This year, NSERC hosted their second annual edition of the Science, Action! video contest. This sensational competition places a novel twist on research presentation. Instead of turning in a proposal to a committee or presenting a poster at a conference, contestants were asked to create a one minute video detailing the NSERC funded research carried out at their respective institutions.

For Simon Beshara of our very own MiNDS program, this opportunity seemed too good to be true. Armed with a script and a video camera, Simon donned his lab coat and put together a truly remarkable video summary of his research. In the video we get just a small taste of what goes on behind the closed doors of the Visual Neuroscience Laboratory on Simon’s PhD quest for the “holy grail of neuroscience”.

Perhaps the most exciting part about this video competition is the judging process. Winning videos must surpass two tiers of judging criteria. In the first round, videos undergo a round of public voting, wherein all submissions are posted to the NSERC YouTube channel. There, the total number of views, along with the total number of shares on Facebook and Twitter, are combined to determine 15 finalists. Simon’s video qualified for the first round no problem, having the highest number of YouTube views by far at the time the competition closed. In the second round the 15 finalists were judged based on a set of three criteria: their ability to compel their audience, their ability to convey the impact of their research and their ability to explain said research. In this round Simon’s video earned him a respectable 6th place in the competition.

In this age of social media, competitions like this remind us of certain aspects of our research that are important to keep in mind. As neuroscientists, we must meet the three criteria of the video competition every day. First, we must find what excites us about our research and transmit that excitement when we tell others about what we do. Second, and perhaps most importantly, is to effectively convey why we do the research that excites us. Finally, we have to make sure we do a good job explaining our work. I feel that the one-minute time limit of these videos serves as a testament to our decreasing attention spans. To present our research as Simon did in this video competition should be a goal each of us can aspire to if we hope to capture attention and make a difference.

Check out Simon’s, and all the videos entered in this year’s Science, Action! video contest, on the NSERC YouTube channel, here.

I had the opportunity to touch base with Dr. Amlung and ask him a few questions about his interesting research in the area of addictive disorders.

Q:  What first got you interested in behavioural and neuro-economics (the idea of blending psychiatry and economics to predict behaviour)?

 A: I have always been fascinated by the brain and how processing in neural circuits gives rise to complex human behaviours such as decision-making and motivation. I am also interested in how the brain functions differently in individuals with psychiatric illness, especially substance use disorders. My earliest exposure to this field was as an undergraduate student when I studied the effects of lesions to the ventral striatum on impulsive delay discounting and cocaine response in a rodent model of stimulant addiction. During graduate school, I shifted my focus to research on humans, but quickly realized that a major problem with many of the methods that we use to measure motivation to use drugs and alcohol is that they are inherently subjective (i.e., an individual’s level of “craving”). Behavioural economics, however, provides an array of tools to assess these processes using objective units (money, number of drinks, etc.). I also like that behavioural and neuro-economics are highly interdisciplinary, which allows me to interact with colleagues from many different fields (psychology, neuroscience, economics).

Q:  What are you currently working on in your lab? 

 A: My lab is still in the process of rolling out new projects and applying for grants to fund our future research. We are also building our research team, which includes four research assistants who have already started working in the lab as well as a new MiNDS student who will be beginning in the fall. We are currently conducting one study examining motivational variables in individuals who drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. Heavy drinking smokers often report that drinking can serve as a trigger for smoking (and vice versa), but the underlying motivational processes contributing to this “cross-commodity” effect are not well understood. We are testing one hypothesis that exposure to alcohol-related environmental cues in our bar lab dynamically increases the relative value of alcohol and cigarettes, which we can measure using behavioural economic measures of alcohol/tobacco demand. Another focus of the lab is examining structural brain correlates of impulsive delay discounting in alcohol and nicotine use disorders, in collaboration with Drs. Luciano Minuzzi and Nicholas Bock. Finally, we have an emerging collaboration with the Forensic Psychiatry Program at St. Joe’s (Dr. Kaitlyn McLachlan). We received a grant to conduct a study of behavioural economic decision making indices of alcohol use and misuse in a forensic mental health sample. These are exciting times and we are looking forward to a productive year.

Q: What are the big questions that your research is currently trying to answer?

 A: The overarching question that I am most interested in is how people make choices, including both good/healthy choices and bad/unhealthy choices. My work is attempting to understand the factors that contribute to decisions to engage in addictive behaviors, such as drinking, smoking, gambling, etc. I am also interested in how the brain supports these decisions and how neural circuitry underlying reward processing and cognitive control is affected by addictive disorders. Ultimately, my hope is that the research that my lab can be translated into more effective treatments for individuals with various forms of addiction.

Q: Tell me a little bit more about The Bar Lab that opened 6 months ago and the planning that went into its creation.

A: We are very excited about the bar laboratory, and we are one of a small handful of research centres in Canada with this type of facility. That our bar lab is also housed within a psychiatric hospital is even more unique. In the last six months, our focus has been to create a realistic bar environment that will allow us to study drinking in a naturalistic context. We spent a lot of time thinking about the types of cues we wanted (the number and variety of alcohol bottles, the artwork and other décor, and the lighting). These may seem like minor details, but they are very important in creating an environment that helps to suspend the reality that our participants are in a research lab. Equally important, however, was the need to ensure the safety and security of our participants, staff, and the patients at the hospital. We have implemented a number of procedures, including keeping all alcohol under double lock and taking regular inventory. We have also installed a closed-circuit video camera system that serves two purposes. First, we are able to monitor participants while they are in the bar to ensure that study procedures are being followed, and second, we are able to record their behaviour for later analysis (i.e., frequency of sips, nonverbal behaviour, etc.). We also look forward to possibly incorporating the bar lab into treatment interventions for individuals with addictive disorders.

Thank you Dr. Amlung for taking the time to answer these questions and welcome to the MiNDS program! 

As proud students of McMaster’s Neuroscience Graduate program, it seems fitting that the current issue of Brainwaves should feature a brief account of this year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. With just under 30,000 attendees, the meeting was held at Chicago’s McCormick Place, the largest conference centre in the U.S.

The conference opened with a dialogue between Neuroscience and Society, in the form of a feature lecture by Judge Rakoff, entitled ‘Neuroscience and the law: Strange bedfellows’. The premise of Rakoff’s humorous and insightful discussion was that now is an important time for neuroscientists to establish their place in the law. As scientists, we have a wealth of knowledge and tools that are applicable to many aspects of the law, and Rakoff cautioned that neuroscientists must be careful when we transfer our knowledge to legal matters. His advice to young neuroscientists hoping to play a part in this future translation is for each side to “learn to speak the language of the other.”

After this lecture, the schedule exploded into a myriad of special lectures, presidential lectures, minisymposia, nanosymposia and presentations. Rakoff’s lecture was just the first of many that would capture my attention over the course of that week. Every day brought forth a new presidential lecture and multiple poster sessions, with themes ranging from Development and Disorders of the Nervous system, to Sensory Motor Systems and Cognition & Behaviour. From October 17 to the 21, there were five non-stop days jam-packed with the best that neuroscience has to offer. 

 This article engrossed me because the authors approached this scenario from an evolutionary perspective. Instead of investigating the benefits of caffeine for the bees that pollinate caffeine-producing plants, Wright et al. question the evolutionary advantage for the plants that produce the caffeine in the first place. Caffeine has a bitter taste and the same is true of the plant genus Coffea, which produces the coffee beans. This bitter taste, especially at high concentrations, provides an evolutionary advantage for certain plant species as it discourages visits from dangerous herbivores. There are certain visitors, such as bees, that the Coffea flower would like to attract to aid in their pollination. While bees, like other large herbivore threats, dislike the taste of bitter nectars, it turns out that if the concentration of caffeine is just right, bees actually prefer a small amount of caffeine in their morning nectar. Wright et al. assessed the caffeine levels in the nectars of various plant species belonging to Caffea and Citrus, two caffeine-producing plant genera. In the species they examined, these authors found that the concentration of caffeine never strayed above the sweet spot required to keep the bees coming back for more. While this explains why bees don’t mind coming to visit these plants for a little pick-me-up, what evolutionary benefits does this hold for the plant itself? What is it about caffeine in the nectar that makes the bees want to come back?

Perhaps the bees had learned something special about these plants, and this learning may have been facilitated by the presence of caffeine in the nectar. To assess the effect of caffeine on bee learning and memory, Wright et al. subjected a group of these insects to a classical conditioning experiment where the authors paired an odour stimulus with a sucrose reward. When the sucrose reward contained low doses of caffeine, the rate of learning for bees increased. Interestingly, the effects of this learning persisted for up to 3 days, suggesting that small amounts of caffeine somehow help the bees create a sustained memory for the odours of desired targets, such as the nectars of certain plant species. Next the authors cast their attention toward specific changes in the bee brain that might be responsible for this rapid formation of long-term memory.

 Along the antennae of bees are olfactory receptors, which sample scents and convert this information into electrical stimuli that propagate along axons terminating in the antennal lobes. Olfactory signals from antennal lobes and taste signals from bee mouth parts combine in an area called the “mushroom body,” and it is here that sensory integration and learning occur in insect brains. Wright et al. found that caffeine increases the excitability of neurons in mushroom bodies, and the effect of caffeine can be countered by blocking specific receptors on these neurons. Due to the overlap between this pathway and the reward pathway for insect learning, the authors conclude that caffeine likely strengthens olfactory synapses in the mushroom bodies, particularly when these signals are coupled with stimulation of the sugary reward pathway. Taken together, this provides an excellent explanation for why certain plants secrete a small amount of caffeine, a normally bitter and repellant taste for insects, into their nectar. A small amount of caffeine might strengthen synapses extending from olfactory receptors in bee antennae onto mushroom bodies, and increase memory formation for a particular floral scent. This would lead to future pollination of flowers bearing that particular scent.

While I consider myself to have slightly better memory than a bee, and though I am still terrified of their stingers, after reading this article I couldn’t help but realize the striking similarities between these tiny insects and myself. We both prefer our caffeine with a little bit of sugar, and neither of us enjoys a too-bitter taste. When we find the right combination of caffeine and delicious aromas, time and again we keep coming back to the same place where we enjoyed our first experience there. And even though this takes me to my favourite coffee shop, and bees to a particular species of flower, we both seem to benefit from the memories we form while enjoying our caffeinated treats at these hotspots.

 There is a wealth of information out there surrounding the effects of caffeine on learning and memory. Some findings may be rather specific, concerning the molecular effects of caffeine on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, and some might be more generalizable to humans, such as the behavioural effects of caffeine on adolescent rats. Even though the brains of humans and bees are very different, neuroscientific findings such as this capture the wide range of interesting questions that our field positions us to answer. I don’t dare claim to be a melittologist, but I am an avid coffee drinker and a MiNDS graduate student, and as such I thought this hot topic might generate some buzz around two things I am passionate about, learning and a nice hot cup of coffee.

 Wright, G. A., Baker, D. D., Palmer, M. J., Stabler, D., Mustard, J. A., Power, E. F., ... & Stevenson, P. C. (2013). Caffeine in floral nectar enhances a pollinator's memory of reward. Science, 339(6124), 1202-1204.

 Chittka, L., & Peng, F. (2013). Neuroscience. Caffeine boosts bees' memories. Science, (339), 1157-9.