know, they're so important for the healthy brain, really complicated diseases, complicated problem.
9:34
And we may be a reminder for us on the podcast too, that we should think beyond the neuron occasionally.
9:41
So yeah, I'd love to kind of shift us on to your extracurricular activity, if that's the right phrase for it, which is the work you do as the Gothic scientist.
9:54
And that involves kind of giving talks on a wide range of of subjects, particularly kind of how Victorian era sciences evolved and influenced literature.
10:05
And also what we do now.
10:06
And particularly through, is it right to say a festival called the London Month of of the Dead, is that right?
10:13
Yes, So that's kind of how I got started.
10:16
So London Month of the Dead free promotion for them basically is a series of talks and events, including cemetery tours that happens all throughout October.
10:28
And I've been going for years.
10:30
I can't remember how far back, but and I always thought it was super fascinating, such a wide range of speakers.
10:37
And one year I, you know, I just said to them, Hey, I'm in your scientist for he let me do a talk.
10:45
And they were like, yes.
10:46
And then I had to suddenly think about, oh gosh, what am I going to talk about?
10:52
But I think that's great because I guess when I, I sort of think about, you know, what would come under the Gothic scientist, I feel like the brain is particularly amenable to great stories, right?
11:08
And it's so fascinating and it's kind of, you know, like just any kind of manipulation of the brain.
11:14
It's just so interesting and it's, it can get so dark and so many kind of gothic tropes affect the brain, like, you know, zombies.
11:24
It's it's very much fun, but that's kind of how it started.
11:28
And I do also kind of medical history talks, I think.
11:32
So my initial background wasn't science.
11:36
I studied psychology and one of the things you get a lot more during a psychology is kind of the history of experiments.
11:45
So it's almost prime to, you know, think about history.
11:48
And then I started doing neuroscience, which was wonderful, loved it.
11:52
But at one point I kind of started looking at the history of experiments and the history of neurology and it's fascinating.
11:59
And I think we're losing out kind of not knowing about where our amazing research comes from.
12:07
Before we dive into that, I'm curious which which came first for you?
12:10
Was the interest in science or or the gothicness?
12:13
Like if you had to pin yourself to 1, which one were you first?
12:17
Definitely the gothicness.
12:19
I read some very dark novels when I was a child, so that definitely came fast.
12:28
Amazing.
12:29
Love it.
12:29
And so I'd love you to start maybe by telling us a little bit then about you mentioned neurology and kind of the history of neurology being a great kind of theme within this discussion.
12:41
So maybe we can start you off there.
12:44
Yes.
12:45
So I always start off by mentioning that the term of neurology in the in Britain was coined by someone called Thomas Willis, who was a General practitioner and had an interest in the brain and published a series of five books that contain descriptions of the brain and neurological diseases.
13:05
But really neurology as a discipline very much took off in the 18th, 19th century when you had the foundation of the Neurological Society of London.
13:22
You had the establishment of journals like Brain and Mind and we obviously know brain still exists today.
13:30
And most importantly, given that we are based at UCL, you had the the foundation of the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic in Queen's Square, which is now the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
13:47
And this was really founded because it was a really revolutionary kind of hospital because a patients with epilepsy weren't usually kept on general warts because people thought they would frighten the other people.
14:07
There was also certain stigma still attached with epileptic seizures being linked to demons and possession.
14:14
So you had this amazing hospital with specific wards for epilepsy and you had really groundbreaking surgeries taking place there based on experiments done by scientists at the time, who mapped specific brain regions and created these amazing drawings of the brain.
14:36
I feel slightly nervous to ask what would brain surgery have been like back in those days?
14:44
I mean, it's something that, you know, even now is a really big deal, even with all of our knowledge and state-of-the-art kind of equipment and and techniques.
14:56
And I'm sure it must have been quite different back then.
14:59
It it is, it was quite different, but actually remarkably localised.
15:04
So for so one of the first surgeries that took place at Queen Square was done by the nephew of Joseph Lister, who was the Super fast surgeon.
15:16
I can't remember his name, but basically, so one of the scientists at the time, David Faria, he created this map of the movement areas of the brain.
15:28
So he did this by stimulating animal brains with electric currents and figuring out which areas of the brain are responsible for which movements.
15:39
That meant that people, depending on kind of the way the seizures presented, could roughly estimate where the tumour would be.
15:50
So which is amazing.
15:54
It's very advanced.
15:56
And so during this surgery, I think the tumour was like they, they cut open the brain and it was like it looked the brain looked healthy when you cut it open.
16:05
And then they went further in a couple centimetre and they found the tumour.
16:09
They, it was very localised.
16:12
The surgery was a success, but the patient died afterward.
16:16
Oh my God.
16:18
I mean, I have to argue with the definition of success there, I think.
16:23
But what would unsuccessful surgery look like?
16:25
I'm sure.
16:27
So they managed to get the tumour out.
16:30
He initially survived the surgery, but then of course, one of the major risks is infection, and that's what happened.
16:41
So yes, the surgery itself, yes.
16:45
The outcome, not so much.
16:47
But yeah, so that was early kind of brain surgery.
16:51
And it's, it's, it was very much a team working together.
16:56
It's as it always is.
16:58
But even then, you know, you had that kind of research aspect.
17:02
You had the the surgeons and it's, it's fascinating.
17:05
I was going to say, it's quite different from I don't know what I'd imagined.
17:08
I guess I imagined like these pictures of the old operating theatres, you know, the ones that really put the theatre into operating theatre with like one boss doctor at the front showing off and doing things.
17:19
But it sounds, I mean it sounds much more similar to the sort of surgeries we'd recognise as sort of a modern team effort with pre worked or localised.
17:28
Yeah, it's yeah, I'm, I'm gobsmacked actually.
17:30
I'm quite surprised.
17:31
No, no, no, it was really amazing reading about it.
17:34
I I probably read way too much about neurosurgery at Queen Square because you had just an amazing assembly of people who worked there.
17:44
So you touched on something that I wanted to ask there, which is how did you, how do you find out about this?
17:52
Is this from those journals that you mentioned that were established at the same time?
17:56
Is it from?
17:57
I know we have a really good archives in Queen's Square that maybe details some of this.
18:02
But yeah, how do you, how did you research these stories?
18:06
So there's actually an amazing wealth of literature about medical history out there.
18:13
I found the most wonderful collection of papers that is basically neurology from Mesopotamia until today and it describes the picture of neurological injury in the Bible.
18:29
It's a you can go down a very deep rabbit hole.
18:35
That's really cool.
18:36
So as well as the stories there are, obviously you've already alluded to this, but the people behind the work and I can imagine there must be some real characters at the time kind of doing these surgeries and really being at the forefront of this new discipline of neurology.
18:51
Yes.
18:52
So one of them who's described as genuinely the father of British neurology as Hulings Jackson, he actually suggested that epileptic seizures arose in the cerebral cortex and that a seizure was a discharge of energy, which was given that there's no EEG, there's nothing like that at the time, revolutionary concept.
19:16
One of the things that stepped that stands out from him is that he published over 300 research papers and I found the best shady comment in a journal that basically said published obvious, often in obscure journals with a style that does not make easy reading.
19:38
So people write your papers well and review it too existed all along.
19:44
Absolutely.
19:46
And the other person that I want to mention is so Victor Horsley.
19:50
He was another pioneer of neurological surgery, but he was super interested in research as well.
19:57
And one time he actually left his clinic to go to the London Zoo because of walrus had died and he wanted to dissect the brain out.
20:06
Wow, wow.
20:09
Do you do you ever have the urge to do that, Selena?
20:12
I mean daily, but I managed to know incredible.
20:19
How do you even find out?
20:23
Yeah connections right.
20:27
Oh dear.
20:27
I think I feel like no one knows quite how to follow up that story about the walrus brain.
20:33
So something that's Troy explain and I think you've alluded to already, but it's definitely apparent in the way that you're talking is some of some of like these these characters who are sort of cropping up in early neurology, sort of there's a definite crossover or maybe they're being influenced with sort of the literature of the time.
20:50
I know you've mentioned that you, you know, you're interested in particularly dark novels or something, but these these people like that story about the walrus wouldn't look out of place in some ridiculous dark novel about evil genius or something.
21:01
Is there, is that happening?
21:03
Is there, is there at this time?
21:04
Is there a lot of interplay between the two or Yes, absolutely.
21:07
So for example, Bram Stokers who wrote Dracula, of course, his brother was a neurosurgeon who advised him on the depiction of neurosurgery in Dracula.
21:21
And he he was also an advocate for animal welfare in experiments, which is just fascinating.
21:32
I earlier mentioned David Faria, who created these amazing maps of the brain, but he was actually the inspiration for a mad scientist not just in one, but in two novels.
21:47
In Wilkiel Collins, Heart and science always get the title wrong, and in HG Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau because so the introduction of the Anti Vivisectionist Act during Victorian times was meant to be a way to care for or to take more care of the animals because people were concerned.
22:13
David Ferrier was the first person to stand trial under the Anti Vivisectionist Act because he performed surgery in animals after they had woken up from sedation and he did not hold the proper licence for that.
22:31
Now he was eventually cleared because he said his colleague actually did the experiments who did hold the licence.
22:39
So either he was taking credit for someone's work or he was lying.
22:42
Either way, not so great.
22:44
Yeah.
22:44
Either way, not the most ethical of scientific practises.
22:49
And it is interesting, I think a lot of what we do now is really governed by tight regulations, ethical permissions, you know, Home Office restrictions.
23:01
And you hear stories like this and you appreciate that they are there for a very good reason, right?
23:07
It's wow, yes.
23:10
And you had people like Williams, like Bram Stoker's brother, Sir Williams, Thornley Stoker, who was very much about animal research, but he also had scientists testifying that they don't care about the animals at all.
23:22
I can't remember who said this, but he was like, I don't care about animal suffering.
23:26
And it's like, oh, yeah, you're not helping your case here.
23:30
No.
23:32
And of course, I think it's hard to have a conversation about kind of Victorian literature and intersection with science without bringing up Frankenstein, right?
23:45
What can you tell us about that story, how it was influenced kind of did?
23:49
Is this what people really thought maybe neurology was like or what scientists were attempting to do?
23:56
Or.
23:57
I mean, it's obviously so.
24:00
Frankenstein has always kind of posed as a cautionary tale about science.
24:05
I should point out that Mary Shelley was actually not opposed to science.
24:10
Her mother was actually early feminists who wanted boys and girls to perform the same science experiments at school.
24:20
And she went to scientific lectures with her husband, Percy Shelley.
24:24
And she based some of the experiments that Frankenstein's father does in the novel on experiments that Percy Shelley did at Oxford with electrical fluids and jazz and things like that.
24:38
And of course, Frankenstein itself is heavily influenced by the frog leg experiments by Galvani.
24:47
We all know that you apply electric current to a frog's leg, it twitches.
24:53
And Galvani's nephew Adini, actually took this a little bit further and applied electric currents to an executed criminal in London and make.
25:05
I know.
25:06
So it's very unlikely that Mary Shelley would have been unaware of that.
25:11
She had a very good, you know, she had a very scientific background.
25:16
But also, yeah, but I'll touch upon that later.
25:19
But again, science and literature or science and arts were a lot more intermingled at the time.
25:25
So that kind of access was a lot more common.
25:29
It's amazing.
25:29
I was just thinking I might start walking through my lab shouting things like live, live.
25:36
I shout that at myself all the time.
25:39
All that because they work.
25:41
It's, I mean, the PhD students look worried sometimes, but obviously you have that kind of influence from science on the arts.
25:53
But also when you look at scientific articles at the time, they often cited poetry, or maybe not often, but they did cite poetry.
26:03
And I wonder whether that would make our journal articles a bit more, you know, interesting at times create that artistic element.
26:12
And you have novels like Doctor Jekyll and Hyde that is very much written in the scientific jargon of the time.
26:20
I mean, it's, it's towards the later end of the 19th century.
26:24
So at that time, science becomes a lot more focused and split into individual disciplines and you could argue less accessible.
26:34
But in Doctor Jekyll and Hyde, it's definitely still apparent that that the author took a lot of inspiration from scientific research at the time, although occasionally he denied that.
26:45
But it's yeah.
26:48
So one of the things that seems to be coming through is that sort of technology is driving both science and the art, like electrophysiology.
26:57
Are there any other sort of technologies that you think have had an an impact on either of these or, or is it just that?
27:03
No.
27:04
So microscopy was a really a popular hobby during Victorian times.
27:09
It was a bit more tied to the kind of natural sciences, like think about Darwins and plants.
27:15
But I found a journal that said, oh, my microscopes were very affordable at the time to have at home.
27:23
And then I did the conversion and it was still 2000 lbs, which not entirely, but it is interesting because a lot of these kind of brain maps that were generated by Faria didn't actually use microscopes to be generated.
27:41
That kind of came later.
27:43
And obviously you have the whole Golgi staining method where it really becomes an amazing way to visualise individual cells.
27:53
But you have to consider that all these early scientists were also artists in a way that they drew the brain, that they drew the cells.
28:03
And, you know, you go back and you look at these books and the Welcome Trust has uploaded a lot of them on the archives.
28:10
You can spend hours looking at them.
28:12
I certainly do, but it also is sometimes it reminds me that in a way we are still artists.
28:19
We use microscopes in a very different way.
28:22
We use what I use a lot of fluor fluorescent markers and spend a lot of time imaging my cells and they are very, very beautiful.
28:33
And we don't share that enough.
28:36
The obviously our main point of science is, you know, we all want to cure diseases.
28:40
We want to find the breakthrough that cures the horrible childhood dementia.
28:45
But at the same time, I get such joy looking at my cells.
28:50
When you stay in parts of the cell like the cytoskeleton, astrocytes, it's always beautiful.
28:56
And it's I, I still think we are a scientist also artists, photographers, images.
29:04
And it's something that, you know, I think we should be sharing more because I think it'll really highlight how fascinating things like cells and the brain can be.
29:16
I agree.
29:16
I agree.
29:16
And there has maybe been this widening of a gap between arts and science that existed back in the day that we need to kind of work to bring closer.
29:25
I'm interested that you said the the kind of cheap in quotation masks.
29:31
We realise that 2000 lbs is not cheap, but almost that some people would have these microscopes and it would be a hobby to kind of use these microscopes.
29:41
What sort of things would people be imaging then?
29:44
Because they obviously wouldn't your, you know, your average person who's doing this as a hobby wouldn't, I hope, have access to brain material.
29:52
But would it be things like insects or Yeah, yeah.
29:56
Or like plants or things, I guess because the paper that I found linked to the natural sciences.
30:01
So things like that just yeah, I have a burning question to ask you because I was looking before we spoke to you.
30:07
I was looking through your sort of bioc, and one of the things that struck my eye was that you've spoken about sort of scientific basis of zombies, I think was one of your talks.
30:16
Ah, yes, you're smiling, which ties into like, like many of my childhood friends were utterly obsessed with zombies.
30:23
I've seen too many zombie films.
30:25
So I really, I really want I want to know what you said in this talk.
30:28
Like, you know what's so it's actually an upcoming talk.
30:32
Oh no, can't spoilers.
30:35
Oh, I can give some light spoilers.
30:37
And so it's on the 2nd of November at Guys Hospital Chapel.
30:43
So get your tickets.
30:44
But yes.
30:46
So my it was actually not my choice of topic.
30:49
My friend really pushed me to do it and at some point I just gave in because so obviously I'm trying to give it a bit of a scientific spin.
31:00
But what I will be talking about is obviously the fungus in ants that creates little mini zombies.
31:07
It doesn't actually affect the brain which is disappointing.
31:11
How does it?
31:11
What does it do to I?
31:13
So I know it changes their behaviour.
31:14
I assumed it must tap into their like little insect brains.
31:18
So I've started reading up on this and I'm definitely not an insect specialist, so I need to this.
31:25
I've got a while to get this right, but it doesn't directly affect the brain.
31:28
It's just, yeah, it's a teaser.
31:30
If you want to know how it works, go to Jenny's talk on November the 2nd.
31:36
But what I will be talking about is taking several zombie tropes from video games, films and books and look at how the zombies behave and then kind of discuss what areas of what part of the brain still need to be functional for the zombies, the way to behave the way that they do.
31:56
Because for example, you have fast zombies and you have slow zombies in Half Life, a video game that I've played, both of them exist.
32:05
So do you get neurodegeneration in a zombie?
32:07
Are the fast zombies the younger zombies?
32:10
And then they slowly decline.
32:12
And so that's going to be one of the things that I'll be covering.
32:16
And I might end on the note of how I would create a zombie in the lab if, you know, if I was an evil scientist.
32:27
I love it.
32:27
We're all going to go away and think about that now, aren't we?
32:30
I wouldn't make a zombie.
32:31
It could be a new research grant.
32:33
I think it might go down well with some funders.
32:39
OK, so we're nearly out of time, and we're going to have to wrap up.
32:43
But before we do, we have our traditional last question.
32:48
But I think, I think having spoken to you before, you're going to put slightly different slants on this.
32:52
So I'm going to ask you the the vanilla question.
32:54
You can do with it what you like.
32:56
So what's your favourite fact about the brain?
32:59
Yes.
33:00
So I thought about it and I couldn't narrow it down.
33:03
I was getting really stressed about it really.
33:05
And then I was like, hold on, let's just go back in time and think about the first thing that I learnt about the brain.
33:13
Now to give a bit of a background, my dad worked closely with some archaeologists in Sudan.
33:19
So one of my first loves was actually Egyptology.
33:23
So the first thing that I learned about the brain was that during mummification and the brain was removed through the nose.
33:30
And you know what?
33:32
Still one of my brain favourite brain facts.
33:35
And the first thing I learned about the brain.
33:37
So there we go.
33:38
Amazing.
33:39
I think that is suitably gruesome for a Halloween special.
33:43
That's been a really fascinating discussion.
33:46
I, I think, you know, I've been scribbling notes as you were talking because I've learned a few things that I did not know before and that I'd quite like to go back and read a little bit more on.
33:57
So thank you so much, Jenny, for joining us on this episode of Brain stories.
34:01
We hope all of our listeners enjoyed this Halloween special and see you next time.
34:06
So we'd like to thank Patrick Robinson and UCL Digital education for editing and mixing UC LS neuroscience Domain for funding the podcast.
34:14
Follow us on Blue sky and LinkedIn.
34:17
Now aren't we moving with the Times at UCL Brain Storage for updates and information about forthcoming episodes?