You're Fired, Mister Neuron! - EWTS #024

Joe: What are you going to do today, Brain?

Senan: I don't know, Pinky. [laughter]

Joe: We're going to do what we do every night. We're going to take over the world. Welcome to another episode of Enough with the Science. I'm Joe.

Senan: And I am Senan. And, Joe, I want you to brace yourself; I have a bit of bad news for you.

Joe: Oh, god.

Senan: [laughter] Your brain is plastic.

Joe: Okay, I don't know where to go with that. [laughter]

Senan: Well, you know, I have a vision of those, you get them when you buy some tack from Amazon and packed in the box comes all these foamy little plastic beads. So, I imagine your cavity behind your eyes is full of them.

Joe: So, you're mixing up plastic with plasticity, I think.

Senan: No, well, I'm using plastic in the good old sense of the word, before we started using it to describe clingfilm. [laughter]

Senan: So, plastic; the origin of the word is something flexible which can be bent or moulded into shape without breaking. That's what plastic originally meant.

Joe: Right, before oil.

Senan: So, plasticity is the property of being plastic.

Joe: Okay, we're going to tell people what we're going to talk about. Actually, just welcome to the podcast first. We are talking about a scientific topic today.

Senan: Yes, it is neuroplasticity, or the concept that your brain is not a fixed, solid thing; that it's constantly changeable throughout your life. And in actual fact, that's a relatively recent theory.

Joe: Good. Finally, we got there. Theory; a recent theory.

Senan: Until the middle of the 20th century, there was a kind of a consensus that after you got out of childhood and you became an adult, that whatever state your brain was in, that was it; you were stuck with that for the rest of your life. It was a fixed structure.

Joe: From when you're 27, I think, or 26 or something.

Senan: Whatever. I don't remember the exact…

Joe: What if you never became an adult?

Senan: Yeah, that's the thing; like Peter Pan.

Joe: Yes, either Peter Pan or just childish all the time. Surely, your brain is still neuroplastic.

Senan: Yeah, well, I mean, they're wrong anyway, because our brain remains neuroplastic throughout life. [laughter]

Senan: And I suppose the poor animals are getting a bad rap here. I mean, the first evidence of it was, they took some laboratory animals, they trained some of them to…

Joe: Can I just say it's not the animals that are getting the bad rap; it's the scientists who are getting the bad rap here. [laughter]

Senan: The poor animals had no choice in the matter anyway. They trained some of them to learn some complex new trick, and then they compared, by dissecting them, they compared the brains of the ones they had trained versus the ones they had not trained.

Joe: You know the saddest thing in that story is, right, there's a little cute dog called Fido, and they teach Fido to play the piano. And his mate Dido is looking at this going, "I want to do that," but they don't let Dido do it because they have to chop both their brains up to see which one has changed because of learning to play the piano.

Senan: But you see, if they let Dido see the other guy getting trained, Dido would pick up some of the training. So, they'd have to keep Dido in a separate place.

Joe: Dido can learn by watching other dogs learn? Like an octopus?

Senan: But Dido was definitely going to die though. [laughter]

Joe: We are never getting to the end of this podcast. [laughter]

Senan: Anyway, the point is they saw structural changes in the brains of the animals that they had taught a new skill to versus the other brains that didn't learn it. So, it proved that there was some kind of growth going on in adult brains in response to the learning of new skills.

Senan: And that's really the whole point about neuroplasticity, is that your brain is actually capable; it's a dynamic, living, self-sculpting object that is capable of changing throughout your life, so you learn new skills, you forget some things, etc. So, there are constant changes going on throughout your life.

Joe: But you tend to find, with you, that you like kind of maybe forget more things than learning new skills.

Senan: Oh, my memory is terrible. [laughter] And actually, it's been a very useful excuse at times in the past of my life, "Oh, sorry, I can't remember. I remember nothing."

Joe: And in the future.

Senan: But at the same time, it's interesting. My wife regularly points out to me that I have a repository of the most irrelevant shit in the back of my head that, like, you know, I remember; we're watching a movie and I remember some fact in relation to the movie that happened 20 years ago or something.

Senan: There's one skill I have, actually, which I don't know whether it's a unique skill to me or maybe everybody can do it, but quite often I only need to hear one beat of a song to know what song it is.

Joe: One beat?

Senan: Yeah, yeah.

Joe: One note of a song?

Senan: Yeah, yeah; not always, but quite often.

Joe: Weird. If any circuses are interested in buying Senan…

Senan: Anyway, let's get back to first principles. So, our brains are made up of neurons, which are... One neuron is a cell, it's a special kind of cell that can…

Joe: A brain cell, if you will.

Senan: A brain cell, if you will. [laughter] Its defining characteristic is that it can carry an electrical charge. So, you can fire it up by sending an electrical pulse through it, right?

Senan: So, you'll often hear the expression, when people are talking about brains, of neurons firing; it means that an electrical pulse has gone through it.

Joe: And where does that electrical pulse come from, though? Does it self? Is it…

Senan: Well I'm sure some neurons are able to originate them in some way, but many neurons are creating an electrical pulse because they're part of a circuit, so they have received a pulse in one end and they're sending it on to another neuron out the other end.

Senan: And in actual fact, each neuron in our brain, on average, is connected to about a thousand other of its neighbours, so it has, on average, a thousand connections to other neurons.

Joe: And there's quite a few of these little neurons.

Senan: Yeah, I mean, the scale is incredible. In a human brain, there's roughly 86 billion neurons. That's 86,000 million neurons, which is a phenomenal amount.

Joe: And then, if you multiply that by the connections…

Senan: Yeah, I mean, you're into trillions; you're into trillions of connections.

Joe: I'm trying to do it here on a piece of paper, but it's not happening, so… [laughter] I should have spent more time in maths, learning maths. I don't have the neuron connections to do this.

Senan: But and so you know, if we have a particular thought or we want to perform a particular action, a pattern of neurons lights up in our brain. A pattern of neurons is fired. So, like a circuit is completed.

Senan: And you know, different things create different patterns. So, you think about an apple, you'll imagine what it looks like, you imagine the taste, that fires up a certain pattern. You think about an orange and do the same thing, taste, appearance, that fires up a different pattern.

Senan: So, and we have, you know, brain imaging equipment that can actually, in real time, see these patterns firing up in our brains.

Joe: But so, you give me an apple and you give you an apple, and they take a picture of your brain and a picture of my brain, it's the same pattern.

Senan: Well, they'd need a zoom lens to find yours. [laughter]

Joe: Now, there's no need for that. [laughter]

Senan: No, so, your pattern and my pattern wouldn't be like exactly the same. I mean, they would probably broadly connect. So, there's different parts of the brain that we know are responsible for different broad functions. You know, there's one part that does speech, there's one part that does vision, there's one part that does anxiety, etc., etc.

Joe: Yeah, but there's no fixed pattern for the taste and smell of an apple.

Senan: No. So, the broad pattern that connects up the different areas would look kind of similar, but the specific route it takes would differ from one person to another. Because it's a pattern that has been dynamically established as you became familiar with an apple or you became familiar with an orange. So, it's your own particular perception of the apple and the orange.

Senan: And just to put an idea of scale on it, so, a typical thought pattern might fire up; in the one pattern there might be a million neurons involved. So, you're not talking about like 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 neurons, it's like a huge number that are involved.

Senan: And they connect to like right across different areas of the brain. Take, for example, a simple one, taking a pencil to draw a line on a piece of paper, right? The pattern will hook up across various different parts; it'll go the motor cortex, which is the part that's responsible for movement, it'll involve something called the basal ganglia, which tends to initiate things, it'll involve the cerebellum, which tends to be responsible for coordination, and of course, the visual cortex, because your eyes are giving your brain feedback about whether the line is straight or not and you're adjusting the movement of your hand to make sure based on what you can see with your eyes. So, you've got all these different... It's like an orchestra being coordinated into a single pattern to achieve a particular end.

Joe: Okay, so, even the simplest task or thought could take a million connections firing up.

Senan: So, the theory behind all this kind of began with a guy called Donald Hebb in 1949. Now, he wasn't cutting up monkeys or rabbits; he was a theorist. [laughter]

Joe: Maybe in his spare time, we don't know; we've never been to his house. [laughter]

Senan: So, he kind of he had, obviously, a bit of knowledge of the anatomy of the human brain by virtue of his training and but he observed human psychology in action and he deduced that, you know, if neuron A excites or fires neuron B, and this happens repeatedly, there must be some growth process happening that strengthens that connection and makes it permanent. Because that's... he said how else would we solidify a new skill that we've learned?

Joe: So, this is how we learn, essentially. This is... You're describing learning.

Senan: Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, you could say that our entire consciousness from the time we're an infant arises as a result of learning. I mean, everything about the world is basically learning. We even have to learn simple things like what's me and what's not me, you know, a basic thing that a one-year-old probably figures out. So, yeah, it is learning, and learning is probably what forms our consciousness at its root, you know?

Joe: Okay, but essentially, these neurons forming connections is learning.

Senan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe: Is it like the physical representation of what learning is?

Senan: Yeah, it is, yeah.

Joe: And memory and all of that.

Senan: Yeah, all of that is essentially solidified connections between neurons. But it wasn't until 1973 that there was definite proof of this idea…

Joe: Here we go. What animal had to die for this? [laughter]

Senan: …that repeated firing of the same pattern over and over again caused that pattern to be solidified into an actual permanent pathway. And rabbits is the answer to your question. [laughter]

Joe: I knew it. Only the cute animals. They just get the cute animals.

Senan: But, look, we have a nice clean scientific term to describe what they came up with, so, you know, that's…

Joe: Okay, let's just move straight to that. Leave the poor little rabbits alone.

Senan: Long-term potentiation; in other words, the solidifying of a pattern by repeatedly doing something. So, what they did was they put electrodes into rabbit brains and fired a repeated high-frequency electrical stimulation pulse across a region of the brain which simulated a pattern of neurons firing in a pathway across the brain. And when they did that, they could see that there was physical growth along that pathway, so this artificial stimulation that they created across the brain caused actual physical pathways to be formed in the hippocampus of the rabbit.

Joe: Okay. Depressing, but okay.

Senan: So, and you can imagine what they had to do to actually…

Joe: No, I'm not going there. I am not connecting those neurons.

Senan: But interestingly, it's a two-way street, right? So, there isn't just growth involved for making new interesting things permanent in your brain; the opposite also happens. If you have things that are no longer useful to you, they get pruned, they get weakened, those connections.

Senan: So, there's a good analogy for it. If you imagine hiking over a rough forest track, the more often that track is hiked, the more permanent the pathway becomes, because the hiking kind of tramples down the vegetation. But if nobody hikes it for three months, the vegetation grows back and the path is not so…

Joe: Very good analogy. Impressed with that. Good. I understand that. It's not often I keep up. [laughter]

Senan: And the actual process of those pathways being made permanent or being made stronger is something called myelination. And it's not just the physical establishment of what was previously an ephemeral pathway, if you like; it actually makes a faster connection and a more consistent pattern that's the same all the time. So, an actual factual manifestation of it is when a musician learns a tune so well that they can play that tune without really thinking about all the notes.

Joe: So, initially, the connection between the neuron is electrical. It's like an electrical jump, like a spark or a light.

Senan: Well, there's actually there's actually an exchange of chemicals across the gap that carries an electrical charge.

Joe: Right, okay. So, once that's done, often enough, it's almost like a physical bridge.

Senan: Yeah, physical bridge grows there, yeah.

Joe: Right, okay.

Senan: And it's pretty amazing that and I suppose it would be reasonable to assume that that happens in childhood, because, obviously, children do a lot of learning about their world. But the importance, I guess, underlying message we're trying to cover in this week's show, is that that continues throughout life. Yes, it is much more prolific in children, but it's still right throughout your adult life. It's still possible to continue making new pathways in your brain, learning new things.

Senan: And there's some interesting evidence in the real world of it happening. There's a fairly well-known study done on London taxi drivers.

Joe: What? Oh, no. Not like that kind of study, no. Okay. [laughter]

Senan: The gentlemen who were let loose on the rabbits were not let loose on the taxi drivers. [laughter]

Joe: Okay, yeah. I think they'd have slightly less luck, I would imagine. [laughter]

Senan: So, back in the day, in order to get a taxi licence in London, 20 years ago, 25 in fact, I think, you had to pass an exam that demonstrated a really detailed knowledge of the streets of London. So, you kind of had to be able to figure out in your head what was the most efficient route to get from A to B. And we're talking about an area of roughly 25,000 streets. So, the taxi drivers had to do a lot of study of maps before they did the exam, because the exam, like, if you didn't pass the exam, that did it; you weren't getting your taxi plate.

Joe: Yeah.

Senan: So, they did some brain imaging with non-invasive machinery on taxi drivers who had passed the exam, and they could see in the hippocampus, which handles spatial memory, they could see definite enlargement there; versus people who hadn't studied all that map.

Joe: That engendered a physical difference in the brain.

Senan: Yeah, but here, it was actually strong enough that they didn't need to look at it down to the level of individual neurons. They could actually see growth in that entire area, you know, at a higher scale.

Senan: And the opposite is also true. There was another study done in 2004 about juggling. So, they took some adults who were not able to juggle, imaged their brains…

Joe: Right.

Senan: …spent three months…

Joe: I wonder how they tested that. [laughter] What do you mean? Like, if someone faked it? "Can you Like, we need we're going to give you €100 for doing this experiment. Can you juggle?" "Do I need to juggle?" "You can't juggle." "No, I don't know how to juggle." "Okay, you're in the experiment." [laughter]

Senan: Yeah, I'm sure hopefully they have some kind of techniques for dealing with that, but I don't know. Anyway, enough people, I suppose, and then you get the odd one who lied to you, it doesn't really matter. But anyway, they spent three months teaching them how to juggle. They imaged…

Joe: Three months?

Senan: Yes.

Joe: Teaching them how to juggle?

Senan: Yeah, well, getting them to repeatedly juggle over a three-month period.

Joe: I just thought juggling would be kind of a week, 10 days.

Senan: But, I suppose, if you keep doing it, you just get better and better. So, the whole point of this thing is repetition builds these pathways.

Senan: Anyway, sure enough, they imaged their brains after the three months and they could see areas responsible for visual processing and motor control were expanded. And then they stopped them from juggling, and three months later…

Joe: I think this is almost as cruel as the rabbits. [laughter] Like, maybe they love juggling. "No more. No more juggling for you." [laughter]

Senan: Yeah, it's kind of... Imagine going to all that trouble to learn how to juggle only to be told, "That's it, sorry. You have to forget it now, mate."

Joe: Yes, you're just not allowed to juggle for three months. And how did they check that? [laughter] Someone having a sneaky little juggle out the back?

Senan: Anyway, after three months of not juggling, the brain changes had reverted to how they were before these people learned how to juggle. So, the point there was it was proving that also unused pathways get pruned over time.

Senan: And this does have some practical; knowing this, we can make use of it. So, for example, stroke recovery; stroke victims, as you're probably aware, an interruption to the flow of blood to a certain part of the brain causes a certain piece of the brain to die off from lack of oxygen. And whatever functionality that piece of the brain was responsible for then often will be impaired. So, you could be talking about not able to speak, not able to use an arm that you could use before, that kind of thing.

Senan: A fairly, what sounds like a pretty mean way of treating somebody who's already got a very debilitating disease, is used for some stroke victims. So, say you have an arm that you can't use anymore, but you still have a good arm. So, what this therapy does, is it actually straps down the good arm so you can't use it, and then you do exercises with the bad arm where you try and pick things up or you try and use it for movements.

Senan: And you just do this over and over. It's a fairly intensive therapy. You do it over and over again. And eventually, the part of your brain which can still control the good arm kind of rewires over to the other side…

Joe: Right.

Senan: …and so it can now control the bad arm as well. So, it's... Look, everybody's stroke is different. That therapy doesn't work for everybody, but it's interesting that it works for some people.

Joe: Yeah.

Senan: It's a very tangible demonstration of how plasticity in our brain can even be extended to the control of our body.

Senan: There's another one, very interesting, for people who lose the ability to speak. Apparently, the part of the brain that handles speech and singing, there's two different parts of your brain. So, people who have lost the ability to speak sometimes can be taught to sing their words, and that part of the brain, the singing part of the brain, is still working okay. And gradually, over time as they repeat this singing their conversation, it gradually reverts to speech being controlled by the singing part of the brain.

Joe: All right. So, the singing part of the brain takes over the speech.

Senan: Yeah, gradually, yeah. So, it becomes less sing-song as time goes along and more like normal speech. So, it's really interesting that they can actually get these functional areas to change based on plasticity.

Senan: Phantom limb is another one where maybe somebody loses an arm and they might have, in that lost arm, their brain is telling them that their fist is very tightly clenched and they can't open it, or they have some pain in the arm or whatever. What's been done successfully for some people is, a mirror is placed in a very specific position that allows the person to see a reflection of their good arm in the place where their missing arm would be.

Joe: Right.

Senan: And it kind of fools the brain into thinking that the missing arm is back, and they can then relax that hand on the good hand, and the reflection in the mirror, the person sees the missing hand relaxing, and sometimes it helps them to actually…

Joe: Tricks the brain.

Senan: Yeah, it tricks the brain.

Joe: It's scary how easy it is to trick the brain.

Senan: Yeah, isn't it? Like, based on what you can see, just, it's actually changing a completely different part of the brain outside of the visual part.

Joe: Yes.

Senan: Yeah, isn't it pretty amazing that just based on visual input that you can actually fool somebody's brain to such an extent.

Senan: Now, of course, it has a darker side. I know we've been talking about strokes and missing arms, but there is an even darker side. So, unfortunately, your brain, when it comes down to growing new structures, your brain at that structural level doesn't make any value decisions about what's good or what's bad. So, like…

Joe: Well, it actually does, because it decides that, "I like these patterns." Surely, that's good.

Senan: Well, good for who? Good for what?

Joe: Yes, good for the brain, good for me. I am the brain, and I like it.

Senan: Feels nice, but maybe detrimental to my health. I'm talking about addiction, right?

Joe: Right.

Senan: So, there's a kind of a reward system in your brain mediated by a chemical called dopamine. And so, when things happen that your brain regards as good, you know, you get a dopamine hit that makes you feel good. Alcohol and drugs, addictive drugs, hijack that dopamine system, and it's like turbocharging your neuroplasticity, that the pathways which make you want to do more alcohol or more drugs are reinforced massively by the fact that this rush of dopamine is happening all the time.

Joe: Yeah.

Senan: So, your brain thinks, "This is great. I'm getting something I really like," but, of course, it doesn't look down the road to detrimental things happening later.

Joe: Right. So, your brain really isn't that smart.

Senan: [laughter] It's smart on a macro level, but on a micro level, not particularly, no. It's more of a processing machine on a micro level.

Joe: Okay.

Senan: People undergoing regular stress and trauma, there is some evidence that where that's been going on for years and years for people, that the memory and learning centres, that'll be the hippocampus, have shrunk a bit, or the amygdala, which would be like fear and anxiety feelings, that has enlarged. So, it's interesting that people who live in difficult circumstances over long periods of time have negative neuroplasticity going on in their brains.

Joe: So, it just reinforces the sort of inescapable situation in which you find yourself, you believe you found yourself.

Senan: Yes, like, certain patterns form in your thought processes that kind of almost have you stuck in that situation.

Senan: So, of course, now that we understand this whole plasticity thing, maybe we can harness it. And I'm going to hand over to you now in a minute to tell us all about something called the growth mindset.

Joe: No. Please, don't. [laughter] I didn't know there was going to be an exam today.

Senan: So, anyway, this psychologist, about 25 years ago, Carol Dweck, she came up with this concept of the growth mindset. Now, you're a professional educator, so, I think maybe you better…

Joe: I'm going to lose my professional education licence for trying to explain Carol Dweck to anybody, but, sure, look. But, no, like, I mean, it's sort of a practical application of neuroplasticity. It's essentially saying that you can approach learning from the idea that the brain can make all of these new connections and that it's possible to learn and you can be positive about experiencing learning, or you can think that the brain is like, I don't know what, a fixed thing that you can have a certain amount of information and it can get full and you like, you can become an adult and that's it, your brain is full, and trying to put anything else in maybe knock some stuff out that you need, or you can't fit any more in and it becomes more and more difficult to learn.

Senan: So, is it just maintaining the awareness in your mind that plasticity exists, or is there more to it than that?

Joe: Well, like, a growth mindset is an approach to learning where you're not... It's there's a couple of things. First of all, there's the idea that learning only really takes place outside your comfort zone. So, you have to get comfortable outside your comfort zone. So, there's a space that you have to try and create for learners where it's challenging, but not impossible, and it's safe, but slightly uncomfortable. And if you can create that space, then regardless of what topic or what the content of what you're teaching is, then that could be an optimal place for people who have a growth mindset.

Joe: Essentially. Like, if you go in with a fixed mindset, I think fixed mindset is a very traditional view of the brain, and it's quite a difficult one to overcome for a lot of people.

Senan: Because, I guess, that pattern has formed strongly in their mind. It's interesting that their neuroplasticity is actually working against that, you know?

Joe: Working against the learning, yeah. Exactly. And it's amazing how you can tell yourself things, and that really becomes essentially true for you. Like, if you like, you know, I know we'll be talking maybe a little bit about this later on, but how, like, if you get up with a positive view of the day or the world and you say, like, "I'm thankful, I'm grateful for all the things that are going right, I understand the millions and millions of things that have to go right for me to feel like this today," and if you say that often enough, then your little neurons are connected very strongly in your brain with that. Whereas, if you get up and go, "Oh, it's terrible, another terrible day, look at the news, oh, the world is ending, the sky is falling," and if you keep telling yourself that, then…

Senan: Yeah, it becomes…

Joe: …it becomes real. It becomes like a physically physically real connection in your brain.

Senan: Yeah, yeah.

Joe: Yeah. It's astounding, really.

Senan: And, but isn't there also another element of that lady's theories, that struggle, the actual difficulties encountered while trying to learn something new, are an important element of learning in that they're a trigger for this neuroplasticity to take place?

Joe: Yeah. Well, it involves effort. Like, you can't just passively sit back, and I know, like, there was all of these used to be able to buy these tapes where you could listen to it at night for like, "Subliminal language learning. Speak French in," like, "60 nights." And you have to it has to take effort. You have to be engaged. You have to have your brain and you have to, like, perform.

Senan: But there's more to it than that, isn't there? The actual adversity part of it, the difficulty part of it, I think is necessary to some extent to as an actual trigger for your mind to start…

Joe: Oh, yeah. It has to be, like, it can't be easy. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't it's like having a Rubik's cube with like four squares, and "Oh, everybody could do it. Oh, isn't that great." But, I mean, what's…

Senan: I couldn't do it. [laughter]

Joe: Well, I probably couldn't either, but maybe not a good analogy, but you know, if it's something remarkably easy. If you sign up for a course in French, and they spend three weeks going, "Bonjour, mon ami, petit pois, Rodney," whatever, right? If they spend three weeks doing that, you're going to be bored out of your brain, right?

Senan: Rodney?

Joe: So, only French I learned, all my French, from Only Fools and Horses. So, yeah. So, like, I mean, it's about you need you need to have this sort of tension between what you know and what you don't know, but it can't be too great.

Senan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe: Otherwise, you become disheartened. So, yeah, so, growth mindset is great.

Senan: Yeah, it is. And there's other ways, I suppose, I think, that you can optimise your plasticity to get the best out of it. There's monkey studies been done where they…

Joe: Oh, here we go.

Senan: No, I don't think they did bad things to the monkeys. At least I hope they didn't. But they played music to monkeys, but didn't really, associate the music with anything good that the monkeys would regard as good. But then…

Joe: Senan's music?

Senan: Who knows? [laughter] But it was only when they gave a the monkeys a reward that they started to pay attention to the music. It was only when they started to engage with it that thier brains changed.

Senan: But there's this concept of another much more interesting one, for me anyway, is this concept of critical periods. So, as I mentioned earlier, children are far more adept at neuroplasticity than adults are. There's far more of it going on in their brains because their brains are developing. And there's this concept of critical periods, so, certain periods in childhood where the neuroplasticity is on hyperdrive, where it's going really hammer and tongs, and that, if we could discover drugs or other treatments that would reopen these critical periods in adults for brief periods of time, maybe to help them recover from strokes or to solve other psychiatric problems or whatever. So, that is a very…

Joe: Or for long periods of time. Just like give make everyone childlike plasticity.

Senan: bits of brain dribbling out of your ears. [laughter]

Joe: Just, well, no, just like to make it easier to learn into your hundreds.

Senan: Or longer, anyway, that is pretty much the end of our tour through neuroplasticity.

Joe: Wow, well, we haven't quite taken over the world, but we have certainly shone a light into the world of neuroplasticity. So, I think that's all from Enough with the Science for this week.

Senan: Yeah, it was a really enjoyable one, that, and we'll see you again soon.