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- [Announcer] This Great Big Story
is made possible by Lexus, experience amazing.
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- The Harvard Brain Bank is one of
the largest brain banks in the country.
At the moment we house approximately 5,000 brain specimens.
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My name is Sabina Berretta, I am the Scientific Director
of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center,
which we affectionately call the "Harvard Brain Bank."
Our mission is to collect brain specimens,
store them, characterize them, and then redistribute them
out to investigators across the world.
They do research on the human brain,
and in particular on large number
of neurological and psychiatric brain disorders
such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,
Parkinson, Huntington, and many others.
The Brain Bank never sleeps.
We have two sets of people that are on call 24/7.
We have a very limited time window
from when the person passes away
to the time we need to be done with this whole process.
- So this is gonna be your first brain late at night, right?
- I know, first late-night brain.
- We have to do it in less than 24 hours.
Our courier will bring it to McLean Hospital
to the Brain Bank.
- [Male Dissectionist] So just put it out here,
so we're gonna take it ourselves.
- There will be a dissectionist ready to dissect the brain.
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That involves separating the two hemispheres.
One of the two hemispheres is put
in a solution that preserves it.
The other hemisphere will be dissected in thick sections
and also will be frozen.
We are not even close to understanding
a lot of what we take for granted,
our thoughts, our instincts, our feelings, our emotions.
There are a lot of questions we still don't know,
and a lot of our brain function still
will probably be studied for a long time to come.
A brain donation is, in a very concrete way,
a gift of knowledge and it cannot be done
without the help of families
and people willing to donate their brain.
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- Give me a hug, give me a hug.
Yes, I know, good girl.
Wanna do some training?
I work with dogs to train them to into an MRI scanner
and try to figure out what makes them tick
and what they're thinking.
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My name is Gregory Berns I'm a neuroscientist
at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
I've grown up with dogs, and I've lived with dogs
pretty much my whole life.
One of my favorite dogs had passed away
and in the back of my mind I started wondering,
did that dog love me in the way that I loved him,
and that was really the beginning of it.
All of these basic things that we've begun
to sort out in humans, at least in human brains,
we want to do in dogs.
If dogs can be trained to go into an MRI machine,
then maybe we could figure out
what they're actually thinking.
So we have a dog in the scanner, that's Katie,
and she is a veteran of the project,
this is probably about the 15th time she's done this.
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Just having the idea of,
okay, well let's train dogs to go in the scanner,
it wasn't immediately apparent how
you would go about doing that,
and MRI scanners are not the most pleasant environments.
(MRI whirring)
Okay, hey, Callie.
Cool, good girl.
Callie is the little black terrier
who was the first dog to train for the dog project.
High-five.
I built a simulator of an MRI.
So, this is the simulator that I built here in my basement,
then we started adding in recordings of the scanner noise,
which is actually quite loud.
(MRI whirring)
We just started working with treats
and positive reinforcement to see
if we could get her to go into this thing.
That actually proved to be pretty easy.
And then so what we did was we kind of put out
word of mouth, do you wanna join this project,
do you wanna train your dogs for an MRI,
and maybe figure out what they're thinking.
The purpose of this is to go through
a number of exercises including basic obedience,
as well as how they react to the obstacles.
When we hold the try-outs it lets us weed out the dogs
that we don't think would enjoy doing this.
One of the benefits then of having more participants
is it gives you statistical power.
You can start to average dog's brains together
and get a better sense for what's happening.
I started wondering very seriously
if we could really finally answer this question,
do dogs essentially like us just for the social bond,
not about the food.
- [Man] Good boy.
- And what we found was, looking at the reward system,
that almost all the dogs had equal responses,
both to food as well as praise,
and even a few dogs liked the praise more.
Things that we were finding about the dog's brain
in many ways confirmed, I think,
what people know in their hearts about
how dogs behave and why they behave.
And the way I think about dogs is, in many ways,
they're the ambassadors to the animal world.
(barking)
They're not that different from
many of the other mammals out there,
and so I suspect that a lot of what we find in dogs
probably holds true for pretty much any mammal.
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- [Narrator] Have you ever walked out of a building
on a sunny day and had an uncontrollable urge to sneeze?
If you answered yes, like me, you likely suffer
from a strange genetic condition that has remained
unexplained by medical science for millennia.
And if you answered no, you probably have
no idea what I'm talking about.
Sun sneezing, as it's more commonly known,
is a medical condition called the Photic Sneeze Reflex.
- [Dr. Louis] Another name that some have given is--
- [Narrator] Hold on, before we get into all that,
this is Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurologist and human geneticist
at the University of California, San Francisco.
Okay, go ahead.
- [Dr. Louis] Another name that some have given is
autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst,
or ACHOO Syndrome, but P.S.R. is really
the appropriate name that we should all use.
Photic Sneeze Reflex is a tendency to sneeze
when suddenly exposed to bright light.
(sneezing)
- [Narrator] And as strange as that may sound
it's more common than you might think.
- [Dr. Louis] I estimate that about one in 10, or 10%,
of all people have this condition.
(sneezing)
- [Narrator] So a lot of us are affected,
but how and why it happens is not fully understood,
despite the fact that humans have been
pondering it for thousands of years.
In 350 B.C. Aristotle posed the question,
"Why does the heat of the sun provoke sneezing?"
Aristotle was barking up the wrong tree though.
- [Dr. Louis] This doesn't makes sense
because heat in and of itself doesn't cause sneezing.
- [Narrator] Some 2,000 years later the philosopher,
Sir Francis Bacon, also tried to figure it out.
His theory was that light from the sun
caused your eyes to water,
which then seeped into your nose triggering a sneeze.
(sneezing)
- [Dr. Louis] It's an interesting thought
but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
P.S.R. occurs almost instantaneously
and it takes longer for the tear ducts to react.
Furthermore, tears don't cause sneezing.
There's no evidence for that.
- [Narrator] So modern medicine
has come with its own theories,
and it has to do with the wiring in your head.
- [Dr. Louis] Sneezes are triggered typically
by irritating things in our nose,
and these are detected by nerve, the trigeminal nerve.
- [Narrator] And right next door to the trigeminal nerve
is the optic nerve, you may have heard of this one.
- [Dr. Louis] The optic nerve is stimulated by bright light
and sends electric signals to the brain.
Some of that signal can be picked up by the trigeminal nerve
and misinterpreted by the brain
as an irritation in the nose.
- [Narrator] Which triggers, you guessed it, a sneeze.
Well, that's the theory anyway.
- [Dr. Louis] Photic Sneeze Reflex is not a disease,
consequently the medical community
hasn't paid a whole lot of attention to it,
therefore we know very little about what causes it.
- [Narrator] But Dr. Ptacek believes
that understanding P.S.R. could potentially
shed some light on more serious conditions.
- [Dr. Louis] Epileptic seizures
can be caused by strobing lights,
migraine headache is precipitated by light.
If we can understand what the mechanism is
that leads to P.S.R., this may give insights
into other conditions which actually
are medically important and represent disorders.
- [Narrator] So, there you have it.
This 2,000-year-old medical mystery
may be worth solving after all.
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- [Narrator] Imagine remembering
every single day of your life, all in perfect detail.
For those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory,
or H.S.A.M. for short, this is their reality.
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- [Rebecca] I remember everything that's personally
happened to me since I was born.
- [Narrator] That's Rebecca Sharuk.
I was fascinated by this condition,
so I called her up to find out more.
(phone ringing)
Hi, Rebecca.
- [Rebecca] Hi.
- [Narrator] How are you doing?
- [Rebecca] I'm doing all right.
It's a very wet Saturday morning here.
How are you doing?
- [Narrator] Side note, in this moment I just realized
Rebecca will remember that this day
was a wet morning forever.
So, you remember everything in great detail.
- [Rebecca] People can remember
what they did last Saturday,
but I can remember what I did Saturday 10 years ago.
- [Narrator] What about a memory
from when you were just a baby?
- [Rebecca] When I was twelve days old
I was lying down on the fur car seat in my parents' car,
and I was staring up at the steering wheel,
and I thought, "What is that?"
- [Narrator] Rebecca is one of only 60 people world-wide
to have been identified with having H.S.A.M.
- [Rebecca] All through my teenage years
I thought that everybody remembered in this kind of way,
I thought it was completely normal.
- [Narrator] It wasn't until she was 21
when her parents decided to submit her
to the University of California
to undergo two years of testing.
After this, she was officially identified
as having H.S.A.M.
Since memories can come to mind
unexpectedly any time of day, a negative memory like this
can make living with H.S.A.M. difficult.
- [Rebecca] Mum was putting me in this itchy, satin dress
and I was crying because I didn't like it,
and Mum gave me this Minnie Mouse toy,
and I couldn't say anything at the time,
but her face terrified me.
- [Narrator] But on most days, H.S.A.M. is a gift.
Rebecca can recall happy memories
in moments when times get tough.
- [Rebecca] A good memory that makes me so thankful
about having this kind of H.S.A.M. memory.
- [Narrator] Thanks for chatting, Rebecca.
- [Rebecca] Yup, thanks, bye.
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