[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: Yes. And today on the podcast, we're gonna present a story that...

ROBERT: The whole thing is an accident, really.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: This podcast.

JAD: We were on tour a few months ago doing the Symmetry thing.

ROBERT: In San Francisco.

JAD: And right as we were there, we got an email from a woman who lives there.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Telling us this nutty story.

ROBERT: Something odd had happened to her and she wanted to share it with us. So we met her in the lobby.

JAD: I missed—I didn't hit the record button fast enough. Could you just tell me your name again? And...

LIZA SHOENFELD: My name is Liza Shoenfeld, and I'm a research technician at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California—San Francisco.

JAD: Now Liza is just getting started with her scientific career.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I finished my undergraduate degree about a year and a half ago.

JAD: And this story takes place as she was about to take that next step after college and apply to grad school.

ROBERT: And the star of our story, other than, of course, Liza herself, is a little mischievous part of her brain. Well, everyone's brain...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Part of your brain called the basal ganglia.

JAD: Basal ganglia, which at the time she'd been studying.

ROBERT: Just so we understand, basal and ganglia. So basal is not the thing from which pesto is made in your case.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No.

ROBERT: What does 'basal' mean?

LIZA SHOENFELD: You're gonna have to ask someone else about that.

ROBERT: Okay. let's go on to 'ganglia.'

LIZA SHOENFELD: It's, you know, collections of neurons.

JAD: Big collections.

LIZA SHOENFELD: The basal ganglia is a fairly large part of your brain.

JAD: It's actually this big hunk deep in the center.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And it's responsible for controlling and coordinating movement.

ROBERT: When I move my neck back and forth, am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: When I wink, am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: When I make an expression in my face am I using my basal ganglia?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Definitely.

JAD: What about if I'm reading The New Yorker?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I don't think so.

ROBERT: Apologies to The New Yorker and its employees.

JAD: Point is, this part of your brain is really basic.

ROBERT: And at the lab where she was working, they had figured out this particular basal ganglia trick.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Using this really cool technology called optogenetics.

ROBERT: Maybe 'trick' isn't quite the right word.

JAD: What they'd done is they found a way to take a mouse, thread a little fiber optic cable through its skull, deep into its brain, into its basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So that when you shine a blue laser, literally, we just shine lasers into mouse brains.

JAD: They could actually turn its basal ganglia or parts of it on or off.

ROBERT: And this is in a live mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: This is in a live mouse. So we have these really cool videos showing a mouse running around, having a great mouse time. You turn the light on, we can get him to freeze...

ROBERT: In mid-stride?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So you hit the laser and—boom!—the mouse stops?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Mouse is like this.

JAD: So you use light to, like, puppetize the mouse?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: If you're this mouse, no matter how hard you try...

ROBERT: Move feet, move!

JAD: ...as long as that light is on...

ROBERT: Come on, move.

JAD: ...you can't do it. Liza is holding the strings.

ROBERT: Not exactly. It turns out she doesn't get to play with the laser that much.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of like I'm the bottom of the totem pole, so I do a lot of pipetting.

JAD: It's like where you squirt liquid from one tube to another.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm working on my pipetting skills these days.

JAD: Grunt work. Get the thumb muscles up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, I could beat anyone in the thumb-wrestling competition right now.

JAD: So at a certain point, she was like, "Enough of this. Time for me to apply to grad school."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I applied to five. University of California-San Diego, University of Washington in Seattle, UCSF, Rockefeller University and Harvard.

JAD: Okay. So you're going big.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah. Go big or go home.

JAD: Right. Exactly.

ROBERT: So she heads off to her first interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: University of Washington went great. I loved it. I went to Penn, University of Pennsylvania. Went down to UCSD in San Diego. It's a beautiful place, great scientists. It's actually the largest neuroscience community in the world.

JAD: So far, so good.

ROBERT: Did you ever go back to San Francisco where we are now?

JAD: This is where things get strange.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes. So my last interview. My very last interview, it was at UCSF.

JAD: And she says about a week before that interview...

LIZA SHOENFELD: I got really sick. So I think it was some kind of stomach flu, but it was pretty severe nausea. I wasn't really able to eat or do anything and...

JAD: Throwing up?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, all sorts—I don't know. I had some bad dim sum the weekend before. That could have been it.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's it. So she goes to the doctor, he gives her some pills to fight the nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then the next day was my interview. Friday was my interview. So I went, you know, there's the nice introduction and they give you breakfast.

JAD: At this point, she's pretty familiar with the whole routine.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Generally, the way these interviews are structured is that we talk a little bit about my research in dopamine and the basal ganglia and these mice.

JAD: They tell her about their work.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I have to think of a couple witty questions. I ask my questions.

ROBERT: What's a witty question in this kind of thing?

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs]

JAD: Witty science questions?

LIZA SHOENFELD: It's a witty science question.

ROBERT: Witty science question. Okay, never mind.

JAD: Anyhow, she's raring to go and she heads in to meet her first basal gangliatician of the day.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And he studies—one of the things he studies is dopamine.

JAD: In the basal ganglia.

LIZA SHOENFELD: He studies stuff that's a little bit more molecular than what I—than what I know. But we had a good conversation about dopamine. And at this point in the day, I was feeling okay...

ROBERT: No nausea.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Then I went to my second interview, which is this woman that I was so excited to talk to. Her name is Allison Doupe, and she's pretty well known.

ROBERT: Her name is Allison Doupe?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Allison Doupe.

ROBERT: Wow. And she studies dopamine?

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] She studies songbirds.

ROBERT: Songbirds.

JAD: Which is what Liza really wanted to study.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So birds have basal ganglias, too.

JAD: So she's pretty fired up.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And kind of the beginning of that interview, my—my face started to feel a little bit strange. And I was wearing glasses that day, so what I thought was happening was that my glasses were—you know, your glasses get loose and they kind of start to slip down your nose and you have to kind of tighten the muscles around your ears to try and keep your glasses on. So we were talking and I just kept on feeling like, "God, why can't I stop tightening that?" It was—kind of got to the point where it started to distract me, but I felt okay. Then we went to lunch, and this was a lunch with all the current students and a lot of the current faculty and all the prospective students. And at lunch, I remember on the walk to lunch my head just started spontaneously turning to the right like...

JAD: Like...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I—like I would be trying to sit here and face you and I would just turn over here and face Robert.

JAD: That's—that's such a funny thing.

LIZA SHOENFELD: It's strange.

JAD: Was your neck moving and you're like, "No neck. Don't do that."

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes, exactly what was happening. I was trying to send signals to my neck being like, "All right, sitting here having lunch with an important professor, why don't you just face him, talk to him," and instead I'm just turning over here, turning over here, turning over here.

ROBERT: Oh, you're turning a fairly wide arc.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You are turning away from the professor.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Oh, yeah, so I remember—I remember at one point in lunch turning my chair like this.

ROBERT: You're trying to rotate? [laughs]

LIZA SHOENFELD: So I could talk to him.

ROBERT: A permanent sidelong glance.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

JAD: But she figured it's not that painful, so it must just be a cramp or something.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'm kind of thinking. "Oh, okay. So I slept funny last night. I must have slept in a weird angle on my pillow. Now I'm having a neck cramp. My glasses are loose. I just got to tighten the glasses."

JAD: Yeah. Everything under control.

LIZA SHOENFELD: So—so then I, after lunch was going to go to my third interview. It was with Allison Doupe's husband, who also studies songbirds. So he's familiar with the basal ganglia, too.

JAD: They meet up to walk over to his office together.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And so I explained to him on the walk over, "I think I'm having neck cramps. Would it be possible maybe to try and get a hot pad?"

ROBERT: He says, "Sure, let me track one down."

LIZA SHOENFELD: But on the walk, not only now does my neck start turning to the right, but it's snapping itself back.

ROBERT: Involuntarily.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, my head snapping back.

JAD: So suddenly your eyes are pointing up at the sky.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And then as I'm talking to him, I'm realizing that I can't control my eyebrows from raising pretty tightly. So I look like...

JAD: Like you're doing right now?

LIZA SHOENFELD: Like I'm doing right now.

ROBERT: So you're in a state of—of deep surprise, to read your face. High eyebrow.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Constant deep surprise, I can't stop it. I look surprised at everything I'm saying and I can't stop it. So after the eyebrows start and I can't pull them back down, then—then the mouth, then all this area starts to go.

ROBERT: Your lower face.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yes.

JAD: What is it doing?

LIZA SHOENFELD: It turns into this really twisted, painful, grimacing smile.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Would you mind demonstrating?

LIZA SHOENFELD: I'll demo it. I'll demo it. Okay so I've got the neck, it looks like this.

JAD: Crane back.

LIZA SHOENFELD: The eyebrows are like this.

JAD: Total surprise.

LIZA SHOENFELD: My face is a lot like this.

JAD: Crazy Frankenstein face.

ROBERT: [laughs] This is not the obviously the best demeanor for a graduate interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Yeah, it's not—it's not going well at this point. And I'm—and I'm very...

ROBERT: Now is Michael now noticing that something is...

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I think at that point he thought I was just really excited to be talking about neuroscience and I'm just trying to think, okay, mouth like try—try and just calm down a little bit. And it was pretty painful too. I mean, it was like, imagine like a charley horse in your face.

JAD: Oh!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But she gets through the interview.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I actually do okay. You know, he asks me tough questions about science and I can answer him, I think. And I leave the interview. And then I'm met by the woman who's the head of the admissions weekend.

JAD: And she took one look at Liza...

LIZA SHOENFELD: And she said, "You know, I don't know if you should do the rest of the interviews." And with her is my student host.

JAD: And Liza decides, all right, let me just call my dad.

LIZA SHOENFELD: Just to say, "Hey, Dad. I'm in the middle of my interview and something kind of funny is happening with my face. I can't control it." And while I'm talking to him, I lose control of my mouth and my tongue. So I can't—I can kind of talk, but it's pretty bad, really. It's pretty bad.

ROBERT: And is your dad a doctor?

LIZA SHOENFELD: No. Imagine your kid calling you being like, "I'm losing control of my face." And as they're telling you that, I started to think something's really wrong. And then my student host comes rushing back in running and he looks at me and he tries to put on a calm face, and he says, "So now we need to go to the emergency room."

JAD: So they throw her into a taxi.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And in the taxi it went from, "I can't control my mouth" to a—I mean, a complete...

ROBERT: All palsied in a torque.

LIZA SHOENFELD: I did not look good. And as we're pulling up to the emergency room was when my throat started tightening up.

JAD: They rush her inside.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And they have me in a gurney in a room in the back of the ER, surrounded by six people within two minutes.

ROBERT: Doctors swarming all around her.

LIZA SHOENFELD: An oxygen mask. EKG leads all over my chest. They do an IV.

ROBERT: And as she's lying there on the table and she's thinking, like, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I control my throat? Why can't I control my body?"

LIZA SHOENFELD: And I just—I couldn't—I remember frantically sending messages like, "You gotta cut this out now."

JAD: But she wasn't in control. And it turned out that while she was going from interview to interview to interview, talking about how her lab had taken these little mices and seized control of their basal ganglia...

LIZA SHOENFELD: The Compazine that I took...

ROBERT: ...that nausea drug.

LIZA SHOENFELD: ...was actually affecting dopamine systems in my basal ganglia.

JAD: In other words, that drug had been doing to her...

ROBERT: Pretty much what [laughs] what she'd been...

JAD: ...doing to those mice.

LIZA SHOENFELD: One to two percent of people who take Compazine, they can have what's called an acute dystonia, which is what happened to me.

JAD: During all those interviews.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And the crazy thing is, the guy that I talked to first in the morning was the molecular dopamine guy. You know, how does dopamine get packed into vesicles? How does it get released? And it wasn't until I started talking with the more systems-level people who studied the behavioral output of the basal ganglia that I started to have behavioral deficits in my basal ganglia.

ROBERT: So your basal ganglia are testing the San Francisco docs and they are failing and...

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs] Yeah.

ROBERT: Did you get into San Francisco State?

LIZA SHOENFELD: UCSF?

ROBERT: UCSF.

LIZA SHOENFELD: No.

JAD: Damn it, basal ganglia!

LIZA SHOENFELD: [laughs]

JAD: We should probably tell everybody that Liza's obviously doing okay. Back in the ER, when the doctors finally figured out what was going on, they just gave her some Benadryl, of all things.

LIZA SHOENFELD: And—and actually, within 20 minutes, I was feeling a lot better.

JAD: She could breathe, her face had unclenched. And when we asked her, "How has this little adventure changed you?" She said, "Well, I'm still working with those mice," because when we talked to her, grad school hadn't started yet. "And now when I go into that room with a little laser..."

LIZA SHOENFELD: I go in now and I just really I empathize with them.

ROBERT: [laughs] Come on, little Casper. This will just be for a couple of minutes.

JAD: You can do it!

LIZA SHOENFELD: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about that.

ROBERT: Liza Schoenfeld is now a proud PhD candidate at the University of Washington.

JAD: And thank you to Brenna Farrell for production help on this podcast.

ROBERT: And that is our podcast.

JAD: There it is.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Thank you for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Santa from Sacramento, California. I'm a Radiolab listener. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

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