What helped launch leaders in neuroscience into a lifetime of learning

Is there a defining moment that set you on your current path? In this episode of Neuroscience Perspectives, we’re revisiting origin stories – what launched leading neuroscientists into a lifetime of learning and interest in the brain. Host: John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience

Guests (in order of appearance):

Nathan A. Smith, PhD, associate dean for Equity & Inclusion for Research and Research Education and associate professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester School of Medicine School of Medicine and Dentistry, Full Episode: https://urmc.info/1G5

Fan Wang, PhD, professor, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute, MIT, Full Episode: https://urmc.info/1G7

Takao Hensch, PhD, professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School at Boston Children’s Hospital and of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, Full Episode: https://urmc.info/1G4

Jessica Cardin, PhD, associate professor, and vice chair of the Neuroscience Department at Yale School of Medicine, Full Episode: https://urmc.info/1G6

Kia Nobre, PhD, director of the Center for Neurocognition and Behavior at the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University, Full Episode: https://urmc.info/1G3

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to another episode of Neuroscience Perspectives.

(00:03):
I'm Kelsie Smith Hayduk, the show's producer, sitting in for Dr. John Foxe.
In this episode, we're revisiting origin stories.
What launched leading neuroscientists into a lifetime of learning and interest in the brain?
How'd you get into science? When did the love of science develop?
The love of science developed when I was a young age, when my mother bought me a little microscope

(00:27):
and I used to catch little butterflies outside and examine the wings of the microscope.
And it started when I was little. I was an avid reader and everything else, but I always loved science.
I always wanted to do science. And most of the time, especially my family was like,
oh, you can either do a doctor, but you don't hear about scientists.
But, you know, and so I had that dream of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon or neurosurgeon.

(00:50):
So you were really heading off in the clinical direction when you were very young.
Very young, right. And it was all due to Ben Carson's book, Gifted Hands.
It was like a book that was passed down to many in African-American families,
because Ben Carson was like a hero to us all.
And we read that book and you get captivated.
And I was like, oh, my God, I want to do neurosurgery. I'm now interested in the brain.

(01:11):
I have it on good authority that you were very interested in science very early in life.
Tell us about that. Why did that passion develop?
Is it something from your family or was it just curiosity?
I would say it's probably just curiosity. And also part of that is I'm always a nerdy child.
So socially, I don't feel like I have lots of friends or I get along with other kids.

(01:40):
But when I read scientific books or when I'm just studying it, I'm totally in my element.
So honestly, I am always the number one student from elementary school, middle school, high school
and college. So I'm just a sort of a nerd. I think it's probably genetics.
I'm proud of it.

(02:02):
So I know I'm always going to be a scientist.
Could you quantify that? How early are we talking about?
As early as in middle school, I just find it reading scientific books.
A lot of things I learn on my own. So I'm just so interested in learning everything.
You weren't born on these shores. Can we go back to the beginning, the genesis of Takawa Hensh?

(02:26):
And what got you to where you're at at Harvard, one of the great institutions on the planet,
studying autism and mouse models. Where were you born? How did that impact your development?
Right. Well, as you can guess from my name, I'm half Japanese, half German.
I was raised in a multilingual environment. They took it upon themselves to speak only their native

(02:48):
language with me. And then we moved to New York. My father was moved to IBM.
Let me jump in. So your father was learning Japanese at this point?
Yes, of course. Given the job he was asked to do. And my mother was studying German, actually,
as it turned out. And so they happened to meet in that way. And I was raised in a multilingual

(03:13):
environment. And then his job took him to New York. And the whole family moved to the United
States when I was three. So my... But at three years of age, your bilingual Japanese, or at least a
proto bilingual Japanese German speaker, you haven't heard a word of English at this point?
Not a word of English. That's right. And then English came in. But fortunately, for me,

(03:38):
I was compartmentalized. So English was friends and outside the house. And I grew up in that way.
I also attended a Japanese school in New York in parallel to the American school. And so I was able
to keep the languages separate in that way. And that's what drew my interest to the brain.

(03:58):
And that goes to extraordinary plasticity. I mean, I think this is one of the things, of course,
being in America and painting in broad strokes, but a great number of people in America grow up
in a monolingual environment. And just the idea that you can pack three entire languages
simultaneously into a child's brain. I mean, the plasticity must be extraordinary.

(04:20):
Yes, it was surprising to me, actually, that, you know, in school, we learn a second language.
And so I took French. So just for good measure, you decided to do number four.
And the French class really opened my eyes that most other kids were not growing up in a
trilingual environment. And I'm really struggling with it. Yeah, learning French was somehow easier

(04:45):
because I guess I was used to the idea of multiple representations for the same objects. And so that's
when I started to develop this fascination with how early life experience can change brain
function. Right, right, right. Amazing. Any other languages that we need to know about?
Well, my wife is Italian. I have to tell that story. What went on there and how did that happen?

(05:10):
And how did your mother tolerate this? It was partly their idea, my parents right now.
This is again back to high school science fairs. You know, I had we actually done some science fairs
using pet guinea pigs in the years prior to this. So I had guinea pigs and we we had done

(05:30):
learning and memory experiments, you know, with like, can they learn to associate a cue with a
food reward and that kind of thing. And so what age are you now? This sort of been like eighth and
ninth grade. So preteen, you know, preteen, you know, somewhere 12, 12 to 13. Yeah, young, you know,

(05:51):
and and I I had wanted, you know, to do another science fair project like this. And so my parents
helped me find a researcher to local university. This is Southern Methodist, you know, in Dallas,
and a very kind researcher who gave me a set of mice lab mice to work with, which we would never

(06:13):
do now. Right. Like, you know, sending lab mice home to some kid's house. So we took the mice home
a group of males and a group of females. And I was interested in sex differences and learning and
memory. And so we had a group of males and a group of females. We kept them in the laundry room for a
while. And I would run them on this T maze based task where there was a queue. And I also learned

(06:35):
a bit about programming because this is the we had to collect all the behavioral data and then do
statistics on it and everything. And, and then even in Texas, it gets cold at night sometimes. And the
laundry room got very cold when I didn't we had a whole bunch of mice with hypothermia. And so my mom
would tell you that she spent hours resuscitating hypothermic mice. Was the hairdryer involved?

(07:00):
Or I think just towels. And, you know, but in the end, it was it was actually a really cool data set,
you know, we did great statistics. And I learned all about chi square tests and like, you know,
and we had this sort of longitudinal learning data for males and females, it turns out the males were
better. And better at learning this task. And, you know, and it was, you know, you could look at that

(07:27):
and say that has all the parts of a the same thing that I do with my grad students now.
How does a girl from Brazil end up in the US? And how does a girl growing up the way you did end up
thinking I want to be a neuroscientist? Yeah, so I think, you know, life is full of
coincidences and circumstances. And I think those make a huge difference to people's lives. I was

(07:56):
I was a small kid in Rio in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, my dad was a very good student,
and he got a fellowship and we ended up he spent a little bit of time at Princeton NYU
doing some he was doing law. And that's when I was like, in my real formative years, I was four,
four to six, I went into an international school, like the United Nations School, which was amazing,

(08:19):
because I met, you know, friends from all over the world that had like my best friends were from Kenya
and Peru and Canada. And so we all had our little flags, you know, in different countries. That was
a blast. That was amazing. When I went back, when we went back to Brazil,
my parents realized that I had this great gift that I spoke English, you know, perfectly, and

(08:40):
they thought that this would be a good thing for me. So they kind of convinced the then the American
school there to let me in on a scholarship to continue studying and in being able to speak English.