#48. Booze, Dads and Drunken Rats - Dr. Sahir Hussain

Finally! after 47 episodes as host, Sahir takes his place in the wrinkly brained experts chair to talk about his research on how alcohol drinking by fathers can impact development of the future generations.

Amer Hussain and Jeremy Hall co-host this special episode where we discuss the importance of animal research, find out why Dr. Hussain gets rats drunk and talk about the importance of science communication.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Sahir's Academic Journey
• 6:42 Why make rats drink alcohol?
• 10:33 Personal Connections to Research
• 16:42 Why focus on Male alcohol drinking?
• 19:38 Example of how fathers influence development
• 24:14 Biases and Barriers which impact research
• 32:43 Research on alcohol consumption in rats
• 39:53 Mimicking human drug use in animals
• 45:26 Behavioral insights from animal studies
• 50:51 Sample size and statistics in animal research
• 56:10 Bringing research to the public
• 1:02:03 Importance of Science Communication
• 1:07:43 Origins of the Smooth Brain Society
• 1:15:32 Breaking down barriers to knowledge
• 1:17:22 Wrap up

Transcript

all right so hello everyone to a very special episode  I am an unfamiliar voice probably you may have familiarized me from a couple of other episodes uh but I am not Sahir I am in fact the brother of uh and we have a special guest uh Sahir Hussain who you may be acquainted from a particular podcast maybe this one um and you'd hope so you'd hope so you'd hope so and with me co-hosting is Jeremy uh frequent listeners may be well acquainted with him more than myself so the host well will now ask the guest to introduce himself Sahir take it away.
 oh dear uh yeah um on on the good note this is what episode 48 so we've done a lot of episodes before we've come down to this where we're talking about my work but we finally got here and I think I think you've done a very good job with the introduction in the sense that I think uh people should know you more than Jeremy because Jeremy's only been on one episode he's done a lot of behind the scenes stuff he's done the logo for the show and a lot of the Social Media stuff but he hasn't been on um except for that one episode so yeah anyway thanks guys glad to be on on the other side now I know now I know how it feels uh when to be asked questions as opposed to asking so yeah excited so let me start off by giving the viewers a little overview of what your accomplishments are to my understanding so you move you did your bachelor's in psychology and international relations uh following which you did your Masters at uh King's College London in Psychology and behavioral Neuroscience is that would that be accurate just Neuroscience just Neuroscience I apologize that that this tells you how close we are as brothers um and and then came back to your stomping grounds at the Victoria University of Wellington to do your PhD under your beloved supervisor but Ellen Brook uh who has previously appeared on a couple of episodes on this podcast uh and and could you please tell us a little bit more about your journey and how you got into

psychology as a family member you know the journey but for Jeremy's sake apparently not as accurately as as I should know fine I I I still tell people that you're doing something with AI although I I just say I ask my brother if I need computer problems fixed that's it so that's how much I know about your work yeah you got a screwdriver with me all right so yeah for Jeremy and for uh the audience so the way The Story Goes is uh I so we did High School in India so we were doing schooling in India and over there the rule is that you either become a doctor an engineer a lawyer or a disappointment to your family um and for one reason or the other I didn't do any of them um but I did want to come back to New Zealand to uh go to university and I had gotten some really good marks in environmental Sciences uh during my final board exam so the board exam is like your final year 12 examination which you have to do which is compulsory and one of the compulsory subject objects at the time was environmental sciences and I had done really well in that so I had applied to Victoria University to do environmental Sciences um at the same time Mom and Dad were like you can't just sit around at home for six months until because we had finished in June and University here starts in February mom said Mom and Dad said you can't sit around for six months doing absolutely nothing so they told me go to a university here for those six months do do something and I picked up psychology there uh just a kill time psychology and marketing um and English literature psychology marketing English literature that was the subject thing and I ended up instead of I think I went to six classes across the six months was good I had a lot of time uh spent a lot of time playing basketball and Cricket uh but yeah um I did actually enjoyed the psychology class so then I applied uh when I finally got into uni I started Ed off doing a double major in Psychology and environmental sciences and then as I'm mentioned Bart Ellenbrook so Bart Ellenbrook is uh is a researcher at Victoria University of Wellington he works on drugs mainly uh so he does drug research on psychedelics nicotine alcohol which you which I will talk about and so on and he was he he was a behavior neuroscientist and what he did some of his lectures in first year were the most interes and that sort of made me Veer in that direction a bit more the environmental Sciences lectures were a bit boring but the Human Geography side lectures were really cool so I veered into that direction and I ended up with you know my undergraduate degree in development studies and psychology and then from there moved into neuroscience and from there moved further into Neuroscience with the PHD and so on um a lot of at every opportunity I tried to get out of Academia I applied for multiple jobs in multiple places around the world and got ejected from each and every one of them uh so Academia kept pulling me back in and yeah that's that's how I ended up with my PhD uh yeah that's that's the basic story Jeremy any thoughts quals queries many quals no I mean like for someone that's known you for this long probably seven or eight years now it's nice to it's nice to get a formal background on those things and I know a little bit about what you what you've been studying and what you've been doing so I guess we we should delve into that a little bit um my awareness of what you've been doing revolves around what you've told us in our like friend group chats and that has always been to do with making like rats drink alcohol and I know a little bit more about that but I guess let's start with like why are you making rats drink alcohol uh yeah so why um I know it's it's a it's a good question if you think about it if I offered an 18-year-old college student alcohol for free I think they would drink it um pretty pretty happily to be fair in this economy you you offer anybody free alcohol they will probably drink it um but so the but the real reason why we do animal studies in general so why I'm giving alcohol to animals is because we're trying to isolate the effects of alcohol so in and that's true for any drugs any medication the reason why we do animal research is generally because we're trying to specify certain conditions and isolate and look at the effects of a drug or an effects of any sort of uh Behavior Paradigm or whatever we want to look at and just look at those effects um and that's why we yeah that's that's why we would use an animal model so in this case when I started off my research animal research work the first project which I was on was actually looking at um dma and cocaine and looking at the behavioral effects they had on uh rats with a certain genetic deletion in them so uh the other thing about animal research is you can actively activate or delete genes in animals and see what that does so the one which we were looking at was serotonin so serotonin people might know I think uh We've it's come up in a few episodes but it's around what serotonin does have a lot of work to do in the brain in terms of your pleasure cells so in terms of like uh but it also has a little bit of role to do in motor coordinations that's your movement coordination things as well so um when so and and serotonin is basically controlled by your genes right so there's multiple genes for serotonin the gene which we were looking at is called the serotonin transporter gene well all it all you need to know is it kind of controls or regulates the amount of serotonin in the brain and in the body and these rats half of them did not have that Gene so therefore their regulation is different to like someone an animal which does and you kind of see this in humans as well um in humans there's different types of that Gene so the same transporter gene is of different length and therefore has different activity in different human beings so we're trying to mimic that and we're trying to see whether like a shorter serotonin Gene which produces sort of a a sorry a shorter serotonin knockout Gene which sort of uh Reg Ates serotonin to a lesser extent whether that has an impact um this is not to say that it is the only Gene it's just the one gene we were looking at and we're just trying to see how that Gene sort of impacts Behavior while taking the drug uh so uh that's how we got into it that's why we do animal work uh and as you said with my work what my current work is or my sorry my current PhD and research was was around alcohol so the first project which I did was looking at serotonin uh that those serotonin rats so they were three types the ones with had which had the full Gene the ones which had sort of half active gene or half functioning Gene and then the ones which had no uh like no gene or the or a knockout the genes knocked out um and gave them alcohol and basically saw whether it sort of changed the drinking behaviors or whether the drinking Behavior was different so that that was my first project and then I can talk about my current or like not my current but my PhD project my research after that later hopefully that answers I'm curious based on that and and I'm sure Army has got some probably a little bit more intelligent a little bit more scientific questions to to dive into in a second but

ially I'm I'm curious from a as a self-described empath uh I'm curious what got you into the field of like looking at alcohol and drugs and their impacts like is there a personal connection with those things and if you had some kind of personal connection whether that be emotional or like a personal experience how did your research sort of change that connection and the way you looked at those substances afterwards yeah um that's a really good question so there's levels to this um so there is a little bit of a personal connection in the sense that uh when you grow up in an Indian household usually mental health is like pushed under the rug a little bit um and sort of if you have family members with a sort of mental health problem of any sort you kind of people just kind of like ignore them being like oh they're a bit crazy let's just avoid them um they not necessarily say they're crazy but they're just a bit weird they're a bit off um yeah um and so to that regard that's kind of like my that's from where like my interest in Psychology sort of started in the sense that I remember telling my parents or telling my auntie actually uh I told told one of my aunts when she was asked when she asked why do you want to do psychology and I was like to figure out what's wrong with you um and and it's not to say there was anything actually wrong with her it was just that I thought my family was crazy like everybody thinks the family is um but the more you sort of like study psychology then the more you sort of kind of like understand like the effect of the environment on people then you do neuroscience and you do psychiatric genetics and so on and then you understand the influence of genetics uh M andor's mom's a geneticist so we had that growing up like knowing the entire role of genetics particularly in like medical conditions but then you sort of learn and grow that also your mental health mental conditions also have that linkage and yeah um the way I got into drug research is I think I found the most interesting um there's a story which I think Mom said on her uh EP podcast episode when we had interviewed her Dr kinan she spoke about genetics that was really cool but she said the story about Ahmed actually where she talk she didn't name names in her in her episode why are you snitching now that's fine carry on um but we we were talking about coding So Co coding's a drug which is is generally used in medication as a sort of like in pain medication right um but there's certain people in this world who have a genetic abnormality not abnormality abnormality is a wrong word sorry genetic mutation where that it sort of hyper metabolizes Codine so it can be toxic to them uh and you start hallucinating and so on and so forth and AMR has that and am was given Codine once cuz he got hurt we won't say who hurt him that that can be separate but uh he was given Cody and he started hallucinating and um that sort of idea that drugs the same drug can affect two humans completely differently and one can find like pleasure in it as it in a painkiller but the other one can have horrific hallucinations um for the same thing sort of got me really interested in like medical drugs but then that idea sort of carried over to alcohol and then when you're 18 19 in New Zealand and everybody's drinking or or doing whatever you sort of see like some some people have like m a much higher tolerance to one thing while the others don't and that kind of got me interested in the sort of yeah sort of that metabolic side of how drugs work and that side of thing and then you know combining it to the earlier story which I said about mental health and there are reasons why certain people might become addicts although everybody uses uh or everybody not everybody uses but a lot of people use substances for various reasons but only a very small percentage actually turn out being substance users of some sort and kind of like yeah that's how I got my interest it comes to for and yeah uh that's basically the story of it uh I actually answered the question I have no clue yeah you answered the the the first part I'd say the second part was has your like your relationship with those those things changed since then so like specifically I guess alcohol is probably the more common thing to yes uh yeah yeah yeah um yeah actually it has a little bit I think more than my I think more than my relationship uh I think the more like the more political side of like how we should treat people who have problems with it has changed like you grow up and you think that they're bad people or whatever and I think that changed a lot when you start working with drugs knowing how they impact well animals in a controlled environment but we're all doing this to see to learn for what we can do in public health right at the end of the day all this research all this work is to uh help people the best we can and yeah I think that's where it's changed the most um I think uh because the other things of all the signs which you see oh don't do drugs or this is bad that's bad that's true like that's that's not necessarily wrong but um I think the way we handle it or according to my perceptions changed a lot since uh yeah the early days of you know when you're 14 15 16 trying to sneak alcohol around hiding it from your parents to now um yeah nice so yeah so carrying on so let's Del a little bit more into your PhD research uh to my understanding it focused particularly on the effects which the males drink has on the progeny why did you want to look specifically in that aspect we all know that we people are well people are well aware that pregnant women should not drink alcohol so what what did you what made you try and investigate the father's influence in uh in Pro in well father's drinking in the progeny oh cuz I'm a feminist

ni short answer um um no it it you kind of answered the question to your yourself there to an extent right so if I ask both of you um have you ever come across any information in your entire lives about sort of male drinking or men drinking in in general like in terms of Public Health in terms of anything have you guys ever actually come across some serious information apart from generally speaking the general sort of things of like drinking bad or be careful like there's been nothing specific right yeah no nothing aside from mental health stuff that's cropped up in the last maybe like five 10 years exactly exactly so yeah apart from yeah for your mental health a little bit things like that but generally uh generally it doesn't it isn't brought up and one of the reasons it isn't brought up is because drinking is a part of so many cultures right like you um psychology is in a sense a western science it it comes from the West the idea comes from the west and in mosto Western countries drinking is accepted encouraged all these things uh to some extent of course again when we get to the AL alcohol abuse side of things again there's tabos around it but generally speaking 80 to 90% of people in the UK in New Zealand in America all have had some experience with alcohol um but if 80 to 90% of people have this experience and the only sort of Regulation which we have about it is advice to women who are pregnant then either it's sort of like we're willfully ignoring it because we know that at an extreme it's bad or we or we sort of or we sort of haven't really looked into it it's one it's one or the other right either there's been research and we've just like push it aside or we haven't researched it at all in either case there's no sort of public health information about it and and the actual project uh just Kazam said Pro and all that uh I would just tell the title of my PhD and what it was so and my work subsequent work for a year after that what it was was looking at how alcohol drinking in males so in fathers before before uh conception so before uh before in rats before mating or before having sex before conception how alcohol then affects the Next Generation so again there has been social research a lot of social psychology research a lot of social science research a lot of Sociology research on like growing up with alcoholic or alcoholic fathers or fathers who abuse alcohol um so there's a lot of things around that right it's it's very simple don't be drunk in front of your kids don't mess up your kids by beating them up I think I think we've all kind of I I don't I think it's I think it's generally known now whether people practice it or not it's a difference story but I think that part is generally known but there's very little about like sort of uh alcohol in terms of yeah while trying to have kids how how alcohol might impact yeah the children or like the development of the child um there is a little bit of work on sperm count so alcohol can reduce sperm count and there's and sperm mobility and there's a little bit of advice on that in terms of people men with low sperm count they sort of get advice of like yeah reduce your drinking that will help increase workout and things but there's no there's not a lot of work on sort of how yeah uh on on how alcohol can impact like the sperm in such a way that conception and development is affected now I I I I say all that to say that the reason why this is important is because because 50% of all your genes come from your dad right so like 50% come from the mother 50% come from the father and it's not equal that's one thing which needs to be clear in the sense that you do not get half from the mom half from the dad and then you're a mix in the sense that you get your body just decides which ones will be active and which ones won't no there's certain genes which only always come from the father and there's certain genes which always come from the mother and a lot of the genes which come from the father are actually very important in early development um so one good example is this Gene called igf2 uh it's called insulin growth factor 2 um and it is very important for the early growth of the baby fetus whatever you want to look at it particularly in the womb and there is a maternal gene or in the gene the mother called h19 now the job of h19 in essence there's a lot more uh is to sort of control this grow uh of the fetus because if the baby's too big in the womb then there's birthing problems so you don't want it the baby to just keep growing in indefinitely but if the igf2 gene from the father isn't working then the baby will be small right and that's again evolutionarily not what you want you want a healthy sized baby and so there's these genes which sort of play together and alcohol tends to impact this um there's evidence to show at least that alcohol sort of impacts this te among many I'm just using one example here and if Al if alcohol can affect this Gene in the father's then uh what you would see is that the baby might be smaller because it's not growing as much and the h19 gene is overpowering from the mother is like sort of overpowering and suppressing the child's growth a bit more and then you get babies which are like under underweight at the one end or at the lowest end might not have developed completely and might lead to other complications at the furthest Other Extreme um of course I need to say that all this research is relatively new in the sense most Research into this field has started um most of the work started from 2014 onwards so uh there there has been work before done before of course but most of it generally in this domain most of the papers that you see would be around from the 2010 2020 sort of area so it's all new a lot of work still hasn't done in humans there so many other factors which you need to look at but that's why animal research is important to try to see and sort of identify exactly what's going on or exactly what we can expect so then when we look at it in humans we can sort of account for all the other factors like Diet other things diet physical exercise from the mom physical exercise from the dad so on yeah right so I've got two questions from this so you first mentioned that there's uh not a lot of uh research conducted in this area specifically due to the prevalence of drinking in a most western cultures so the research you did find were there any specific regions in the world where these papers originated from and were they more catered towards drinking or cultures which are very much conservative about drinking see I think there's an issue here but this might go to a wider issue in science uh and wider is issue in research that most papers I came across it did come from either America Japan uh the UK Europe Netherlands does a lot of work on this Germany does a lot of work on this um and a lot of the reason is that most big journals only published from these countries like it's there's a bit of a bias there um also all these journals were in English which helps me right because I do not I'm not capable of reading many other languages to an extent where I can derive uh yeah key research from there so there's a lot of bias involved in those things so but a lot of work generally which is done and especially in human populations would be from Europe because they do a lot of so example Netherlands Finland all these countries with uh socialized Healthcare Systems have a lot of data as well where they can uh which they can use um for these things so yeah most of the research would have been from I would say the same countries where alcohol is uh is drunen but uh and yeah those countries also have the money to do the work so that's also a big part so yeah I think all those factors play a role in what evidence I

found so yeah so this would actually be a good little plug for one of your episodes which discusses these aspects in Academia um and you know Journal publication and it it is a fascinating listen so I would encourage listeners who haven't listened to that to uh go back to that episode um but yeah so the second question I had uh since you did say that this that a lot of this work is very recent is is it fair to say that uh these so the research conducted in this area does not yet have the capabilities to investigate the long-term effects

um for some things yes and for others no uh because it really depends what we're asking here right um and I feel this will be my answer for a lot of questions about speculation because that's how science works you can tell some things you can't tell others uh I don't know um because for example again countries which have pretty good health data so Finland Denmark the UK even the USA to some extent they've got a lot of uh large cohort studies which have been going on since the 80s '90s whatever um all of them now have two three generations of people to look at and they can probably track back depending on how good data information is now now we have the technology with a machine learning getting better with Statistics getting better having more powerful computers we have the ability to like look back and sort of decipher things which we previously didn't like a lot of blood samples which were collected in the' 6070s can now be sort of looked at again and understood um so that way there is you can actually you can actually learn about long-term effects by looking backwards or we have the ability to do that to some extent um but then other things sort of uh for example how much the environment's been changing a lot since then like the conditions that someone lived in in the 50s and 60s are not the conditions now so how new environments might also interact with these things you need you need to always keep updating that um in terms of yeah uh in in terms of uh certain things which are new and have just been found again it depends on technology so for example there's new technology in Neuroscience uh and genetics things like the nanopore the Oxford nanopore which sort of can identify a change in each Gene of so each protein within a gene the easiest way to put it so each nucleotide or each protein within a gene it can identify any change in a human W which we did not have the technology before so you can now look at those things and then that probably give us a lot more information than what we previously did so with the Improvement of Technology we'd probably be able to do more which we can't do right now yeah so it goes in it go it goes in multiple ways it's whatever you want to take it and I guess yeah smart people much smarter than me can do that not that's not for me to do yeah I think I think I've got one more question unless Jeremy uh has some before we move into the actual experiments uh themselves and what you found uh but yeah since you did mention that a lot of these researches were conducted in from teams based in the US though you said some of them are recent were there any uh I can imag imagine because a lot of research conducted and funded can also be based on the narrative at the time so were there any examples of P such papers being conducted say during the prohibition where you didn't want to encourage alcohol drinking uh to sort of that's a very good question and that's a very good question which I actually do not have the answer of um what I can tell you is that prohibition and then the War on Drugs specifically really impacted people's ability to research um research uh yeah drugs in general um a particularly good example is use of MDMA for treating PTSD um and use of uh yeah marijuana uh THC and CBD all that's grown now but during Pro during the war on drugs and it was illegal to do research and very and very few places could actually do it um you needed to get so many permissions there were so many levels which hurdles which you had to jump across to actually do it and then once you had those findings um because because everything was banned in certain depending on the country um you couldn't move forward very quickly or easily um so those kind of things play a row U to an extent of what you could do and I assume prohibition would have also you know with nicotine's a famous example where a lot of like tobacco companies used to pay researchers um to fund uh projects which said nicotine is good for you um they don't do that anymore um there's a lot more stringent laws around it around conflict of interest in term when you're sort of publishing papers which you need to disclose and if you don't disclose it the papers are taken down and you lose your licenses and so on so forth um so this so it's stricter now so I hope may maybe I assume around prohibition might have been some stuff but I do not know I I do know I do know of one paper from 1968 which did look at alcohol across Generations but that's after prohibition so it doesn't really count um I think there's also one from 1920s or something which I found uh which was doing it on hamsters mes one of them another furry rodent of some sort uh but yeah it's a yeah the there's it's always a thing like science to an extent will always be political right what you can research like uh during covid so much more money was put into infectious disease research um and taken away from other fields for that reason because it was a need of the time that really depends awesome right so now from there we can just move on into the experiments and the results so sah I asked you what did you do and what did you

find uh um I so for my PhD what we did was we basically took a bunch of rats bunch bunch of M rats uh and we made sure there were teenagers or young adults in terms of r ear or rat days uh because the idea behind that was that um not just idea we've we did research in our lab before and it is a lot harder for rats to start drinking alcohol or just wild wild sprog Dolly rats to start drinking alcohol when they're older but if you think of it that's kind of similar to humans right so like if you don't start drinking young very rarely do people pick up drinking later on in life um I'm not saying they don't but I think generally speaking most people have the first introduction to alcohol during their teenage years and uh that's that's it goes from there I think Jeremy if you have any evidence to the contrary feel free to tell me but I I I would say so right because yeah my my evidence supports that hypothesis yeah so your your opinion is definitely valuable here because you have spent your early years in a western country as opposed to the other two participants in this podcast cast who grew up in India but yeah but even then like when when if you just ask when did you start drinking armor or when did you have like your first serious interactions with alcohol it was it was 18 it was 18 it was like 18 um yeah when when you get to UNI you see people drinking alcohol same thing uh I feel New Zealand slightly earlier 15 16 maybe your Dad gives you a beer or something but generally speaking people start drinking at a young uh around the teenage years and similar it's a kind of similar thing in rats because what I did was I gave them like straight drinking ethanol which means that it had no flavor so there's no wine there's no flavor of vodka rats love wine by the way um but you don't but you don't want to like that's the thing this is why we can do this with animals right because you don't want this the kind of effects of the sweetness or the actual flavor to play a role in their drinking you want just the effects of the alcohol so what we did is we gave them like 20% pure ethanol mix uh in water um and we also gave them food and we also gave them regular water to drink and it was basically up to them how much they wanted to drink and we did this for a period and we also kind of tried to mimic human drinking a bit where you'd give them access to alcohol for a day then you don't give them access to alcohol for another day and then you give it again and this idea was sort of to say sort of to kind of mimic the idea of that even humans generally speaking we do not drink all the time every day right we drink don't drink then we drink then we don't drink and sort of giving them access of whenever access so that they could drink whenever they wanted to within a period a time space was kind of this idea of trying to mimic The Human Experience and make it voluntary for the rats so we weren't a lot of the research done before me has always been injecting rats with alcohol or forcing them Force feeding them alcohol or giving them alcohol in vapor form so they sniff it and uh so the good thing about that is you can control exactly how much alcohol rat is drinking we cannot control it right we're giving them the choice but that's more that's more in my opinion that's more kind of like uh transferable to humans and because that's the goal that's what we did we gave 20 rats alcohol as much as they wanted to drink for eight weeks and then we took the animals who were the highest 10 Drinkers and we M them with female rats who had not who had never touched alcohol or never seen alcohol before so any alcohol in them was from any alcohol or any effects of alcohol you would see would have been passed down from the male rats um yeah and then we and then the M rats basically uh M it and then the kids which came out of them uh for out of the females uh and I always I use male and females because rats so easier to just delineate that way as opposed to going through genders um is that the Fe the female rats of gave birth to litters uh and we sort of like did all this sort of like visual comparison so we looked at litter sizes we looked at the weight of each pup so each rat pup born we looked at like different metrics of how well how they develop their eyes opening when they started walking when their hair started growing when their ears started when they could start hearing because rats are not born uh with all these abilities like human babies are they're born kind of Half Baked if you'd say where they still need to they they still their ears still need to open their eyes still need to open so on and we basically we saw the looked at these development of Milestones because they're usually very strict in rats you know that on day 14 they're going to start uh walking you know on day 18 they're going to start grooming themselves things like that um and then we did a whole bunch of behavior experiments with them afterwards to see how their mortal coordination is how much they drink what how how does alcohol affect them does it affect them differently and so on and then we also looked at this in one generation further so in this case the only interaction with alcohol they had was if their grandads drank alcohol so we're trying so we were just trying to look at whether we had the same Behavior or we look had the same behavior or whatever effects if we saw any two generations down and we did a lot of other experiments as well we did uh one looking at their fear and anxiety responses so sorry their depression and anxiety responses to see if the difference is there and then we also looked at their brains and their livers for any differences in sort of liver potential liver function potential brain function the project is actually still ongoing after I finished my PhD I left I'm in the UK now but uh there's new Masters and PhD students trying to take a look at some other things in those animals but yeah uh that's basically that's a rough idea of what we did um I can talk about the sort of like looking at the brains and livers and the sperm and what sort of biological stuff we did or I can talk about the behavioral stuff we did because whatever we found so far is pretty cool um and yeah that's that's a basic idea I'm really fascinated by the concept of um mimicry in your in your testing so you mentioned like giving them the ability to choose when to drink which is something that we as like humans with agency have but then you also mentioned that you feed them pure drinking ethanol and you're like I don't give them whyne or you don't give them first of all like is the mimicry to try and like sort of uh correlate their circumstances to our circumstances more closely and then how do you choose which circumstances to to mimic is there you know like do you put them in social situations as well because for us right as humans often alcohol is consumed in a social situation it's often frowned upon for a person to go and sit in the corner of their room and like down a bottle of whiskey so are you putting them in like are you giving them the free free will to to drink alcohol with their friends is it like a social thing for them or what what are you choosing the m and why right uh so this is really cool cuz um the we actually did a study so for for the purposes of my study we did not we uh the male rats were isolated when they were drinking during that drinking period of those eight weeks um one of the reasons we did that is because we know isolation sort of uh sort of helps with drinking we know we know that uh from previous research and research done by our lab at the same time um we know that if you have a friend uh your drinking pattern sort of changes in rats as well it's the same thing uh it's but we kind of wanted to see the effects of alcohol and therefore we we decided for the study that we're getting into too many layers um of things if we are adding the social aspect to it as well and then we need to control how much they drink and if you have two rats in a cage uh trying to see which rat drank alcohol drank Al alcohol from that Botto is also I think which you need to like follow on and we didn't have the sort of a lot of it is like budget and what equipment we have related as well because we didn't have the equipment to be able to manage exactly how much eat rat is drinking without completely isolating them um we uh yeah oh we didn't do that um but uh like like you said yes you sort of you sort of mimic uh or you try to mimic um certain aspects and then you sort of like leave out others and the way the decision goes is yeah the one I said was the monetary decision it just depends on what equipment you have what you can do but the second thing is what you're looking at right so we did a study in our lab at this oh running concurrently um CLA Bradley did that where she was looking at whether isolated rats in this Paradigm because we're trying to mimic drinking sections and most like you know like I said they drink for sometime then they don't drink for sometime which is kind of like humans and we were trying to MIM and what she tried to do is tried to mimic that exact Paradigm but have a friend rat as well so there's two rats who are together they been mates and see how they drink and she found that drinking is reduced a little bit um which again comes to that idea what I mentioned before that other people have also found that isolation tends to show you you tend to drink higher in isolation um than you would uh in a group uh or at least with rats um it also shows that you change drinking patterns I think I think her study her study didn't look at it but I think I've read papers would show that you're the style of drinking changes like in the sense that you might drink more to begin with in a pair but then reduce later on while if you're isolated you keep drinking throughout the day and uh therefore you end up drinking a lot more by the end of the day um however it uh there's conflicting reports in terms of like there's multiple studies which sort of look at it and and there's also some evidence which sort of says that you know that peer group drinking and particularly in humans you drink more in uh in your groups than you would if you are alone uh because of behaviors particularly with men I think there's like public health research which shows that or which has been mentioned um but yeah there's a lot of conflicting reports about it what we do know in general is that overall on average you tend to uh if uh if an animal has been socially isolated they tend to abuse drugs more than if they're with friends uh some of the clear Studies have come from cocaine research on that front or her herin research on that front where a rat if left alone with a her herin thing V where it just like presses a lever or button and it gets injected with herin it would it'll OD every single time it will it will overdose it will kill itself every single time but if you have a friend r with it they might take some but then over time they just stop taking their uh and it kind of leads to that idea of uh sort of like substance use substance abuse is uh sort of like to an extent is a disease of loneliness uh is the way which uh which which it has been described as in certain papers in so yeah does that answer everything yeah really interesting

yeah I think if so you you mentioned you investigated a few different paradigms uh one from well uh analyzing brain activity behavioral activity you've highlighted a little bit about the behavioral aspect of it uh well D but this was during mainly the EXP the data analysis well this is data accumulation uh part of the experiment in terms of the result analysis what sort of other Behavior uh components did you examine and what did you find o hey this is the fun stuff I like this so the FI the findings are always fun so this long story of about 40 minutes uh come comes down to what we found which is really really cool stuff um in certain aspects so for example we found on average there were they were more there were more pups which died in infancy in the alcohol drinking fathers versus the controls um so this is was suggesting sort of like maybe some effects or maybe some influence in early development then there were also like minor developmental delays so I I say minor because like suppose on average uh like uh the control rats open their eyes on day eight uh the drinking Rats on average open their eyes on day nine so there's a slow delay there these are significant in the terms of this might be showing this kind of indicates potential developmental overall neurological developmental delays and things but it on the whole it shows that it's not that big a deal in the sense that all of the the rats which survived to adulthood even from drinking Offspring they were behaving fine there wasn't necessarily big beh behavioral changes all these changes are subtle um um which we found uh which is also interesting in the sense that it kind of tells people that these things can have an effect but they're not like it's not that drastic that like they will uh die but like these changes are these changes are sort of Min minimal but clear that there might be developmental delays there might be sort of uh there were there might be sort of growth delays like some rats were smaller so they're called runs so alcohol drinking Offspring had smaller runs that kind of links back to what I said in the beginning about igf2 as that's one of the genes which is affected with alcohol and it impacts growth so there could be linkages there um yeah uh so that was development side the then when we go on to behavior this is where it gets really interesting it looked like we found sort of differences between the female and male offspring of uh fathers who drank so you kind of you sort of see this difference the most interesting one was in how sensitive they are to alcohol so one really really funny experiment which you do what funny was it funny for you guys is you you know how like cops sort of ask you once you're drunk to like walk in a straight line to see whether you can right it's sort of the same idea so you put Rats on a sort of treadmill which is raised high above the ground and you ort of see how long they can stay on it and then you inject rats with a dose of alcohol and see whether they can still stay on it and then you inject them with a higher dose and see you can still stay on and the and the performance drop is generally very consistent so the higher dose of alcohol the quicker the performance your performance drops further right so if you're given one gram of alcohol you so if you can stay on the rod for like a a minute you give you give a gram of alcohol you stay on it gram per kilogram of alcohol if you stay on it it for 30 seconds given 2 gr per kilogram of alcohol which is double with the dose you stay on it for like 5 Seconds uh just to give you an idea um and what we found was controls had like a nice neat sort of decline um but The Offspring rats you find that particularly the females ac across the first and second generation that first dose does not seem to impact them as much they perform the their their drop in performance is nowhere near as steep as The Offspring of control rats so sort of like this change in sensitivity um the other thing which we find was remember I told you guys about we just gave them alcohol to drink we had we gave them a choice we did the same thing in The Offspring we gave them a choice and the male rats drank as much as the control males did so they drank Sim almost The Identical patterns but the female rats drank a lot less than what their counterpart control females drank so sort of this again this idea that there's something going on there which might impact the way female offspring of male drinkers might be interacting with alcohol uh compared to M drinkers so yeah those were two of the really cool things which we found

behaviorally yeah W uh so here's that's very wow yeah that

is that's that's very fascinating uh but here now here's uh here's sort of this is a sort of a segue question but uh it is from the wrinkles I gained listening to your PO listening to your episodes on statistics so if you are not happy with the question my only response would be you reap what you saw

what was the what what was the sample size for each generation and how does that how would that affect the overall findings in terms of translating it to the real uh real world right yeah so animal animal research always has small samples okay one is because we don't want to hurt more animals than we need to two it's to give it idea it's not what we find is generally to give ideas like all these things you said gives us an indication of what might happen what might be happening but at the end of the day all these things need to be done in humans and that's where we go for the large Apple sizes um there's things which uh we mitigate right to allow for stronger statistical power so for things for example all these rats have almost the exact same genetic makeup right so I when I so we use a particular strain of rat I used uh sprog Dolly rats my previous experiments which we had done we used withar rats but we use a particular strain of rat with almost identical genetic makeups so that there's no sort of genetic differences which you would see with within humans in humans you need large sample sizes to kind of control for that difference or that variance if you don't have that that's one thing which you can control for which allows for a smaller sample size the other thing is uh genetics uh the genetic variant is one thing but then there's also environmental variance right like the way Jeremy grew up is very different to the way armor grew up the way armor grew up is also still different to the way I grew up because he's a younger brother so the experiences which he faced would have been different to me and you have to account for all that variance over here the rats were given the have been growing up in the exact same environment um exact same temperature conditions exact same uh sort of uh container well cage sizes exact same amount of time away drinking exact same so when we controlling for all these things it allows for smaller sample sizes uh having said that uh we having said that we made sure that none of the rats were siblings in this experiment in terms of uh so for example the 20 rats which drank alcohol none of them were at the start so the fathers none of them were siblings um and also although they have the same genetic makeup they didn't have the same mother so there was a little bit of variance to see whether this still holds because you don't want the case that it's just one same rat family doing all the experiments and then the problem might only be with that rat family um yeah if if I do the experiments from just one just from one clan up in Scotland like the McDonald Clan or something it's very hard to translate it because there would still believe to our listen to our listeners I believe that would replicate an incestuous environment yes exactly we don't want it to be too incestuous as well it's incestous enough that they're all the same genetic makeup so there's not much variance that way but you don't want it to be that it's causing other greater problems um and then when when I talk about the other experiments which we did the uh the alcohol sensitivity one the alcohol drinking one the behavior anxiety test the development the ones whose brains we took out um all of those were done on one animal from each litter so each litter each pop litter gives about 10 animals roughly um on on average five male five female but it's not always the case but yeah on average with we're talking about 10 to 12 and we made sure that there was one male and one female from each litter in each experiment so that there's no sort of overlap between experiments and there's no sort of multiple siblings in one experiment so that's so sample sizes if you want sample scienes there were 20 uh in the first 20 fathers and then after that we were talking about there were nine nine drinkers nine non-drinkers in the first first generation and eight drinkers eight non-drinkers in the second because in s in each case like one animal did not one part they did not produce off string so uh so in terms of animal research it is on the larger side actually because most animal papers which you see particularly like the bio papers usually only use four or five rats so using 10 is larger so um that way it's good but yeah you're right that sample sizing as a statistics person you would say that you need a larger number but you're we're sort of countering that with trying to make conditions as similar as possible to control of all the possible variants

yeah all right I now I have a question for Jeremy I think we've got a time we've got some time to examine uh an an additional aspect of your findings so sah mentioned we he's looked at some neural neurological activity genetic activity SP the SP uh examine the sperm which of these aspects do you think he should delve

into you're asking me that's a crazy crazy question actually well can I answer your question with a question yep CA because I was gonna ask you s and and I think this is where like where I'm really interested in in talking to you and the Academia circles that sort of surround you it's like I I always feel like a bit of a dummy um and the thing that I always want to know and that we've talked about in your research and some other people's research is like how does this manifest for us like as a society and like how do you hope that it will manifest and I guess that that will answer Aria's question as to where I think you should go because I think you should go wherever this will best benefit Society in the future like how do you how do you want to see it manefit I guess oh like my research like the output of my research um so I would like to see it manifested on like the research side I would like to see it manifested in people doing this work on humans because that's the goal right we want we want to make sure that uh we're having Healthy Babies we we're able to take care of like our society moving forward and if drinking alcohol before before birth is showing these effects which it is then we should see whether this translates really well in humans there's some evidence that it does um but we need more work to sort of quantify it and then on a wider scale you want like this to influence policy so sort of uh sort of policy work around this so uh people plan like Family Planning and so on and so forth for example would be a good way to think about it where you'd like to see it manifested the other place where I'd like to see it manifested is being spoken about cuz I and talked about more maybe in uh yeah the media space a little bit in the sense that uh we also we associate with drinking and smoking being cool right like in in media like Jame James Bond's all about sipping martinis um it's the the whole idea of uh drinking and partying is uh is associated with being cool which it probably is to some extent right like people enjoy it like alcohol is a drug at the end of the day which you enjoy but then also sort of being aware of what excessive drinking could potentially do in terms of not just to you but also potential kids you're planning to have potential yeah future effects um yeah I think that's I think that's where I want to go with my research in general but I think it's also there with science right so science inherently is all about you sort of asking questions and being like you can never prove anything really in science you're always saying you're always disproving things right so you're always saying that no this this is not what happens we cannot guarantee tell you that this is exactly what happens but we're 99% sure or 95% are sure that this is what happens for whatever hypothesis like XY um and what that means is a lot of research when we speak about it comes with that uncertainty because science in general is uncertain and which means it makes it very hard to sort of communicate uh when we get in we get into the wider discussion of science communication which allows for a big room for misinformation because people don't like to deal in like maybe and is it possible and all that stuff you want to know okay is this bad for me or is this good for me and as just can't go well maybe under these circumstances it's bad for like and and uh that's where that's where we're at with science right and I think I would like to see people like well you Jeremy because you're a creative person you're you I want people like you sort of like putting giving ear to S to like science research a bit more but also understanding how we can potentially show or send these messages to like wide audiences to the public to kind of understand like the basic premise of uh science and what things and if you find a finding what things to be wey of not everything's good not everything's bad like you see it a lot with marijuana research in general or being like these people who are like no it's really good for everything and then there people like oh my God it's terribly bad when the truth is like there's good and bad to it and you need to understand and be educated enough about it so yeah I think that's where I I that's where I'd hope it to go that's where I want it to go we'll see if it does but yeah that's a good point the middle ground does not sell and it's it's something that you see really predominantly in Hollywood something that you see in a lot of the like entertainment media which we consume which a lot of our like social and popular culture revolves around is like good and bad the concept of like this is good this is bad there's not a lot of room for the public perception to be like this is good in some circumstances and bad in others and there's a whole lot of nuance that goes with it I think you're right there's there's a challenge there in our in our world and in your world to sort of come together and begin communicating that more effectively and a little bit more um connectively so that people can understand these things and hopefully end up better off for it right yeah I think the other problem is that we also need to realize that the middle ground doesn't necessarily mean that it's in the the middle like it's not that like like it's good it's bad and the middle is just like oh it's nothing there's you need to sort of understand that that's also not true depending on what we're talking about like we can be like it's not it's not like with the Flat Earth is and round earth is that oh the Earth might be a triangle it doesn't work that way it's not that middle ground like but there there is that sort of thing of particularly in Psychology research cuz you're working with such vague terms in many ways you're working with behaviors you're working with emotions you're working with sort of things which are slightly nebulous um qualitative research makes it even harder because you're working with lived experience of people and you're trying to amalgamate it and yeah it makes it really really hard and people need to be able to understand the nuance and we need to be able to open spaces we can have that conversation with that Nuance of like what all is good and what sort of bads we need to be worried about this sort of just goes into that um aspect of science being in uh Publications being a peer reviewed process right you kind of want it to be true to that aspect of yep there is a lot of gray area but within that gray area what what do you what has the person investigator find and what have the peers cross examined and being able to collectively move science forward rather than just finding loopholes within your own research to try and find a a revolutionary hypothesis statement which which uh which can be easily challenged but at the same time is not really challenge because that's th those taglines are what are uh attractive to uh to the mainstream and it's just and it's just something that feels even more lost in this sort of in this sort of era where you're trying to just push forward a narrative rather than trying to act trying to GAE okay good trying to have that willing being willing to have that discussion in the gray area this is a huge this is a huge crossover area between our worlds headlines being like a ma major issue yeah everybody likes examining things on the surface level because it's easier to to see and it's easier to observe and it's easy to quantify and articulate right so it's easy for them to explain to their peers and it's easy for them to to sort of bring it into their own worldview and correct me if I'm wrong but like the psychology of humans boils down to like we'll just do whatever's easiest a lot of the time like oh yeah um uh I I've I've I've wanted a proposal of you know because in journal articles the peerreview thing is you have other like I wouldn't say fancy scientists because I'm technically now a fancy scientist who does peer review stuff as well which is shocking how they let me do it but I I feel I feel one one of the things which you need to uh which we need to add to peer- review is like you know how like jury duty Works in most countries so for example people in Europe where they have a sane Judicial System uh it's not for you guys for the French Judicial System it's for people in the UK USA New Zealand Australia where there's a jury system where you call random people from the public to decide on whether someone's a witch or not um and I feel and I feel it's the you you should you should not do that in law um I don't think at least personally I don't think you should do that in law but you probably should do that in peer review where you should just send a journal article to a absolute random person and be like do you understand this because if you understand what the guy is trying to say um or like a version of the article you could keep the high-f five version for the academics to understand but if what you need to send it to like some random member of the general public and if they can understand what you've said then and only then it should be published because you should have a clear understand you should be able to sort of manage expectations in that way and sort of cater but I don't think that's possible viable is just like a favorite dream of mine to move Academia forward because at the moment half the time I read articles and even I'm like what the hell are they talking about it feels like feels like I needed a thesaurus but then I felt the thesaurus had too many words about a dictionary and then work my way back up it's the same that's that's the co that's a common stereotype of uh people in stem right that their communication especially written communication unless they're in Psychology is absolutely horrendous and it's a stereotype but it is very it's fairly prevalent some some of the bio papers some of the genetics papers oh my God it's they're speaking in tongues funnily enough s you you've brought us full circle in a sense because you've you've highlighted this need for the general Layman or general public to understand these question complicated academic sort of um Pursuits and we've had a lot of discussions about this because I am one person right and I think this project and this podcast in particular the smooth brain Society is in at least ethos and in and in practice now addressing that Gap and is sort of like more and more moving towards addressing that Gap more effectively so it's kind of like we've just been talking about your career thus far and now this this element of it is it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy and do you think that is why you started this podcast oh yes yes time to plug the podcast on my podcast how good this was the inent long wasn't it you've done this entirely yourself you've come this full circle on your own which is amazing I literally sitting here going like he does he see this connection that he's established for himself no not at all damn you accidentally fall into a lot of things do you um and yeah that's I I guess to an extent yes that it was my goal with the podcast to some extent I remember speaking to you even before I started the podcast uh about wanting to do something like this for a while armor would remember with our flatmate Henry who did psychedelic work that we wanted to do this podcast and we did we did a pilot episode which should never be aired um because it went down too many terrible rabbit hoes I believe I was the host in that one you were so yeah the host of the very first unofficial episode is now the host again only took you 47 well technically 50 recorded episodes to come back yeah um any uh anyway so it it came from the discussion where we were making as as you know Jeremy and most of the listeners but I'll repeat it the idea of having a smooth brain is like not being very smart and the idea of a wrinkly brain because brains have more grooves and the more grooves you have technically means more surface area which means you should be smarter right so um we were talking to some people about their work and they were explaining it in a way too fancy Manner and uh one one of our other friends Joe K said my brain's too smooth for this you need to dumb it down um and that's kind of when the idea got picked up and then that was later later in the evening is when we sort of recorded the first episode which was not which is never going to air but it was based on it was basically based on that idea that we we are not smart we don't understand this which is funny funny enough the person who was explaining the work is another person in Psychology and it's just a different area of psychology which we had no clue about so it also shows that even within this these fields and all that there specific things which we can be really smart in one thing like I I know quite a bit about rat work in alcohol but I would have I would be completely lost outside in a different field and I have no clue and I'm just as smooth brain as everybody else about it apart from somebody who works in that area and that's where the idea came from then a few of my students uh because I was tutoring they kind of were scared of our lectures or found was sort of intimidated of them and because by this point I was a PhD student and I knew that all of these lectures were also softies and sweet people and they also have their own like flaws and good points and stuff I thought that I would interview them and sort of put them out for you know the other psychology students other undergrads to feel comfortable that yo these guys are humans too and this that's where the podcast was kind of born where in terms of its current format where I decided to you know get someone on who has no real clue about the subject most of the time I have no clue about it as well and then we talk to somebody who really knows their stuff and sort of we learn together and yeah that's basically yeah the full circle plug also new plug we just started our patreon so we've been doing it we don't the host I should bye bye I should be saying that well the spood society has recently started a patreon and we thank you we've also received one uh P we also received one Patron very recently so thank you to that person whose name I do not know because I am the interim host uh and also would like encourage our listeners to explore uh the patreon where you could potentially in the future given the demand also provide some outtakes and extended cuts on some of the discussions that have nothing to do with science um and just general band Fun the nice the nice cool fun that yeah exact exactly because um the whole purpose of this is again to give science a platform give everybody access to it so we don't want to put things behind pay wolves um that's why I've also sort of like working through with uh Europe's Journal of Psychology and psych openen which are Publishers which publish research open access for everybody to read and that's the same thing with this we don't want to put anything behind a pay wall um but yeah of course this needs needs to be funded we' be doing it on our own so any support is really helpful and yeah if we can do extended bits based on demand um sort of like yeah not nonscience toit chat maybe even ask questions get researchers back on to sort of answer those something let's see what we can do it depends on what we have the resources for yeah that's a yeah that's a great that sounds like good value yeah yeah wow that sounds like incredible value definitely does if I if I W the host I would donate if I were not the co-host I would also donate if I was an unbiased third party I would be clicking that patreon site that's

www. patreon I'm assuming smooth brain Society Society hell yeah I just guess that go go and donate just because gifts yes it's that easy uh listeners it's genuinely that easy you can also find it through our website at smooth R society.com so yeah do that too so we got our URL sorted yeah I would like to like say that I think this is and and S you know this like I think this is such a cool concept I learn so much every time I listen to one of these I learn even more when I've been on them um and it always feels a little bit like deep in and I'll never forget I'm about to name drop a few people but I'll never forget being in a room with you say and and a lot of your friends who I was meeting for the first time so like Ally and Bailey and Finn and nusa and those those that group of people and I was sitting at this table going like I am so dumb I am so dumb but the minute that you start talking to those guys about anything you realize that it is not their intent at all to make you feel dumb and they are like mortified to know that that you would be feeling that way so I think this as a platform is such an awesome facilitator to break down that boundary and to let like people understand that the world of Academia is yeah full of like really really smart intelligent people but they are also people and like the the the root of connection is like that people to people conversation yeah no uh and like you said we to be fair that SA group the same room we we think about how smart and creative you are in your field because we have no clue about this when you just show up with your artwork so Jeremy does a lot of sketches does a lot of production digital work worked for PPO um as a designer uh was Creator designer what else did you do producer of I I cinematic director cinematic director there we go not Designer director there we go um but you see his artwork you see his CV his CV went viral about two years ago cuz he sketched the whole thing um and when when we sort of see him with thinking like probably the same way he was scared about us because it's just not our domain and we need to like understand that everybody has something to share and everybody can and and you can learn from anyone as well so yeah um yeah well that's what it's all about good job exactly it yeah so for our listeners if you were wondering if uh the our host our regular host sahir had a smooth brain or wrinkly brain he clearly had some predefined wrinkles before he started this podcast as indicated by his knowledge on alcoholism displayed during the course of this episode so there you go uh in case you were wondering but yeah naturally uh it well I think we should wrap up there yep thank you so much for listening I have been your host Amir Hussein for first for the first time and maybe not the last time we'll see in case sah wants a follow up of this episode thank you to Jeremy maybe I can Outsource my co my H you guys yeah oh that was really fun yeah see you next time awesome what's the what's the sign off do we do like a sign off dance is we like a like you got to do a dance on Tik Tok I got start it and then it's got to go who's in the middle s's in the middle s's in the middle no wrong side you got set the other way yeah there

go yeah there we go got it awesome hey you didn't you didn't ask for advice from me but you don't need advice for me so it's all good thank you so much I always oh yeah sorry oh I forgot about that oh if you had I think no but I think the podcast itself the listening to the podcast listen to the podcast would be the advice you give to people let's be honest if you but if you had one piece of advice for our viewers sorry not viewers sorry sorry let me you got have cut that if you had one piece of advice for our listeners today s what would it be I I asked the question and then I had no ad no actual advice um no uh actually I've I've got a lot of advice over the course of my life really um apart from all the advice given by all the podcast guests before um do not do not take a Snapchat saying about to be randomly selected before getting through security at an airport you will always get randomly selected for that um do not take pictures on tops of cliffs trees Etc uh does not end well um yeah uh just generally as someone had once said be better and that's always a good good one be better don't be a coward s s always uses those on me be better don't be a coward n n in in in general just everybody take care of yourselves take take care of your mental health uh keep having these conversations and subscribe to the podcast yeah nice