Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. This season on Sagecast, we're talking with a variety of Pomona College faculty members about how they came to study what they study, teach what they teach, and love the field they love. Patty Vest: Today, we're talking with professor of neuroscience and psychology, Nicole Weekes, whose research explores the psychological and biological responses to stress. Mark Wood: Welcome, Nicole. Patty Vest: Welcome, welcome. Nicole Weekes: Thank you, it's a pleasure. Mark Wood: It's great to have you with us. Nicole Weekes: Thank you. Mark Wood: Let's start with your academic interest in how the brain works. Can you trace that interest back to its origins? Nicole Weekes: I sure can. I sure can. So, as early as I can remember, I had an interest in psychology. I really was interested in how the mind worked and how... why it was that people could experience what seemed like similar things, but react to those similar things in very different ways. So, I always had that curiosity. What makes you me and... what makes you you and what makes me me and wanting to understand that. So, that had always been there and when I decided to go away to college, and I specifically decided to get as far away from California. So, I'm a California girl, but I wanted to get as far away as possible. And so, got my map out and started looking at the East Coast. Wound up in Boston and at Boston University and was a psych major at Boston University. And so, I knew that whatever I was going to do, it was going to be in psychology and it was going to be related to trying to understand the mind. Nicole Weekes: And what happened, sort of curiously, was there was one what I think of as sort of natural science, hard science, course that you have to take in the psychology major and that was called at the time Physiological Psychology. But today, we would call that Neuropsychology. And so, it was the one course I didn't want to take. I thought I've never biology and physiology and chemistry and physics and so, gosh, I'm going to put that off as long as I possibly can. That's the truth! Nicole Weekes: And what that wound up meaning is that I took it my junior year. And I remember the course. I remember the first day of the course and I remember the professor, Professor Jackie [Leiterman 00:02:18], I still am in contact with her, saying to me... saying to us, "Forget everything you ever learned about the id, the ego, or the superego. If it does not exist because of firing of neurons in the brain, it simply does not exist." And that was the day when I thought oh my gosh. There may be something to these sciences. The biology and the chemistry and the physics that I didn't realize. And if it's really the case then those systems can help me understand the mind. Can understand the way in which people think and feel and react. That's what I want to study. And so, that was [inaudible 00:02:56]. It was my junior year at Boston University back in the 80s. And that's what turned me on to the field. And I've been in it since 1986, something like that. Patty Vest: So you started in that area. You wanted to study the id, the ego. How did you- Nicole Weekes: Yes. So, that's a funny... yes. So, this sounds weird now, but when I went to Boston, it really was with the idea that I would be a psychotherapist at the end of that. So, it wasn't just studying psychology. When I first went to college, it was to study psychology to be a psychotherapist. Mark Wood: So, you wanted to be a clinician. You didn't want to teach. You didn't want to- Nicole Weekes: Oh, absolutely. That's exactly right. I wanted to be a clinician. And even more so, it would be strange to people, I really was a believer in Freud. And what I often say is, "Not that penis envy stuff." Did you get that? Penis envy. So, it wasn't the penis envy that I was so interested in. It was the idea of the unconscious. That there were all the motivations that we had and we weren't even aware that we had them, but they seemed to be responsible for much of our behavior. So, I was really interested, yes, in doing clinical work, and yes, trying to understand, again, the motivations for the ways in which we behave and the ways in which we think. And so, in some ways, I wound up pursuing that, but from a very different perspective than I expected. Mark Wood: So, you started off... You said you didn't feel like you were very good in chemistry or... Nicole Weekes: That's right. Mark Wood: So, were you trying to avoid the STEM fields? Nicole Weekes: There's no question I was. There's no question I was! I think it was a combination. I think, in some ways, the positive was it wasn't just avoiding the STEM field. I really fell in love with the idea of trying to understand psychological functioning. So, it wasn't all aversion. It was definitely... I remember in high school that the books that I would on my own or the topics that would come in any class... It could be a class on poetry. It could be a class on... was trying to understand motivations. Love, hate, what have you. So, it was that those topics, those questions, appealed to me and also, the idea that I did not think I was particularly good. I did not think I was particularly competent in the sciences as I defined them at the time. Yeah. So, it was both of those. I was attracted to a particular set of questions and I didn't understand that the fields that I was avoiding at the time might actually be the best ways of pursuing the questions that I was interested in. Until I got to college. Patty Vest: And how did that experience inform how you work with your students now? Nicole Weekes: Oh, I really like that question. Thank you. So, I feel like even though I had a great education in a lot of ways, K through 12. But what I realize, and now I look back and I think really informs the ways in which I teach, is they didn't... I don't think the teachers felt it was their job to excite me and bring me into the field and convince me that what they were studying was important and fabulous and interesting and things like that. I didn't get any of that until I got to college and then, it now becomes critical to me. So, since I've been here, I feel like it's my job. I feel responsible for trying to convince every student that this is what you should be studying. This is what's exciting. And really pulling me them in. If not to become majors and have careers in neuropsychology, at least to understand what it can offer them and the different perspectives it can bring together. So, I take that very seriously in terms of my own experiences in college and even before that and what it means about the way in which I teach. Definitely. Mark Wood: So, you were originally from this area. You went east for college. You came home. Nicole Weekes: I surely did. Mark Wood: Do you consider yourself an Angeleno and how does that tie into your academic journey? Nicole Weekes: Aw, that's interesting. Yes. Yeah, I definitely consider myself an Angeleno. It's funny. The way I think about it now. I never... When I think about the time I spent in Boston... We were talking about this before. If you think about the weather here recently. It was a great place to get educated. It never felt like home. It never took the place of sunny California for me. And so, I always thought of myself, when I was there... In fact, I remember when people would tell me to go west when I was in Boston and I would always be looking for the ocean because I thought that's how I'd know I was going west. And so, I always wound up going exactly in the wrong direction when I was there. So, I've always been an Angeleno. I think, now, the way in which I think about that is there's a set of values and I'm very keenly aware now of the ways in which the ways I think and the ways in which I try not to be conservative, and I don't mean politically here, but I mean conservative in terms of these old-time beliefs that have been with us since the 1600s type thing, that I think there is an Angeleno feel of sort of the new, the flexible, the creative- Mark Wood: The openness. Nicole Weekes: The openness. That very much, I think... It took me getting away from Los Angeles to realize how much Los Angeles is a part of the way in which I live and I do my work. Absolutely. Patty Vest: Let's move on a little bit more to your research. You focus on the connection of the psychological and biological ways stress affects us. Why is it important to study that connection? Nicole Weekes: Oh, wow. I know this is a stereotype, so I don't necessarily want to increase that belief, but there is no question I got into the field of stress because of my own experiences with stress. I often tell my students... One of the things I always remember, and again, remember I was born and raised and lived here. My family was here throughout. And when I was in school in Boston, I remember I would be really stressed out. I would get through the stress. I would get those exams done. I would get on the plane and I almost never made it home before my throat started to scratch just a little bit and I started to feel exhausted and I... right? So, I was always interested in what is that? What is the connection between the fact that I would go through these periods of high levels of stress and almost immediately I would experience a cold or flu as a result. Nicole Weekes: I would also say I was also really interested in the idea that... and yet, isn't it interesting that my body, that my brain, would allow me to get through the stressor. So, there was something really interesting about the way in which your body and your mind and your brain deal with these events in life that if you're lucky, you still persevere. You still get through, but then you also experience the downside. The cost of that. And so, I think, certainly from college and my own experiences of pressure and wanting to do my best and all of that, I've always had that sense of what is that relationship? What is that about? Nicole Weekes: And then, as I got more interested in neuroscience, then it really became interesting to me to think about how are things that we think of as psychological, like psychological stress... How are they actually experienced biologically? Or how are they actually experienced in the brain and in the body? And so, in some ways, that seemed like a natural place to go with trying to understand my own experiences, but I also, moving from someone who was most interested in the mind, if you will, and psychology to someone who was more and more increasingly interested in understanding the connection between the mind and the brain and the physical body. Mark Wood: Before we move on to your specific research, let's talk a little more about that connection. Can you walk us through how that actually works? Nicole Weekes: Sure. Absolutely. So, there are a number of different models. It's also important, as I do my work and as I think about the literature... A couple things that I think about in terms of psychological experiences of stress and biological experiences both of stress, but also health, for example, changes in immune system, things like that... One thing I always like to make sure I make clear is that there are a number of reasons why, when we are stressed out, we wind up more likely, more vulnerable, to getting sick. Some of them have to do with direct biological models. Nicole Weekes: So, Mark, I would answer your question from the biological perspective, which is that when an individual experiences stress, you tend to have two major responses. So, let's say it's a life-or-death event. And our bodies are not very good at telling the differences. Mark Wood: [crosstalk 00:12:21] if we did! Nicole Weekes: Right, exactly! So, our bodies are not really good about telling the difference between a life-or-death event and... like running into your boss on the elevator. Obviously, your boss is beautiful and his mind, but you feel a little bit of stress over there. So, for both of those cases, your body, your brain, gears you up for action. Like, this is fight or flight. I have to do something about this! And when you experience that stress, when you experience fight-or-flight, all kinds of changes happen to your body. So, you get an increase in blood flow. That's because your cardiovascular system, your heart, is beating faster. You get an increase in respiration. So, that's because your lungs are bringing in more oxygenated blood that can get mixed with the greater volume of blood that can get shunted to your muscles, all that kind of thing. So, the body is gearing you up to protect you. Because you have triggered the idea that there is something really wrong in your environment whether there really is or not. Nicole Weekes: So, the body goes through all of these changes, these biological changes, that are there for a reason. They're there to keep you alive. But in the long run, you can imagine, if you respond, as we do to some extent, as though there's a bear chasing you every time you happen to hit a deadline, over time, that is not the best response for your cardiovascular system. Mark Wood: In nature, a bear doesn't chase you every day. Nicole Weekes: No, it's interesting, but... right? To that point, that even in nature, a bear doesn't chase you- Patty Vest: It's a bear of a deadline. Nicole Weekes: It's a bear of a deadline. Thank you very much. Nicely said. And more than that, the amazing thing about being these brilliant humans that we are, is it's not just about the bear. It's all of the ways in which you can anticipate a bear. And the bear may never come. Even if there was once a bear in your life, that bear is likely never to show up again and yet, one of things about having these very complex brains is that we can anticipate the bear. Nicole Weekes: There's a great book by a stress physiologist up at Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, called Why Zebras Never Get Ulcers. And the whole idea is that a zebra does not have a brain that is complicated to worry about lions all the time. There's either the threat in front of them or there's no threat at all. But this exquisitely complex brain of ours, that biology of how does this work, allows us to have the anticipation of a bear, a lion, a deadline, a life-or-death event, at any moment. And because of that, we wind up gearing ourselves up, gearing our bodies up, in ways that can easily tear the body down in the long run. And that's the idea of the biological model. You're gearing your body up for action and if you really had a life-or-death event, that would be a good thing to do. But that's not what most of us are handling in our quite first-world problem life. What we're handling is stressors that really do not need to be responded to in the way that we still respond to them. Mark Wood: And it's interesting then... We always think cognition, brain, mind, but it's the whole body to some degree, right? Nicole Weekes: Exactly. And the brain... There is no question that the brain is the ruler... is the master of the body. The rest of the body. And you can think about all of the ways in which that's beautiful and complicated and interesting, but you can also then imagine, if your mind tells you... If your mind, your brain, tells you that something is so, you make it so in your body. And that, right, is one of the things that winds up putting us into some of the troubles that we wind up in. I think that's fabulously interesting. Patty Vest: And the stay-on stress. Let's stay stressed. Nicole Weekes: Oh, okay. Let's do it. I'm ready for it, Patty. Patty Vest: Another area that stress affects is our memory. Can you tell us a little bit about your work in that area? Nicole Weekes: Yes, absolutely. And, actually, this is one of my favorite parts of our work. And the reason for that is in some ways it's the most complicated, but should be obvious from our own experiences. And what I mean by that, and I think this is especially true for our students... A lot of time when people think about stress, they automatically think about it as a negative experience and you expect it to have a negative impact. But what's actually the case is that the only way... Let me take this to our students. The only way that students make it to Pomona College is because they manage stress way. Or let me put it maybe a different way because I'm not quite sure that was the accurate way to say it. They are able to perform well, especially on memory tasks, much of what we are required to do, even under high levels of stress. Nicole Weekes: So, one of the things that I find most interesting... and when we got these findings, we sort of had to look back and think, well, that actually was one psychological finding that was obvious. And that is that when we take our students, Claremont College students, and we look at them under stress. And what I mean when I say look at them under stress... What we actually did is to bring students in during a time of low stress. So, in our case, we actually chose students who were around over the summer and we asked them how stressed are you feeling right now? And then, we asked them to come in again the most stressful week of the school year- Patty Vest: Finals. Nicole Weekes: You got it. Finals or midterms, right? And we tested them again. And we looked at their memory. We looked at brain activity through EEG. We looked at cortisol levels or stress hormone levels through salivary sampling. So, we had all of these different measures of the same individuals over two periods of time. What we found that I thought was so interesting was with regard to memory, our students memory functioning actually got better when they were under stress. And again, it kind of makes sense when you think about it because what we have is a population at our college that- Patty Vest: Is high-achieving. Nicole Weekes: Exactly! High achieving and highly capable even under relatively stressful circumstances. So, on some level, when we looked back at the literature and we really thought about it.. We might not get that same finding if we just went out to the general population. But we've self-selected for students who actually manage stress well if by managing stress well, you mean are able to perform with regard to memory tasks in a positive way. Nicole Weekes: But what's also interesting is the other finding that we got that went along with that is even while students were performing well on the memory task, their immune functioning... So, one of the things you can get from salivary sampling is not only things like stress hormones, but you can also get some immune markers that are related to colds and flus. So, the same student, when they were doing well on memory tasks, was actually decreased in terms of their immune functioning. And so, this is another piece I've gotten really interested in is what it means to be successful under stress depends on the stress you're talking about, but it also depends on how you define successful. And so, it very much seems to be the case that the conditions that we put ourselves in that actually may be beneficial to some types of functions, that same level of stress in that individual may be actually problematic still with regard to other aspects of success. If you think about your ability to fight off a cold or flu versus your ability to perform well on an exam. And that, I think, is really interesting in terms of complicating how we think about stress and how we think about the outcomes of stress. Are they negative? Are they positive? It depends on what you're measuring. Mark Wood: I'm curious. There are different kinds of memory, right? Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: Are they all affected in the same way by stress? Nicole Weekes: Yes, thank you. That's also a really good question. Where we found stress to actually be beneficial, at least the stress that is related to examinations, so how stressed our students tend to get during exam weeks, was that their... It was actually their short-term memory. So, we would ask a question like... what's called digit span. We'd ask question like repeat after me. I'm gonna read you four numbers. I want you to tell me those numbers. And then, the more difficult aspect of that is then repeat those numbers backwards. Which is something I pretty well can't do. It was actually that task. I'm gonna give you a series of numbers. And they would start with like three numbers and go up to eight numbers. And then you have to repeat them backwards. It was that task that students, our participants in these studies, our own examinations... It was that task that they had the most difficulty with until they were stressed. So, at baseline, I would say, when they were lower in stress, that task was actually harder for them than when they were under examination stress. And it's as if something sort of... an extra resource of activity in the brain, activity in memory centers of the brain, was able to catch them and allow them better memory. Nicole Weekes: Whereas when we gave them lists of words, for example, and asked them to repeat them the following day or... There are all sorts of ways to do that. That longer term memory, longer term in quotes, wasn't so effective. So, it does seem to be the case that not only does it matter if you're talking about cognitive ability or immune functioning or cardiovascular functioning, but also, even when you say memory, it depends on the specific kind of memory that you're talking about. Patty Vest: You also studied the ways that stress affects individuals and groups and also gender. Can you walk us a little bit through that? Nicole Weekes: Sure. So, this is another finding that may or may not be surprising. But I'll say two ways in which... So, I'm gonna use as my group gender, exactly as you suggested at the end, Patty, and just talk about two kinds of studies we've done on that. One sort of study is looking at different measures of stress. So, when someone says stress, do you remember I was saying it depends on how you define stress. You can think of stress and measure stress psychologically. I can simply ask you, as we do, on an inventory how stressed do you feel, how anxious do you feel, how tired do you feel, how overloaded do you feel. I could ask you questions like that. And we would talk about those questions as your perception of stress. I could also ask you how many times have you experienced X? Financial issues, health issues, examination issues, in the last X period of time. We would talk about that as exposure to stressors. So, you can have your perception of stress, you could have stressors, and then you could have physiological measures of stress like your heart rate, cardiovascular system measures, and, as I talked about before, things like cortisol. So, all of those, people sometimes talk about as measures of stress. Nicole Weekes: That's a long way around, but here's the point. There are significant gender differences in the extent to which those different measures of stress map onto each other or are consistent. And this is the part that may not be surprising when I say it, but it is really more interesting than I think people realize. For women, those four measures of stress map pretty neatly. So, I could ask you how stressed are you feeling or I could take your cortisol level and I would be likely, if you are someone who said you were psychologically rather stressed, rather anxious, felt put upon, you're also likely to have these cardiovascular and immune and hormone measures of stress that match that. So, if you're someone who says you're stressed, just about every measure would be in line with that if you're a woman. Nicole Weekes: If you are a male, if you're a man, those do not map up in the same way. Or map together in the same way. So, if I ask about your stress level and I measure it through you telling me whether or not you feel stressed versus I use what we think of as a more objective or biological measure, you might be someone who says, "I'm not feeling stressed at all,"- Patty Vest: And you're really stressed. Nicole Weekes: ... and yet, your physiological measures would suggest that that may not be... and I don't want to say accurate because that puts sort of a value judgment on it, but let me instead say they don't match up. And so, there really becomes this question. It's sort of a reminder, an alert. Be very careful about the way in which you ask your questions depending on the group of individuals that you are evaluating and do not assume that every group of individuals is going to show similar relationships between their different stress measures. Does that make sense? Nicole Weekes: So, I'm really interested, again, in one, why is it the case? One could have all kinds of hypotheses that those things would map up in one gender and not the other. But it's also an interesting question of, or a cautionary tale, when you're doing stress studies, to be very careful. You could imagine that happening culturally as well. You could imagine in one culture, a mapping of the different measures of stress, whereas in another culture, you may not get that same mapping. So, being very careful about the way in which we define stress and then, also, the way in which we measure stress. So, that's just one example using gender that we found. Mark Wood: Let's say on gender differences for a minute. A former president of Harvard got into some rather deep trouble a few years ago for speculating publicly that women might not innately be as good at math and science as men. Are there differences between men's and women's cognitive abilities and is there any evidence that they're innate? Nicole Weekes: Yes, thank you. I'm glad that you asked both of those questions because the first one, I think, is an easy yes. That is there's pretty good and pretty consistent evidence. Although the differences are far smaller than I think people make them out to be, but there is absolutely evidence to suggest, on average, men... and here I do mean biological men, but we can talk about that. Men tend to be better at 3D visual rotation. The ability to imagine, think of any object in space, in 3D space, the ability to close one's eyes and visually rotate that object in your mind and then, if I said, if you did X rotation, what would that object look like? If that makes sense. Men tend to be better at that kind of 3D visual rotation than women tend to be. So, again, remember this is average. Whereas- Mark Wood: Statistically. Nicole Weekes: Correct. Thank you. Whereas women tend to be better on verbal memory tasks. The ability to remember long, verbal stimuli and also to be able to manipulate it and put it together and put combinations of verbal stimuli together into sentences and then change the sentence to change the meaning of it, things like that. So, on average, you see those differences between men and women. I will even suggest... although it's not clear what that sex difference in cognitive functioning has to do with a second sex difference. And that is it is also the case, on average, that male and female, or men and women, if you look at their brains, you see different complexities in men's brains and women's brains. And I won't go into all the detail of that, but it is the case that there are some differences. They have less to do with overall size and more to do with where you may see more complexity in one gender than the other. Nicole Weekes: Sometimes that second finding, that idea that if the brain of 50 men looks different than the brain of 50 women... sometimes that's taken to assume that that is the way in which those 50 men and those 50 women came out of the womb. So, innateness suggests that the reason why these things are different is because it is genetic. And that's where the former president of Harvard gets himself into trouble. There's at least as much evidence to suggest that your early environment is responsible for the shape and the complexity of your brain. This comes up when you talk about gender differences. This comes up when you talk about race and ethnicity differences. This comes up when you talk about cultural differences. There is at least as much evidence to suggest if my brain looks different than your brain, it's as likely to be because of differences in our environment than it is to be about anything related to genes or early prenatal, perinatal hormone levels. Which is often where people go when they see those differences, but there is really no evidence to suggest that that's where they came from. I do hope that he has now been educated about that. Patty Vest: ... You just mentioned. Nicole Weekes: Oh. No, no, no, no. Patty Vest: You're not in trouble, not yet. Nicole Weekes: Okay. Oh. Patty Vest: You just mentioned, one of the last things you mentioned was hormones and how hormones are involved in those differences. Nicole Weekes: Yes. Patty Vest: Can you tell us more about that? Nicole Weekes: Sure. I should say with regard to gender differences, this is not my own work mostly, so I want to put that out first. There's been some beautiful work over the last, now several decades, looking, for example, at individuals that are undergoing transgender hormone therapy, and looking at those individuals before therapy and after that therapy. Often, this is done when you're talking about somebody who is transforming from female to male, in terms of identity. In that case you would be giving them testosterone and related hormones. Nicole Weekes: Often, the argument that has been used to suggest that cognitive differences are related to hormones, is if you take individuals before they have had testosterone, and you might think of as male related hormones. You look at their cognitive functioning beforehand, you look at their cognitive functioning afterward. What's been reported in the literature is that increasing individuals' testosterone levels improves that 3D mental rotation that I was talking about. Nicole Weekes: Sometimes, that finding is used in the same way we were talking about with the former President of Harvard. I will not, no, okay. Nevermind, nevermind. Those two are often confused, right? Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Nicole Weekes: Okay. The brains of women and the brains of men, on average, statistically are different, and look at that. If I put a male hormone into an individual, that individual may now have greater visuospatial skills, but what you're doing is two entirely different things. One is taking a person, usually much later in development, and adding testosterone to whatever their brain and body looks like currently. The other is making a huge assumption based on what's going on neonatally, what's going on in individuals who are gendered as male or female, and then are brought up in our very gendered society. Nicole Weekes: The idea that those, that one, that is increasing testosterone, even if we bought the premise that the data's consistent, that that improves what you might think of as cognitive skills that men, on average excel at. Thinking that that then explains the other, that is the sex difference, the gender difference, just scientifically doesn't make sense. Mark Wood: That's sort of a good example of the fact that when it comes to cognition, we're always looking for simple answers. Nicole Weekes: That's exactly right. Mark Wood: The brain is always giving us very, very complicated answers. Isn't that true? Nicole Weekes: That's exactly right. That's absolutely right. I would say, so what often happens though and we all understand this, is that when you try to give the shorthand, when you try to move from the scientific literature and the complexity and the nuance that's in the research we do, when you try to bring that into a public square, which is really important, that communication needs to occur. How do you communicate out to most of us who are not experts in any particular field, that particular field, and do so in a way that doesn't, that isn't so simplified that it's now entirely inaccurate? That's a real problem in terms of- Mark Wood: As a former journalist, I've probably been guilty at sometime in the past. Nicole Weekes: Oh, yes. That's true. Yeah, I'm sure we all have. I'm sure we all have. Absolutely. Patty Vest: You've also studied stress and the reaction, and stress reaction in children. Nicole Weekes: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Patty Vest: How do children react to stress and how is it different to adults? [crosstalk 00:04:09] Nicole Weekes: Yes. Again, mostly, I'm going to go back to other people's work. We've done some work, and this work was in collaboration with Jessie Borelli, who is now at UC Irvine, and other colleagues here, like Patricia Smiley. We've done some work and that one, that work is sort of complicated because the work that we did in children, it wasn't just looking at their stress reactions. It was specifically looking at how individuals bond with their primary caregiver, and then how those bonds affected their stress reactions. Nicole Weekes: Similar to the work I talked about earlier though with gender, again, what we found there was there were different reactions to little boys versus little girls in their reaction to stress, dependent on how closely tied, how functionally tied to their primary caregiver, which in most of these cases were women, they were. Nicole Weekes: It's like, it was a complicated story that we have never looked at in adults. I can't give you sort of an easy parallel. What I can say though is I think there's some really interesting questions about having early life experiences and how much those early life experiences, if you have great trauma in your early life, how those experiences continue to impact you, continue to affect the way in which you respond to stressors later on. Nicole Weekes: I would say maybe that's a parallel is that both in children and even watching children as they grow and move into adulthood, in both cases, there's evidence to suggest that your stress response has a lot to do with the environment in which you find yourself, both in terms of your early life environment, but even into college and into early adulthood. That's what I would say is parallel between those two lines of work. Patty Vest: How early do ... Staying on children, interested in, how early do they experience stress? How would you measure that, how would you know that? Nicole Weekes: Also a great question. There are a couple of measures, so this might be surprising that one can do in early, even infancy. One is actually the parallel to what we do with college students here, which is that we can put electrodes on the scalp of infants and look at brain activity within, certainly, the first couple of months. It's the same method that we use, just smaller caps, just smaller electrode caps, then what we use in college students. Nicole Weekes: There are ways and there are markers of individuals who react. Individual infants, individual college students, individual older adults who respond to sour tastes on their tongue, for example. We often will use that because that's something you can use across those different populations. You'll see gender differences between the reactions to sort of negative stimuli. You will see differences based on, again, sort of early life experiences or even stressful delivery experiences, things like that. Nicole Weekes: There are ways, both neurologically, to sort of look at the same measure at different points in time, and there are also ways, hormonally. When I test my stress levels, hormonal stress levels like cortisol in college students, I'm using salivary samples. They just spit into a test tube. If you can get your baby to spit into a test tube or otherwise give me some spit, I can analyze the same hormones. Patty Vest: I'll give you a bib. Nicole Weekes: That's what I ... Then I'll just squeeze it out into my test tube. Actually, that would work. In one way or another, so it's interesting and maybe surprising that some of the same measures that you would use in college students or adults, you can actually use in infants as well. That's really nice because then you know, as we were talking about earlier, there are so many measures of stress. You want to make sure that you're getting a consistent measure across time or individuals and yes, babies show stress responses nearly immediately. Probably not even nearly immediately, but certainly prenatal at that. The last couple of months, prenatal. Patty Vest: Wow. Mark Wood: We mentioned that journalists like me [crosstalk 00:08:47] have a tendency to want to oversimplify science. They also have a tendency to insist on applications. Nicole Weekes: Yes. Mark Wood: I'm going to ask- Nicole Weekes: Oh, of course. Oh, of course. Mark Wood: You work in pure research. Nicole Weekes: Yeah, yeah. Mark Wood: I mean, it's not aimed at specific applications, but are there applications down the line for the work you're doing, you think? Nicole Weekes: Yeah, yeah. Yes, there is no question in my mind, and let me say even though you're absolutely right, some people would think about, at least some of the work I do, as pure science, basic research, basically, as opposed to applied or clinical or translational research. The reason I can be so excited about it, and that's just me as a scientist, is because I see such a clear application. Nicole Weekes: I'll give you one example of that. One of the things I'm really interested in, and this goes back to how individuals differ in the way in which they respond to stress. You can think about, an extreme case would be individuals who are returning from combat with post-traumatic stress disorder. We often talk about the number of veterans who return with some form of brain damage and relatedly, I will say, and we're understanding the complication here more and more, of PTSD. It might surprise people to know about 10% of veterans return with PTSD who are males, and about 20% of veterans who return from combat are female, so that have PTSD. Nicole Weekes: Let me put that again. About 10% of veterans who return from military service who are males will wind up with PTSD. About 20% of females who return as veterans will get PTSD. There are two things that are interesting there. One is the gender difference, and that's something I'm very interested in. The other is that those numbers are probably much lower than many of us think about. It turns out, even if I control for the trauma that you experienced, you would still see that it's not the majority of individuals who experience trauma, who wind up coming back with PTSD. Nicole Weekes: One of the things I'm really interested in is trying to understand, "What is it about particular individuals that puts them at a higher or lower risk of experiencing a traumatic outcome?" PTSD is one example, given what looked like fairly equivalent levels of stress, of trauma, of stressor. There, again, go back to, "Is it about early life experiences? Is it about differences between men and women in terms of support while they're in the military? Other trauma that they may experience in the military?" Nicole Weekes: I'm really very interested in these questions of, "How is it that different individuals experience what we think of as relatively equivalent events in very different ways?" I think the only way we get an answer to that is turning to the brain, and understanding how the brain reacts and the ways that it reacts. Patty Vest: You mentioned that you were interested in psychology early on. Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Patty Vest: Then you were brought into the light of neuropsychology. Nicole Weekes: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Patty Vest: Now, with your understanding of the mind and the brain, how does that feed back into understanding of yourself? Nicole Weekes: Oh, oh. Mark Wood: Yeah, are you- Patty Vest: You could say, "Oh, I just experienced a high level of cortisol right there." Nicole Weekes: Yeah, yeah, no that's- [crosstalk 00:12:29] I love that question because right at this moment, and for the last six months I have been faithfully doing yoga and practicing mindfulness meditation. One, I guess I got into this work because I so identified with the stress response, and sort of all of the outcomes, good, bad and indifferent of the stress response. Over time, what that's led me to think about is, "Okay, now I feel like I get this. I feel like I understand why I experience the negative things, often, that I experience when I'm stressed." Nicole Weekes: Now I've gotten really interested in like, "What do I do about it?" Now, I would say I have a new-found respect for stress. What that gives me is also a new-found motivation to understand how to diminish it, and when to diminish it, and to try not to stress about the things that may be stressful but may also be positive and arousing, but to be very thoughtful about, "How can I change my hormonal levels that are related to stress? How can I change my brain?" Nicole Weekes: In another chapter of my life, which is in front of me, I'm sort of moving my research from looking at the stress response to looking at management of stress through meditation, through yoga. There are really excellent, again, studies to suggest that in the same way that stress can alter our brains, so can stress management. That's actually, I'm so glad you asked that question. I do, I really try to- Patty Vest: That's really powerful. Nicole Weekes: That's it. I try to incorporate what I learn in my research, what I learn and teach my students into how I try to live my life. Mark Wood: Now I'll ask you to offer some advice. Out of your research, but also out of your own experience. Nicole Weekes: Oh, yes. Mark Wood: All of us are trying to manage our stress levels. Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: It's one of the more important things we do in a day. Nicole Weekes: No, there's no question, there's no question. I do think, I think there are a lot of different strategies that work. This idea of eating well, exercising regularly, sleeping. What's optimal for you, which is almost always somewhere between 6 and 10 hours. Good luck. I apologize, new mothers. Nicole Weekes: All of that, and then what are the things that work for you? I do think that much of ... I mean this is sort of Buddhist in many ways, but much of our negative stress response, if you want to put it that way, is less about the stressor and more about the way in which we react, or better respond to that stressor. Trying to see, "What's out of my hands?" Because there's so many things out of my hands but, "What's also in my hands?" Mark Wood: Garrison Keillor one said in the shower, "It's not the fall that hurts me, it's what you do to try to stop the fall that hurts." Nicole Weekes: "To stop the fall," that's exactly right. In Buddhism, they would say, "It's not the arrow, it's the second arrow that you create for yourselves." It's not the thing, it's the reaction to the thing, and that's why zebras don't get ulcers. They tend not to react in the way our- Patty Vest: Channel a zebra. Nicole Weekes: That's all I'm saying. Channel a zebra. Make that your spirit animal. Mark Wood: I love the old line from Eliot, "Teach me to care and not to care." Nicole Weekes: Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Patty Vest: Where's your ... We talked about, a little bit about where your research is going now. Have you just started or where are you in that process of stress management? Nicole Weekes: Yes, as many of you know, I am just at the end of three years in administration as one of the Associate Deans and Diversity Officer for the faculty. Yeah, and some of you might say I haven't even started stress management yet. I have a sabbatical in front of me, and during that sabbatical I plan both to practice more stress management, but also and in all seriousness, to think about, "What does it mean to incorporate, what does it mean to move my research from trying to understand sort of the reaction, the response to stress, to really trying to think about what we can do?" Especially our students. Nicole Weekes: I mean, that's one of the things I like about the fact that my students are also my participants in these studies, is really working with the population that I love and teach and thinking for them, "What would it mean to manage your stress in healthier ways?" To be able to show them and show myself, it's not just that you think you feel better. It's not just that you psychologically have the experience of feeling better but there's evidence, through brain activity and through hormonal levels and through immune functioning, to suggest you are better. [crosstalk 00:17:29] That's exactly right. At least in women. Mark Wood: Let's turn to your teaching. Nicole Weekes: Oh, yeah. Sure. Mark Wood: That's a segue. What are the advantages of teaching neuroscience in a liberal arts setting? Nicole Weekes: Oh, yeah. I love that question. I'm not sure I knew exactly, I knew I wanted to be at a liberal arts school. I knew that my passion was really about teaching and mentoring. I'm not sure when I got here, which is now 21 years ago, remember? Mark Wood: Same year as- [crosstalk 00:18:00] Nicole Weekes: I know, I know. We came in together. I'm not sure when I came here I really thought about like, "What's the advantage of being here with regard to my research?" I think I really thought about, "What's the advantage of being here in terms of teaching and mentoring?" What I've found is being at a liberal arts college, it seems to be the ideal place to study neuroscience. Because if you really take seriously the notion that most neuroscientists work with the idea that anything you feel, anything you think, anything, any way in which you behave, has to be about the neurons in the brain. Has to be about the brain. Nicole Weekes: Then what that means is that I can ask questions that are legal questions or political questions or philosophical questions or studio art related questions. Ask every sort of liberal arts, "What does it mean to be human?" For me, that has to, at some point, involve the brain. Nicole Weekes: What I don't think I really thought through, honestly, when I came here was how much being in a liberal arts college, being in this setting, would make me want to and require me to push my students to think about neuroscience, neuropsychology from the perspective of literature and religious studies and women's studies. That hadn't, I hadn't, it hadn't even occurred to me, but doing it for this long, I really realize like, "Oh, this just also happens to be the ideal place to do my research." Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Patty Vest: Nicole, you're known for your enthusiastic energy, and you're a four-time recipient of the Wig Award, excellence in teaching. Nicole Weekes: Ah, yes, yeah. Patty Vest: How do you do it? How do you keep your students engaged in your courses? Nicole Weekes: Oh, well I do yoga in class, and I have been known to jump on my desk and things like that. I have answered a student's cellphone before in the middle of class, because that seemed only appropriate. I think, honestly, I think it's because I'm excited. It's because I love what I teach and I love the practice, the practice of teaching and learning. I feel like I'm always doing both of those. I hope that I serve as a good model for our students, in terms of both loving the topic and thinking like, "Oh, if you don't love it, you just don't know it. I got to teach it to you." Nicole Weekes: Also, really like, "I'm always learning. I want you to always be learning. I want you to know why I'm so excited to tell you about this and share it with you." I hope that's why, I hope that's why, yeah. Mark Wood: Some of the concepts in neuroscience are kind of hard to wrap the brain around because it's wrapping the brain around itself. Nicole Weekes: Yes, your brain. Right, exactly. Mark Wood: For instance, cognitive deficits. I think of the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Nicole Weekes: Yes, Man Who Mistook ... One of my favorite books. One of my favorite books. Mark Wood: What do deficits like they have to teach us, and how do you approach things like that with students? Nicole Weekes: Yeah. First of all, that's one of the books that got me into being interested in neuroscience, and I read it during that class that I was talking about. There's something about the narrative. There's something about understanding, "What are the implications of having damage to this part of the brain? What are the implications about not being able to remember anything from more than two years back? How would that change your identity? What would that ... Would you have an identity? If you wouldn't have an identity, what's identity?" Nicole Weekes: All those sorts of questions that I think deficit often teaches us. Or we often teach from brain damage cases and things like that because they're sort of more marvelously interesting, especially if Oliver Sacks is the one writing about them. I would answer it in a different way as well. Those narratives of, "What does it actually look like, when?" I think are really cool, and students love them. Nicole Weekes: I also am very careful, very careful when I talk about deficit to ... In the same way we were talking about stress, and I was saying people often think about it in a negative way, but stress can be gloriously energy producing. I think about deficit in the same way. Many of the individuals, many of the groups that we think about as being deficient in something are also highly, super capable, functional in other ways. Nicole Weekes: I constantly, I think both in terms of thinking about what we would traditionally think of it as deficit as saying, "No, have we just not found what sort of the superhero characteristic is of people who would have this?" I try to think about that in terms of when I talk about brain damage or any sort of cognitive, what we think of as deficit is you sort of, "What's a strength here?" I try to do that with myself, I try to do that with my students. Nicole Weekes: Even as I sort of use brain damage cases, for example, but partly as an example of we're only talking about one side of the coin. There's another side of the coin here. We may have not explored that yet and let's remind ourselves of that either way. That's a very sort of conscientious, about the way in which I talk about deficits and really trying to get my students, get myself to realize that's almost always just one side of the coin. Mark Wood: Well, and that's sort of the wonder of the brain, isn't it? Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: That it is so plastic and so- Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: ... So able to surprise you- Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: ... in ways that you wouldn't expect. Nicole Weekes: That's exactly right. I'll often say when students ask me, "At what point does the brain stop changing, stop growing?" The day it stops learning. We learn throughout our lives, we change throughout our lives. That is the evidence that the brain is constantly changing, and exactly as you said, is constantly surprising us. Patty Vest: What happens when the brain stops learning? Nicole Weekes: I think you die. My recommendation is that you keep your brain learning every day that you are here at the colleges, and from that point on, for the rest of your life. Patty Vest: Good plug. I like it. Nicole, in your 21 years at Pomona, what have been some of your favorite courses to teach? Nicole Weekes: Oh, so two favorite courses, and they're sort of on opposite ends of students' college career. The first one, Intro Psych. I think partly, I started this story talking about that's what turned me on to the sciences that I thought I was not so interested and engaged in. There's something really exciting to me about getting students as early in their college career as possible, and trying to convince them. "I'm going to tell you, I'm going to be your travel agent," I'll sometimes say, "Through the mind. In the course of our travel, you're going to meet the brain if you haven't met it yet and you're going to fall in love." Nicole Weekes: I love, I love getting students at the beginning and say, "I'm going to teach you the coolest thing ever." Then, I love getting students at the end. I teach an Intro Psych course, I teach a few other courses. The most senior level course I teach is called the Biological Basis of Psychopathology. Nicole Weekes: One of the things I love about that course is the whole idea is, "Think of things you think of as psychological, specifically with regard to psychopathology, depression, schizophrenia, manic depressive disease, aggressiveness and violence. Let me convince you that all those are, are disorders or changes in the body above the neck as opposed to below the neck. That's the only difference between those things that we're going to talk about and diabetes and gout and what have you." Nicole Weekes: I really love being able to sort of ... For me, I feel like teaching those two classes along with the other classes I teach, sort of allow me to see the entire sort of progression of a student's four years and their experience in psychology and neuroscience. Those are my two favorite courses. Yeah, I like both ends. I like both ends, yeah. Mark Wood: Do you find that your research feeds back into the classroom? Nicole Weekes: There is no question. There's no question. In both of those classes, well, every class I teach, I do, I give myself the privilege of doing at least a week and talking about my own work. I think that's really groovy for the ... They don't say, "Groovy," but that's okay .... For the students, because I think they get to see, like not only do I teach it, but I do it, and I ask these questions myself. That this isn't just some dry, "Here, read this article." Like, "I wrote this article. Let me tell you why I thought that was an interesting set of studies to run." Yeah, I think it enlivens my work in terms of research, and also enlivens the way I teach. Patty Vest: You mentioned you're at the end of your three year, as Associate Dean. Nicole Weekes: I am. Patty Vest: Focused on diversity initiatives. Nicole Weekes: Yes, that's right, that's right. Patty Vest: Tell us more about that. Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. My main initiative has been thinking about the parallel, in terms of diversity, so demographics, equity, creating similar conditions and inclusion, bringing people together, so diversity, equity, inclusion. Thinking about where we are with regard to the student body. As we all love to brag about, we are, if not the most diverse, certainly one of the top couple of most diverse, elite liberal arts colleges in the country. We maintain that for the student body, and I expect us to, but we have not done as well with regard to the demographic diversity. Especially race and ethnicity but also gender with regard to the faculty and with regard to staff at all levels. Nicole Weekes: I've been really interested in thinking about, "What does it mean to have a diverse campus?" Not just be able to talk about one part of it, and we constantly brag about one part of it, as we should, but "Okay. What does that mean to make it institutional, college-wide? What does it mean to do that, and also, what does it mean to go beyond the numbers, across populations?" Whether you're talking about students, staff or faculty, and think about creating a place where we all sit down together and learn. We all sit down together and debate. We all sit down together. Nicole Weekes: That's the thing I've been most proud of is diversifying the faculty. In the last three years, we have made considerable gains in terms of bringing in young scholars, who are also young scholars of color and more young scholars who are women. That is my proudest accomplishment in the time that I've been in the office, for sure. Mark Wood: There's also sort of the question of diversity in the STEM fields. Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: In neuroscience in-particular. I know you've written a little bit about. Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Mark Wood: Can you talk about that? Nicole Weekes: Absolutely. Actually, that piece that I wrote is called something like, We Know the Problem, Why Don't We Move to Solutions? I am concerned that we've known for a long time .... Neuroscience would just be an example of this. The issue with regard to inequities in college are probably greatest in the STEM fields, in science, technology and engineering and math, is actually what STEM is for. Nicole Weekes: We've known for quite some time that black and Latino students are more likely to leave the sciences than our white students, or also in most cases, our Asian students. The fact that we keep reporting that, and yet many places have not done much to sort of move that needle, is something that I have also been fighting for and had been frustrated about for some time as a teacher, as a professor. Nicole Weekes: The thing that I've been doing the last three years related to that is working with Travis Brown on the cohort programs, on Posse and other cohort programs, QuestBridge, to really encourage students of color, who are interested in the sciences, to be supported in the sciences. That's been my work. One, is sort of trying to be a voice out there saying, "what do we do? Stop telling me about the statistics, we know about the statistics. How do we move those statistics?" Nicole Weekes: Then, also trying to get my hands in there, and doing the work. Again, that would be the second thing I'm most proud of, is that we have moved the needle considerably, in terms of the number of black and Latino students who say they're interested in STEM fields when they get here, and who wind up graduating in the STEM fields. Patty Vest: That's great. Mark Wood: Well on that note, we're going to wrap this up. Nicole Weekes: Okay. Mark Wood: Our thanks to neuroscience and psychology professor, Nicole Weekes- Nicole Weekes: My pleasure. Mark Wood: ... for talking with us about her academic journey into the human brain. Thanks. Nicole Weekes: Thank you. It's my pleasure. Patty Vest: Thanks, Nicole. To all who've stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Until next time.