Laura Wesseldijk works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt at the Behavioral Genetics unit in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC. We talk about her research on the genetics of music and mental health, methods in behavioural genetics, the role of large samples, the importance of twins for behavioural genetics, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Did Beethoven have bad genetics for music - or are there problems with applying (some) genetic methods to individuals?
0:11:51: Different methods in behavioural genetics
0:24:20: Gene x environment interactions and the difficulty of disentangling them
0:30:30: 23andMe in genetics research
0:37:26: Can you ask an interesting question if you need millions of people to have done a measurement?
0:42:08: How to measure musicality (at scale)
0:47:56: Geneticists really love twins
0:50:41: Do critical periods in music exist?
1:03:30: How Laura got interested in the genetics of music
1:12:07: A book or paper more people should read
1:16:17: Something Laura wishes she'd learnt sooner
1:17:49: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Laura's links

• Website: https://geni.us/wesseldijk-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/wesseldijk-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/wesseldijk-twt

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References
Begg, ... & Krause (2023). Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven. Current Biology.
Harden (2021). The genetic lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality.
Hjelmborg, ... & Kaprio, J. (2017). Lung cancer, genetic predisposition and smoking: the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer. Thorax.
Rutherford (2020). How to argue with a racist: History, science, race and reality.
Rutherford (2022). Control: the dark history and troubling present of eugenics.
Ullén, Mosing, Holm, Eriksson & Madison (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences.
Wesseldijk, Ullén & Mosing (2019). The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes. Scientific reports.
Wesseldijk, Mosing & Ullén (2021). Why is an early start of training related to musical skills in adulthood? A genetically informative study. Psychological Science.
Wesseldijk, Ullén & Mosing (2023). Music and genetics. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Wesseldijk, Abdellaoui, Gordon, Ullén & Mosing (2022). Using a polygenic score in a family design to understand genetic influences on musicality. Scientific reports.
Wesseldijk, ... & Fisher (2024). Notes from Beethoven’s genome. Current Biology.

Arne Ekstrom is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where he studies spatial navigation and memory. We talk about how he got into psychology, his unusual path to getting a PhD, his work on using single-cells recordings from people, the relationship between memory and spatial navigation, why he uses multiple methods, and much more.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: How Arne ended up studying psychology and neuroscience
0:06:23: Arne's route to a PhD recording single-cells in humans (via political activism in Central America)
0:20:18: The state of using VR-like tasks in the early 2000s
0:24:32: The status of spatial navigation research in the early 2000s
0:29:45: Collecting data from unusual populations
0:33:59: Why record from amygdala for a spatial navigation task?
0:41:35: Combining memory and navigation in hippocampus
1:02:04: Should I use one method or many?
1:11:29: A book or paper more people should read
1:13:51: Something Arne wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:14:51: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Arne's links

• Website: https://geni.us/ekstrom-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/ekstrom-scholar

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References & links

Episode with Lynn Nadel: https://geni.us/bjks-nadel
Episode with Nanthia Suthana: https://geni.us/bjks-suthana
Episode with Nikolai Axmacher: https://geni.us/bjks-axmacher
Episode with Nachum Ulanovsky: https://geni.us/bjks-ulanovsky

Argyropoulos ... & Butler (2019). Network-wide abnormalities explain memory variability in hippocampal amnesia. Elife.
Ekstrom, .. & Fried (2003). Cellular networks underlying human spatial navigation. Nature.
Ekstrom ... & Kahana (2005). Human hippocampal theta activity during virtual navigation. Hippocampus.
Ekstrom ... & Bookheimer (2009). Correlation between BOLD fMRI and theta-band local field potentials in the human hippocampal area. J neurophys.
Ekstrom ... & Starrett (2017). Interacting networks of brain regions underlie human spatial navigation: a review and novel synthesis of the literature. J neurophys.
Ekstrom & Ranganath (2018). Space, time, and episodic memory: The hippocampus is all over the cognitive map. Hippocampus.
Hassabis ... & Maguire (2009). Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus. Current Biology.
Iaria & Burles (2016). Developmental topographical disorientation. TiCS.
Kunz ... & Axmacher (2015). Reduced grid-cell–like representations in adults at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Science.
Logothetis ... & Oeltermann (2001). Neurophysiological investigation of the basis of the fMRI signal. Nature.
Watrous ... & Ekstrom (2013). Frequency-specific network connectivity increases underlie accurate spatiotemporal memory retrieval. Nat Neuro.
Zhang & Ekstrom (2013). Human neural systems underlying rigid and flexible forms of allocentric spatial representation. Human brain mapping.

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of the recent biography of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (The brain in search of itself), and The Dreams of Santiago Ramon y Cajal. We talk about Cajal's life and work, Cajal's unlikely beginnings in a rural Spain, how he discovered that neurons were separate from each other, leading to the neutron doctrine, how Cajal became famous seemingly overnight, Cajal's rivalry with Camillo Golgi, the relationship between art and science, how to write a biography of someone whose autobiographical writings were heavily influenced by picaresque novels, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Why Cajal is worth talking about
0:01:42: Cajal's father
0:04:48: Cajal's childhood
0:17:22: Cajal's early work on the brain, and the status of neuroscience in the 1880s
0:23:45: The conference that made Cajal famous
0:29:42: Cajal's years as a famous scientist
0:35:33: Cajal's personality
0:41:14: Cajal & Golgi's rivalry
0:45:48: del Rio and the discovery of glia cells
0:49:13: Picaresque novels and the difficulty of trusting Cajal's stories of himself
1:02:52: A book or paper more people should read
1:04:14: Something Ben wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:04:57: Advice for PhD students/postdocs - people in a transitory period

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Ben (Ehrlich)'s links

• Website: http://www.benehrlich.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/benehrlich11

Ben (Kuper-Smith)'s links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References & links

Kölliker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_von_K%C3%B6lliker
Golgi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi
del Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADo_del_R%C3%ADo_Hortega

Calvino (1972). Invisible cities.
Ehrlich (2017). The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
Ehrlich (2022). The brain in search of itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the story of the neuron.
Pitlor & Lee (editors). The Best American Short Stories 2023 .