#76. The Future Of Brain Imaging - Dr. Liam Collins-Jones

Dr. Liam Collins-Jones of University of Cambridge shares his journey from studying medicine to becoming a neuroscientist and comedian. He discusses innovative brain imaging techniques, particularly near infrared spectroscopy, and their applications in understanding brain activity in babies and dementia patients. The podcast explores the intersection of science and humor, emphasizing the importance of making science accessible and enjoyable. Liam also reflects on the challenges of research, the value of curiosity, and the role of comedy in science communication.

Chapters

• 0:00 Liam’s Origin Story
• 6:24 Measuring changes in the brain
• 9:04 Dementia and Brain Structure
• 19:01 The Cerebellum and Humor in Science
• 25:10 Wearable Brain Imaging: A New Frontier
• 33:18 Investigating Dementia: A New Approach
• 44:10 Dream Research Study
• 49:31 Liam’s Stand up comedy work
• 1:08:01 Hot Takes and Wrap up

Transcript

0:00

Awesome. Cool. Beth, are you ready with the intro? I am ready. Are you ready? I'm ready. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Smooth Brain Society. Now, what do you get if you cross a neuroscientist, an engineer, a comedian, and someone who really likes shining lights into brains? You get Liam Collins-Jones, and that is the guest today on our podcast. Now, Liam's building the next generation of wearable brain scanners at the University of Cambridge, shining infrared light through people's skulls to watch their neurons fire in real time. He started out strapping tiny light caps onto babies to figure out how their little brains work. And then moved on to mapping how hearing loss messes with your brain as you age. Now, apparently being in the lab, developing cutting edge imaging techniques just wasn't quite enough for him. He now also performs as part of three queers and a Welshman making people laugh about science. Now he's performed at Glastonbury and Green Man Festival, done time at the BBC and convinced people that neuroimaging and the brain can be pretty funny. Today we're getting into the nitty gritty of brain imaging techniques, the surprising link between hearing and cognition, and why making people laugh might be one of the best ways to explain your research. Welcome, Liam. Thanks Beth, happy to be here. Glad to have you. So to start us off with, can we ask you, what is your origin story? How did you get to where you are today? Firstly, what an honor it is to be on the Smooth Brain Society podcast. Honestly, this is you talk about the Oscars, you talk about the Golden Globes, you talk about a Smooth Brain Society podcast. It's truly an honor. It's truly an honor. My origin story, I started off at university studying medicine and I did a couple of years of medicine and it was okay. I found it interesting enough. But in my third year, what we had to do when I was at university at UCL, we had to do our third year in a different department doing the final year of another degree. And I ended up doing the final year of a medical physics degree. And it was a bit of bit of a pan, I didn't, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of an out of the box choice. I liked physics at school and it was a bit of a toss up for me between physics and medicine. And it was really nice to sort of bring the two. together. um And I just really, what I really enjoyed was going from first principle, going from an equation to understanding how does this machine actually work? um I really, I really enjoyed that. um And I really enjoyed diving into the theory and then coming out into the real world. As I, towards the end of my third year at university, I became really interested in pursuing a PhD. Chased all my lecturers asking, do you have any positions available? um And I started my PhD a years ago now in 2017, um looking at how light travels through the baby brain and how we can account for the fact that babies brains grow as they age. I, yeah, is that really an answer to your question? But yeah, is that an origin story? That's just a really bit boring. That's just going in chronological order, isn't it? It's okay. We'll edit all this out. I think. I think for me, what I really enjoyed is... I don't know. What do people say for the origin story? exactly what you've just said, like spot on. this, like, that's a, actually, that's a really fantastic story. Like they, didn't know you'd went into medicine and then actually for medicine, you're like, no, what's kind of the intersection between the two, like physics and medicine, bioengineering and new imaging. Like that's, yeah, exactly. That's fascinating. so you, and I had no idea you went into medicine. That is, that is wild. So you're basically a physicist and eh like a medical doctor almost. need to finish. I actually know I do need to finish off this origin story. I was doing my PhD and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed sort of transitioning from seeing myself as a student to seeing myself as a scientist and shaping the direction of my PhD, making decisions, thinking, oh, based on the data, this is the direction we should take. And it made me realise towards the end of my PhD, I want to go into research. I really enjoy science and the process of discovering new things. And so I did a bit of soul searching in the last year of my PhD and I decided to pursue a career in research as opposed to going back in and finishing my medical degree. So I started off doing medicine and I only did two years of it. And so I went to pursue a career in research. I finished my PhD, got some fellowship funding to do some work looking at baby brains and basically to help me a method to look at baby brains. And then it was from there that I sort of got more interested in the more practical elements of science. My PhD was mainly sort of the computational stuff and just sort of, I just really enjoy sort of bringing together the sort of diving into the data, trying to work out what it's all about alongside with how do we get something to work in the real world. That is a really, really good origin story. Coming back to Beth's point though, it's quite funny that you enjoyed both physics and medicine. Most people I know pick medicine because they hated physics or the vice versa. They hated bio, so they go into engineering chemistry. You're one of the rare specimens. Yeah, I think what I enjoyed was when I was studying medical physics is sort of thinking for myself and thinking, right, how do we work out how this thing actually works, rather than just memorizing things? And, you know, I'd enjoy a lot of the things that I studied when I was doing medicine, but I just really enjoyed sort of working things out and understanding how they work, going from the simple equation right up to how do we measure? oxygen changes in the brain. what I really enjoyed. So how do we measure oxygen changes in the brain then? Is it one of things you actually use in your research day to day? Yeah, so a lot of my work has been with a technique where you shine light into the brain and it can map where there are changes in oxygen levels in the brain, which is a market brain activity. So that's a technique called near infrared spectroscopy. Basically, we shine light into the head. This is red light and light that's just beyond the visible spectrum in the infrared range. And this light is quite good at traveling through tissue. fairly deep into tissue, maybe up to two centimeters. But the light when it gets into tissue is it gets scrambled very quickly. It forgets its direction. You shine light into tissue and it's a clusterf*ck. So what happens is some of that light that you shine into the body reflects back out. And we see this if we shine light into the head, it can travel through the skin, the skull, into the brain, and some of it reflects back towards the surface. So if we can measure much light reflects back towards the surface, that can tell us about what's going on inside the brain. And that's particularly interesting because when a part of the brain is activated, more blood flows to that part of the brain and blood is better at absorbing light than the surrounding brain tissue. So if we see a drop in levels of light that reflect back towards the scalp surface, we can say ah there must be brain activity going on there. So that in a nutshell is how we use light to measure changes in oxygenation, which is a marker of brain activity. Okay, so you've spoken about how your imaging techniques work and why was it specifically, and I you briefly touched on this before, you looking at babies over adults and is there any differences when you look at those two? Yeah, I think a lot of what I did in my PhD was thinking about how babies heads grow and how that affects the way they like travel through the baby head. Now, what got me interested in adults was thinking about times of life when we see changes in brain structure. And it's back in about 2021, 2022, I started collaborating with a group in the Department of Physics at Cambridge. and who are interested in dementia. so the last PI got in touch and the question she had was, how does the fact that we see atrophy in the brain, how does the shrinking brain, how does that affect how light travels through the brain? And that really got me thinking that it's sort of, it's like, it's the same thing that we're seeing in babies. structure is changing with age, but it's sort of rather than things growing, we're seeing things shrinking. And that's what initially got me interested in dementia was that technical angle. And then more and more sort of looking at the sort of impact it has on society and seeing what the needs are. And also with my own story with my grandmother who got dementia and seeing the real value in working in that space. So that's where the sort of transition from one end of life to the other came from. might ask quite a simple question here. Could you just sort of describe dementia a little bit? So for people's understanding, when you think of dementia, you think of sort of memory loss. But could you tell us what's actually happening in the brain? You said like it's shrinking, but what does that sort of mean? uh Yeah, so in terms of defining dementia, I'm not going to give a definitive explanation because I think there are are experts out there better to answer that myself. But it's a change in the way of how we sort of perceive and understand the world. And what we see is shrinking in some areas of the brain. particularly that layer of the brain, the cortex, we see that actually start to lose quite substantial amount. of brain cells there. And that's what can uh impact things like how we understand the world. And what, from my perspective, what's interesting about that is thinking how deep does light get into the brain? And if we're going to use the techniques that I've used before, the near infrared spectroscopy techniques, how do we know that the differences in signals between one group and another, is that down? to genuine changes in how the brain is functioning, or is it just down to the fact that the brain is deeper and the levels of light getting into the brain are lower? And that was the interesting technical challenge that got me interested in dementia in the first place. Yeah, it's fascinating. it's like, it's from what you're saying, it's, it, you know, it was the opposite problem to the baby's brains is there was a shrinking brain. And so kind of going back, because I feel like there was kind of two separate questions there was with the, the one where you were looking at the kind of the light in the baby's brain, was that literally just to see how it was growing? Or was there a specific question that you were answering? Yeah, so I wanted to do a PhD looking at new infrared spectroscopy. So there was one of the lecturers when I was studying medical physics, her research was in new infrared spectroscopy. And she was heading something called the Brain Imaging for Global Health Project, which was following two cohorts of babies, one in the UK and one in the Gambia. And the idea was to see what the effect of malnutrition another early adversity was on baby brain development and see if there's a difference between this UK cohort and the Gambianic cohort. And what I found particularly interesting about that was we develop these techniques to image the brain in labs, but we don't think we only want to apply them in high resource settings. And what sort of really captured me about this project was that we're applying these engineering advances. in low resource context and thinking that there's so many people in such populations that we can get data from and better understand, we can use technology to better understand how brain development is in different populations. And so when I was studying my PhD, the question that my thesis centered on was, are the changes, uh The sort of question my thesis centered on was, as the baby brain grows, how does that affect how light travels through the head? And can we account for that? So that if we see changes in brain function, we can say those are changes in brain function rather than those changes being just down to changes in anatomy. So that was the interesting question when it came to babies. And that's what we're guiding my. my work so I thought a lot about how the baby brain grows, what changes we see in the brain and we see really quite substantial changes in the brain, particularly when we think of babies born, babies just as they're born, if they're born preterm or a term age and how quickly the baby brains change. That's fascinating. did you see any differences? Sorry. Did you find any differences between sort of deprived conditions and I guess the UK, I'd argue depending how deprived you think the UK is as well. uh Would you also see, to that regard, would you also see differences, suppose, say within UK populations as well based on indices of deprivation where they are in the UK? Yeah. those kind of things. think those are really interesting questions and I there's been work since on data from the Brain Image in Global Health Project to try and answer some of those questions or similar to what you've asked there. My job there was more sort of on the technical angle and that's what I really enjoyed about that project was it was crossing different boundaries. We had people working on the physics engineering problems, also people working on the psychology, the neuroscience problems and others thinking how does this... how do these findings translate to society? So for your exact question there, my answer is, there is work out there. And I'm pleased to have sort of helped contribute towards that. So what does a physics problem in this look like in this sort of scenario? Do you need to sort of, I know I guess like with the tech, do you need to like alter it or change it based on location who you're measuring? What, yeah, so I'm just trying to figure out like your role and in the project. Yeah, I think so what was what was interesting is, I think one of one of my findings was when we look at babies at around sort of six months to a year, and the differences in brain anatomy don't have too much of an effect on how light travels through the head. But what really matters is how accurate we are in placing the sources and senses of light. on the head that has a big impact. And so part of my work was showing how we can increase the accuracy of baby brain imaging data using the infrared spectroscopy, we can use, how we can basically improve how specific we are and how confident we are in locating activity in the brain. So that was sort of one of the findings from my PhD. And are you able to kind of look at specific areas in the brain? Like I think one that we briefly mentioned that people might know of is the hippocampus, so like the memory region, or is it more kind of like on the top of the skull rather than those top of the brain rather than those deep structures? Or can you look at all of it? Yes, when we're using human-trailed spectroscopy, it's the outer layer of the brain, the cortex, the bit that's just below the scalp. And in terms of regions when it comes to, say, cognition, the regions that I'm particularly interested in are sort of in frontal areas of the brain. And here I'm particularly interested in something called the inferior frontal gyrus and has functions in things like language and And there are some other regions that I'm interested in when it comes to sort of thinking of the dementia context is thinking of regions that are involved in processing sand. And those are sort of the side of the head in the temporal regions of the brain, things like superior temporal gyrus, the temporal parietal junction. In terms of something like the hippocampus, that is really important, particularly when it comes to memory. Unfortunately, that's just too deep. to get the light towards. But it's thinking, right, what are the, what things connect to the hippocampus or what sort of in that network of brain regions, what are the things that we could measure that are on the surface that could, we could use them to infer about functions that sort of involve the hippocampus. That makes sense. It's like constant problem solving almost. Can't get to that area, but what can we pull from that from other areas? Yeah, I think it's understanding that different brain imaging techniques have different Achilles heels. For instance, MRI is fantastic and that will give you a high resolution look at the entire brain. But it might not be particularly useful or scalable in different populations. And that's where we sort of bring in different techniques. So there's all of the different traits and the trade-offs. And I think that's something that's really interesting about sort of... innovation in the sort of medical imaging space. The other one I was thinking about was the cerebellum because I guess it's reachable, right? It's pretty important in sort of coordination and things like that. I was just thinking about babies and motor coordination. I was thinking that's a cool region to look at our study. Yeah, this cerebellum is really, yeah, it's really, I think it's a really interesting region to look at. think it's, I've not sort of attempted myself to measure it. I think it's, in terms of its depth, it's fairly, it's not deep, but it's deeper than a lot of bits of the cortex. And I think in terms of the specificity you need to be able to study the cerebellum. And I think something like near infrared spectroscopy and its resolution might be just a bit too coarse to be able to give sort of the more fine grain sort of spatial data that you'd need to make inferences about a cerebellum. But what I like about the cerebellum is, so whenever I'm doing comedy, sometimes I want to take a temperature check of what the audience is like. Do we have a lot of geeks in the house or do we not? And so, I mean, I've got, I've 3D printed my brain before. And I say, no, I've 3D printed my brain. call my brain Sarah, short for Sarah Bellum. And in fact, I've got, I always keep my brain handy. But yeah, this is Sarah Bellum. Yes. But yeah, you see some people holding models of the brain and I think, have you actually got your brain 3D printed? I was talking with someone a few months ago. a lecturer at UCL on Zoom. And we're just about to finish the call. And I said, is that your 3D printed brain behind you? And he said, yeah, it is, it is. And he was brought to the camera looking really proud. And I said, I've got my brain 3D printed as well. It's a flex, it's a flex. It's a definite flex. yeah, especially like, so you have got the cerebellum on it as well. I've got, yeah, it's not particularly, I probably could have done a better job on this, to be honest. But yeah, there's the, yeah, because I remember, I mean, I remember from doing, being in the anatomy lab, looking at brains when I was sort of in my undergraduate. And yeah, the little, the little like layers of the cerebellum and just how, yeah, I remember, I haven't quite got that level of detail here. mean, it would be hard to, I mean, there's a little fact for everybody. There's more neurons in the cerebellum than there are in the cortex. It's understudied, I would say. There's lots going on there, but, you know, so it's an interesting part of the brain or sometimes called the little brain. fact. There are actually more cells in your brain than there are atoms in universe. That is a wild fact. Is it true? You pull it in the face, Mike, it's actually true. That's bullshit. very much, I mean, it's very much, it's the... It had a little smithy-con. It's the end of Amelie, it's the French film Amelie. Is it at the end? And the narrator says that somebody finding out there are more brain cells than atoms in the universe. I'm thinking that is amazing. That's not an O-accurate because like each brain cell requires so many atoms to make. Like it falls apart immediately Liam, that statement. I mean, you could say probably more possible connections between brain cells than there are atoms in the universe. might be true. I don't know. That's more like that. That's, I mean, then that would be 90 billion factorial, which I think is a very big number. I've never calculated it myself. is this going to make the cut into the podcast? is making the cut. I quite like how wrinkly your brain is as well and coming on the SmoothBrain focus, it shows the difference between a smart person and us, me. maybe my brain, I wouldn't be quite as wrinkly as that. I mean, it's yeah, I quite like this. I'm quite proud. I'm quite proud of my brain. Yeah, it's yeah, the other thing about this brain is when I so I printed this brain when I was when I was in like my fairly early on in my PhD. And it was at that point where I remember after I printed this, I was like, God, I don't know how to tell left and right and an MRI scan. And basically, this brain might be the wrong way around. So the right might be the left and the left might be the right. So this is either my brain or it is a mirror image of my brain. selfie of your brand. It's a selfie. I'm making sound. I'm going to put that. I'm going touch it. I'm making too much sound. can't touch the table. Does that mean if you are right handed, then if your brain was flipped and you put that back in, would you become left handed? What differences would there be? We've nailed neuroscience there, Beth. It's interesting, I think there's the right ear advantage you have, which is where it's easier, or people tend to find it easier to perceive speech with their right ear than with their left, which I believe is down to sort of how the wiring in the brain rather than the actual structure of the cochlea or the ear. So you might, if you put it in the other way around, you might find that your left ear is more teamed in speech. Not particularly in speech, but. the left hemisphere of the brain is more used in language, you swap the brain science around, then your right hemisphere will be more used in language. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it would be, I think this, this, yeah, this, yeah, yeah. I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Yeah. I'm going to quickly go back to, because I love this little tangent, which I love. I have couple more questions about the wearable brain. it, you can wear them, because I think most of the time that maybe what people don't realise is when you have your brain scanned, you go into like a massive machine, it's solid, it doesn't move. But with this wearable brain imaging, how close are we using that in clinics? Sorry, a couple of questions. Close to using that in clinics. You commented that there was a study between women looking at brain health in Gambia and England. Could we use them in Gambia? What kind of uses does that have, especially, guess, in your research as well? Yeah, think it's, I think what I'd like to see these things sort of used in clinic because I do believe that they address a need that we have to get brain specific biomarkers. So a lot of these devices have mainly been used in academic research, but have also been used in clinical context as well. One of my colleagues actually last week was covered in the BBC. Flora Foer who's been applying these uh techniques, neon infrared spectroscopy techniques in baby, some really, really interesting work there. would, in terms of how it's actually being used, it's mainly been in academic research. Now, in terms of what it is actually like, so imagine you put a cap on your head, and as you were saying Beth, Usually when we think about going for a scan, you think of lying down flat in a big machine that could be light. But here, we're sort of thinking of this differently. And we're thinking, right, put a cap on your head that's made out of... So think of a swimming cap. So the caps that I use are made out of basically wetsuit material. So just think putting wetsuit material on your head. And in that, you've got sort of little hexagon-y things. In fact, I've got... And think about in your sort of wetsuit cap, you've got loads of little sort of hexagon things like this, and you've got that dotted all over, all over your brain, well, all over your scalp. And the idea is that we don't need people to go into a big bulky scanner. We could then have something that could see what the brain is doing in different environments. could... take it to a point of care setting, it could sit in a drawer to GP's office and could be useful to get brain biomarkers from someone in a sort of more convenient location rather than having them to go off uh to a specialist center. I think my immediate follow up to that is something like if you're putting a cap on, the other thing which I think of is sort of the EEG caps and things, which I guess this is kind of similar, but they often have a problem with people with hair. So people with thicker hair generally have hard, it's a lot harder to collect data from them. Does this also suffer from similar problems? I feel like thicker hair would mean that light going through your scalp would be a lot harder. um Do you come across some similar issues? Yes, hair can be a problem. And yeah, I think here's a problem. Basically, what you want is you want the underside of the cap to be in really good contact with the scalp. And this is something that I've found in the lab recently that sort of participants that I have in the lab, and I'm scanning them with these caps. If they've got no hair, great, great. We got great signal. But to get people with, when people with hair come into the lab. I need to do quite a lot of work to sort of almost massage the cap so that it gets into better contact with their head. So we can think of like the other side, the underside of the cap. It's basically got lots of sort of, let's say three millimeter long tubes, about sort of three millimeters odd in diameter. So it's like there's lots of little things poking out that I'm trying to massage through the hair, sort of comb it through the hair. And yeah, and so some people in the lab, I spend quite a bit of time, particularly with the thick hair getting it through. I think hair used to be more of a problem. It's getting to be less and less of a problem. But it's still something that is that I've been putting a lot of work into to sort of try and minimize the effect of hair. Unfortunately, I can't just shave people's heads when they come into the lab. I make the joke with every participant I have and people find that funny. It's interesting when you get a lot of people into the lab just say the same jokes again and again and again and you're like, wow, that is funny. That's the middle of the time I've heard that, but they still find it funny. But yeah, hair is an issue, but I wouldn't shave my head for some. Well, I guess it was coming to the question of you said, like going back to think about the study about Gambia versus the UK. I know they're babies, but once they start growing, the hair also was different. And if the study was a few years ago when you said it was more of a problem. Now the same readings can also be interrupted or oh have more noise to them, if you know what I mean, than what would otherwise. And I guess maybe this is why you're looking at babies and people maybe towards the end of the life, because we kind of don't have hair at start and we kind of lose hair later on. I see the reason you've chosen these populations, Liam. All makes sense. babies are great, you get great signal with babies. But yeah, think, yeah, the hair problem's gonna, the hair's gonna become less and less, less problem as time gonna have a whole section here on hair. Yeah, it's taken up a lot of my thinking recently. How on earth do I deal with hair? I joke that hair is the enemy to my participants, but I'm not joking. But we are solving that problem. We're solving that problem of how to deal with hate. get a free head massage as well. I hope that you put that on your posters when you're recruiting. mean, yeah, I mean, I didn't put that in the sort of ethics application that participants also get a head massage. And so I'm not sure I could advertise that. However, I do, I do often get sort of as I'm trying to massage the cap onto people's head, say, you could you could be a hairdresser. then, you know, I make the joke that if science doesn't work out, could I use this as experience on my CV? And apparently, I'm that funny. So I keep saying it. Yeah. Um... Sorry, go ahead, Matt. No, no, it's okay. It's kind of moving on to a different point. Now there's just one more thing was around, do you use gel or anything to put the cap on or is it just like those light tubes sitting like straight down? I'm just thinking similar to EEGs where you have like water or gel which you use to stick the caps on. no gel, no gel. I got participants come into the lab and they're saying, oh wait, I don't have to put gel on my head. And I'm like, no, no, no gel today. And yes, I understand with EEG, you need to match the impedance between, have some intermediate in sort of electrical impedance between the scalp and the electrode. But with this, no, I think the key thing is to make sure there's good contact with the head. So at the end of experiments, the participants, I take the cap off their head and they've got lots of little sort m dimples, particularly on their forehead. Basically, like we're in a tight cap. I like to see that because that means that they've been wearing the cap correctly and we're getting a lot of light into the head. yeah, so there's the challenges of trying to get light into the head. We don't need to any gel or any of the messy stuff. And so use the cap in babies, use the cap in people who have positive dementia. With your new fellowship, what is that letting you, so I think it's the Blue Sky Fellowship, what does that let you do which you couldn't do before? What's particularly great about the work that you're doing now? Yeah, think so. I started back in May this year on the Cambridge Neuroworks Blue Sky Fellowship. And I think the first thing that came to my head when you said that was being supported to work at a quicker pace. And that's something that I've really enjoyed and that sort of I've sort of felt supported by the Neuroworks team to do, to work to quicker pace and think, I've got an idea. Let's test it out. in the lab, sort of what needs to be true for this to be sort of implemented in future in clinic. And if we test it out and that idea doesn't work, that's great. We can then sort of pivot and think about something else. So it's been being support to work at a pace. It's being introduced to ways to ideate. So the first three months of this fellowship, I was given three months to basically come up with an idea to consult sort of the. ecosystem when it comes to, when it comes to neurotechnology, when comes to academia, startups, industry, clinicians and think, what is the problem at the moment? What am I trying to achieve? And that was where I sort of pivoted from, and envisaging that this would be a hardware development problem that I'd be working on to thinking, no, I think this is more of a software development, more of a data analysis problem that I'm trying to um solve. So the work I'm doing at the moment is I'm interested in dementia and I'm interested to see how we can use emerging technologies like near infrared spectroscopy to streamline the diagnosis process and offer clinicians a brain specific biomarker that could be used to improve diagnosis times and improve clinical certainty in diagnosis when it comes to thinking of dementia subtype. The idea I'm exploring at the moment is how listening to things or how cognitive, uh the idea I'm interested in at the moment is how listening and cognitive tasks that rely on listening, can that be used to offer clinicians a brain specific biomarker that could be helpful in dementia diagnosis? What I'm doing right now is getting piloting an imaging protocol for this in healthy participants. And my hope here is to see um what sort of conditions in that experiment elicit the most reliable brain responses. What are the parts of the brain where we see robust responses that could be useful targets when it comes to thinking about clinical diagnosis in a clinical population. um And I'm hoping to uh apply that in future. in a population with dementia. Right. So that'd be looking at, because I know you spoke about the kind of sound and the temporal, superior temporal kind of regions. Would that be something that you'd be looking at with sound or is it more like processing the sounds? Yeah, it's interesting. it's interesting because regions that are linked with auditory cognition, as well as low level auditory perception are based in the temporal lobe. So I'm interested in what's going on in the temporal lobe. Also the connections to other parts of the brain, particularly frontal regions that are sort of involved in more general cognitive processing. And a region I'm interested in is the inferior frontal lobe. that we know is linked to things like listening efforts and higher cognitive demand during listening tasks, as well as other more general cognitive tasks. So yeah, thinking about the front of the brain and the side of the brain, those are the sort of bits that I'm most interested in for this work. So, like, take us through if I'm a part, if I'm a participant in your pilot study, you put the cap on me. What happens then? Are you like playing me sounds? Are you doing a comedy bit which I listen to and you see the activity? What's, what sort of, yeah, what kind of task does it look like? Are we just seeing just the base range? Yeah, well, if I'm going to walk you through, the first thing I'd do is I'd meet you in the reception of the building and talk about some pleasantries, where have you come from today? What are you doing? Blah, blah, blah. Get you into the lab, talk you through the experiment. But no, in the actual experiment itself, are, participants and my wonderful participants are wearing the cap and the caps sampling from the sort of temporal and frontal regions. And they've got earphones in. So what they do is they squash down the phone and their earphones, put it in their ear, and then they sit looking at a screen in the dark for about 25 minutes. And what they're doing is they're listening to different things. And then I'm asking them to repeat what they've heard. And what I'm interested to see is sort of the responses to when they hear the sound, the responses just before they respond, the responses after they respond to see sort of these different things that are happening from perception to cognition. And yet, I'm interested to see what the responses are in those temporal and frontal regions. Nice. And would you, are you expecting for possibly those, I mean, of course, you're still in like the testing phases with the controls. Do you expect that them, are you still looking at the blood, the blood flow, I guess, would you expect that to be less blood flow for those who maybe are looking for a diagnosis of dementia or have dementia or are you still unsure any little synopsis of hypotheses you can give us? Yeah, it's interesting because what I'm interested in right now is sort of seeing what regions, firstly to pilot this protocol ahead of hopefully then in future applying it in a clinical population. But I'm also interested to see what brain regions, what responses do we see in the brain and then sort of focus in on those in a future study in people with dementia. So what I'm... Interested in what's your question again, Beth? Would you expect there to be a lower blood flow? right. And so in terms of what I'd expect to see in people with dementia or specifically people with Alzheimer's disease, um I'm interested to see what the response is in this region and whether we see, we might see an increased response, we might see a decreased response. And I'm not sort of committing right now to a particular hypothesis on this, because we may see compensatory effects in the brain. So what might happen is we might see a deficit in one part of sort of cognitive network and then another part of cognitive cognitive network sort of makes up for that. we may see in someone with cognitive impairment an increase in activity in one of these regions. So that's something that I'm that I haven't got a specific. hypothesis right now, but what I'm really interested to see is what are the regions where we can get these reliable responses in healthy volunteers. And that is then a sort of proof of concept of the neuroscience that these regions can be measured using this method. So let's go and see how it could be used in people with dementia. That is so cool. you're literally, it's just, it's really cool to see like it's quick. mean, I'm running my own study and it's taken me four years to get ethics and finish it. It's wild, but this is just, you you're like, yep, I have an idea. em I want to look at where blood flow when we're having like listening efforts, which we spoke about Kate with a little bit, which parts of the brain are ah linked to listening efforts and with blood flow. And then once you've kind of got those down, you can be like, oh, is this different in people with Alzheimer's disease? em And maybe in the long run. Can you identify different types of dementia? But I talk for another day, probably. Yeah, I think it's interesting. think right now I'm sort of in a proof of concept phase. So it's thinking, let's show that this thing works and sort of get pilot data ahead of a future study. And then sort of the next step in future would be maybe a bit more rigorous when it comes to thinking of sort of establishing a baseline and sort of comparing a control cohort to a cohort with Alzheimer's disease. But yeah, right now it's in the lab. Let's show this thing works. And yeah, that's something I'm really enjoying. Yeah, the few one thing which I was wondering, cause you said that the cortex, oh, well, you, is usually for the cortex. can't go much deeper, but then I guess certain dementias, you know, start from the hippocampus or start from like the medial or central regions of the brain. Those, guess would be a lot harder to detect from, uh, this, but I've, now that I'm saying it, I'm thinking, I guess if somebody shows with symptoms of dementia and you put the cap on and you look, but sort of the lateral, the outer regions are fine, you can kind of then narrow it down by like elimination that it's probably one of the more medial regions which are degenerating. So, yeah. interesting about that is thinking right as you say sort of saying Alzheimer's disease and we're seeing um we're seeing sort of uh the the first sort of signs of um of atrophy and sort of medial temporal sorry yeah the medial temporal gyrus yeah we wouldn't be able to to image that but it's thinking what about other parts of the brain and do we see changes in brain function before we see those structural changes And it's thinking, right, okay, let's think about the network. Let's think about how the brain is set up. What parts of the brain are in contact, have strong connections to the medial temporal lobe and thinking, right, which of those are on the cortex and which of those can we measure? So it's taking that sort of wider approach. We may not be able to look at the seed region, but we can look at some way that is very closely connected and sort of in through what's going on. meeting. Yeah, that's really, yeah, really interesting. it's excited to see where it goes. It sounds like it's still kind of like, yeah, it's a proof of concept, early stages. I usually ask a question here, but I feel like you're literally already doing it, Liam. I want us to pretend that you've been given a grant of a billion pounds more, unlimited, and the ethics committee were on holiday and have said, well, we trust you. You just do whatever you want to do. What would be your absolute dream? study. See, that's such a big question because that's basically like, you always think about research ideas in amongst these constraints and usually amongst the constraint of a grant court and that with your question is like. anything. and What I think would be really interesting is to get people and scan them with different things. Let's scan them with the EEG. Let's scan them with high-density EEG. Let's scan them with MEG. Let's scan them with MRI. Let's do all these different MRI things. Scan the infrared spectroscopy. Take different kinds of neuro-infrared spectroscopy and think, what are, get all of this data, get it from loads of people and then think, right, what are the things that I would. that I would usually only be able to get with a big bulky scanner, what can I get using a much easier to use and cheaper device? And I would be keen to get, so yeah, loads of data and then we could see, it could even be something very obscure, sort of the link between this part of the brain and the signal and this frequency band in EEG. I think it'd be really interesting to do that because then we could sort of distill sort of these technologies, these really sort of advanced technologies like MRI and think. use this cheap thing to get information that's just as clinically valuable and that would mean that we could roll it out across much much wider area and then get more people to get information that can sort of support their health and their healthcare outcomes. I think that would be, I would scan a lot of people at a lot of different ages with different conditions with a lot of different techniques. feel technically that one's pretty ethical, it's just the money constraint on that one. I've got a billion in the bank here. I haven't done a power calculation on that. But yeah, I think it would be, I think that would be interesting. Yeah, like a a, know, Biobank has lots of different bits of data, but you know, and Biobank is like a massive, for those listening, Biobank is like a massive database of thousands of people with lots of different measures like age and some imaging and some kind of cognitive things, lots of different kind of metrics about people. But like, this would be like the m kind of the absolute gold standard imaging, imaging one. m And you have every type of imaging possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, buy a bank on steroids. Barrowbank on imaging steroids, yeah, like it. We'll call it that as well. think that all the ethics would particularly like that if they were around. I mean, BioBank does have blood biomarkers already, right? Because it does like blood tests and stuff, so could in theory map them to your brain imaging. Yeah, I mean, imagine if we could get something from the from blood biomarkers, yeah, that could tell us what we get from brain imaging. Now, part of why I'm interested in looking at the sort of getting a brain specific biomarker in dementia is to sort of complement the the advances we're seeing at the moment in blood biomarkers. So blood biomarkers can can sort of tell you things, but tell you things about what's going on with the brain. But I'm interested to get uh a device alongside that that can sort of look at the brain. specifically. Yeah, well, think it's important for people to remember if you don't know that there is a thing called the blood brain barrier and the blood and blood biomarkers can tell you a lot about the brain, but they aren't directly the brain and therefore it's quite important. BBB as I wrote it in my notes as shorthand. Yeah. Great. so I think, is there anything else you want to ask to hear before we move on to maybe the public engagement bit of this? Oh, thank God. But is there anything Liam you wanted to talk about which we didn't actually cover in terms of your work? before we go on to the fun part. to be honest, no, I'm quite happy with sort of how the conversation's gone, that it's got that it's sort of focused more on the sort of technically angles rather than because, know, something I enjoy doing is trying to feel my way and sort of see how this works in the sort of diagnostic pathway, but it's that sort of that and symptoms of dementia, things like that. I'm just pleased that it's been sort of more technically guided, this conversation. So I don't That would be the only thing that I would have to have said at the start. Yeah, we can get someone more clinically focused to get into the nitty-gritty of the clinical aspects of dementia. You have to remember, people are very, very specialized. The higher up you go, it's not as simple as you think. Oh, I researched dementia. What part? Oh, the techniques. oh So I think I said at start, you're part of three queers and a Welshman. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How did that start? What kind of comedy do you do? I guess the origin story of that maybe. The origin story, yes, so I think it's back in 2023, we started on a program called Talent Factory, and we met at basic science, sense communication sort of program. And we, so I met Eva, Alice and Max. And so we, the thing we had in common is that we liked silliness. we liked science, although we were in different parts of science of course, but I think that was, we were like, we really like science, we really like talking about science, and so it was one day uh in the group chat where we saw that Greenland Festival were looking, put a call out for science exhibitions, and sort of, can't remember if someone put in the group chat and said anyone fancy doing this? And the four of us were like, let's do it. We didn't know what we were going to do, but we sort of thought, right, what is it? How can we sort of bring our science together? And so we came up with this idea of a maths and neuroscience crossover. So we thought, right, let's do this exhibition where we think about maths and we think about puzzle solving and then let's bring along a brain scanner and scan people's brains. And uh anyway, that was what we took then to Green Man in 2024. then, and so, you know, that was sort of the sort of public engagement bit. And then what happened was, what happened was, while we were at Green Man Festival, there was an act that dropped out on one of the stages. And so we were asked, we were asked because knew the person was running the stage and she was saying could you fill in an hour slot and we were like yes yes so we filled in with an hour long show on science comedy and yeah in terms of the name basically how this came up was we were putting a proposal together for Green Man it was a question on quality diversity and inclusion and we thought right what can we put for this and we wrote we are three members of the LGBT community and there is also one Welsh person uh and uh that's it. I can't remember who came up with that name but we thought you know that's let's just perform under that name and so that's what we did. That's what we did agree about. So we thought you know what we could we could as well as the public engagement staff. why don't we give the, why don't we sort of try and bring this together for a science comedy thing? Because, you know, we met, the four of us met doing science comedy. And yeah, that was, that was, yeah, that was sort of the origin story. And then, and then we went, when we went to Glastonbury, we got, we got asked to do a, to do a few performances on, on a stage there. And yeah, we were like, let's do it, let's do it. So yeah, it's really, yeah, really pleased that that came together and really pleased to have three other people who are just as committed to silliness, nonsense and science as I am. So wait, did you just name drop Glastonbury there? I did just name Rob Glastonbury. We did three shows at Glastonbury. One of which we um got a spot on Robin Ince, who hosts Infinite Monkey Cage alongside Brian Cox. He had a show called Nine Lessons for the Summer Solstice. And so we were asked to be on the bill for that and we were so pleased about that. So we, but we had basically had a, we had a 10 minute slot for that show. And we thought, right, what we're going to do is we're going to pack as much comedy as we can, much comedy and science into 10 minutes as we can. And we came up with this fantastic set where we all came together to talk about consciousness and what is consciousness solving the puzzle of consciousness. I was really, I was, I was really pleased with that. Robin Hintz introducing us as three queers and a Welshman was fantastic. And yeah, we did a couple of other shows at Glastonbury as well, of more, we sort of fleshed that out a bit more, sort of our nature of solving puzzles, but making it funny at the same time and bringing in some science. And yeah, I think bringing science into comedy is great. I feel like in comedy you are invested in someone's story. and part of the storytelling aspect, that there's something that I like, someone immersing you in their world. And yeah, why not do that with science? yeah, did, to answer your question, yeah, I did name dropcast. That is like honestly like the coolest thing. And you first said that, is wild. So I off the audience, I guess you see aren't very science-based. How do you find different audiences react when you kind of mix the science, maths and the kind of the humor together? so it depends. Some audiences are performed to a much more sciencey than others. That's where the Sarah Bellum joke comes in. Try and see what audience am I with today. I think when it comes to science comedy, sometimes you have to make a judgment call. Am I going to go sciencey or am I going to go funny? Would something funny better here or something sciency and most of time funny words. And I think that um you know to an audience that's not immersed in science, anything scientific is sort of is really new to them and sort of as scientists we can sort of forget like that this isn't the usual experience being surrounded by science all the time isn't usual experience so and I think a lot of the time is thinking is thinking yet. How do I make this funny rather than how do I make this more science-y? But that's still a great way of bringing in science, bringing it into audiences that aren't scientists. And yeah, I do really enjoy talking to non-scientists because they bring a different perspective, they bring different ideas. And that's, yeah, I just really enjoy talking about science and I just like being silly about it as well. and saying silly things about her on stage. Yeah, makes it fun, doesn't it? so how did you, I guess kind of two questions. How did you get into it? And I know because I dipped my, I've of been dipping my toes in the patio too and I the people who are similar. How do you, because you're quite established now. So first of all, how did you get into it and what would you advise to give people who want to get into it a little bit more? don't mean, Beth, you say dip your toe in it. I'm talking to the person who has conceived Amy Gidala. ah If I brought Amy here right now, uh would be saying she was the expert. Unfortunately, it's just Beth today. We'll keep it modest. But I mean, Amy Gadala is also a bit like Sarah Bellum in the sense that you need a level of knowledge about the science of the brain to get the statement, amygdala. I, yeah, tell us your question. So I think, I mean, my advice to people would just get involved and, you know, look for a sort of a sort of science community, science comedy community. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's around the place you've got things like Bright Hood, there are different, there are different sort of cities around the UK. Dipyto in that. if you know someone who does it, send them a message about it. I had someone that got in touch with me about getting into science comedy and then we bumped into each other at this conference and I was like, wait, we know each other through silliness, not through the serious science that we're talking about now. So how I sort of started out, so I did some gigs in sort of different venues in London and yeah, that's how I got to know the other three in three careers in a Welshman. And I think it's terrifying, it's absolutely terrifying, but you learn a lot from doing it. And when I was an undergraduate at university, did stand up for a couple of years. And I think one thing that I didn't like about that was I wasn't able to talk about what I wanted to talk about. know, so was science comedy, sort of finding a way and sort of finding different audience that are interested in science, might not be scientists themselves, but interested in science. I think that sort of helped me sort of find a voice in this space. Now, yeah, my advice would just be, you're gonna need to feel terrified because it is terrifying and it doesn't get any easier. I'm not a... Yeah, it doesn't get any easier and I think sort of, you sort of have to try new things. a lot and I feel like every step that I do I try and do something new because otherwise you don't know what's going to work and sometimes you really don't know what's going to work. can't just work out when you're doing things on pen and paper and I think I find that sometimes you write something down and you're like that's it that's going to be brilliant and then it and then it falls flat and then you come up with some off-key remark and you're like wait I'm going to sort of build around that in future. But yeah, think, but I think sort of thinking what's funny is sort of the way to frame it rather than thinking, I want to talk about this particular science thing is thinking that's a funny thing in science. Let's talk about that. So I've always try and sort of lead with what's funny. great advice. Well, the different sets thing is quite interesting because I've only seen one of your performances and you were making the setup almost on the day, like 10 minutes before the show you said like, oh, I'm going to add this, I'm going to add that. So you, you then coming back saying that it's terrifying. How are you so flexible to just prepare and say something 10 minutes before, but also be completely terrified about doing it. It reminds me of my first gig when I was doing my second year at university. was in UCL College Club and they were doing their freshest gig at the start of term and I turned up to the Taster session. They're like, you're going to do the freshest gig, aren't you? And I was just like, yes. I really didn't want to say yes, I was just like, I didn't feel like I say no. I remember being so nervous for that. So I've had a five minute spot and I'm really nervous. And then I just remember sort of getting in front of people and thinking, I'm so terrified, but like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And you sort of become, wouldn't quite say a different person, you just become someone different. You survive a different outlook to things. You've got your stage persona. And for me, I find that that's a lot more confident than I usually am. Even though you're breaking it inside, then feel, also feel like, it's an odd thing. And I remember sort of, in that gig. it wasn't particularly funny, there was like, I was like, why am I going on? Why am I saying this off-key remark? then getting a, uh doing this saying this offhand remark that's actually getting a lot. Like, what am I like, wow, okay. So that, and then I've just found that afterwards I've just found that I write things and then I just rip that when I go on stage. I, you know, I I'm beforehand, I'm like, I need to sort of orchestrate this really well. need to choreograph this really well. And then you get on stage and you're like, no, don't know what it is. I'm just like, no. And so I've tried to lean into that a bit more and think, you know what, like, I don't need to, I don't need to, I don't need to be so prepared. Or I can sort of prepare, but then leave sections where I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to go with whatever's going on. I remember once I made a funny joke about the Fibonacci sequence, because the person before me just mentioned Fibonacci sequence and I was like, how on earth did I get such a big laugh to a joke about the Fibonacci sequence? But yeah, it's, I don't really know that much about the Fibonacci sequence either. But yeah, it's, yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's just like, yeah, I think it's all part of the fun. It's all part of the fear, it's part of the fun. Part of the fear is I actually don't know what's gonna happen. you guess it's always leaving it as islands, as you've kind of got a little islands of funniness, but you don't, you have not like scripted it into like an intimate side, which is probably a good thing. yeah, yeah, just, yeah, you did. Yeah, you just, but you also just don't know what's gonna be funny. So it's almost like, it's like the thing of, you know, don't bother worrying about things because what you need to worry about, you don't even know right now. Don't worry about it being bad on stage, because it's probably gonna be bad anyway. So you might as well use it to try and sort of gather data on what's funny and what's not. Yeah, that's really good way to get gathering data and what's funny and what's not. Failure is a data point there. you Failure is a data point. Gathering data on what's funny and what's not. Bet's writing that down for advice. It's gonna be on like a throw pillow sewn in now. it's going to be on your wellness podcast. Failure is a different point. Amy has taken that point and has now said it's hers. She said she fed that to you, she's just told me. A fun little question is, if you could get any scientist dead or alive to do a stand-up set about their research, who would you choose and why? That's actually, that is interesting. would I get I mean You know what? I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, he's... I mean, he'd just get away with it. What he'd do is he'd mess up the hair, wouldn't he? He'd mess up the hair even more. And then he'd just get a laugh. Just like, he basically can do a Milton Jones impression and he'd just get loads of laughs. I can imagine him sort of with sarcastic one-liners, you know. Who would I get back there? I mean, I think, look, I think what would be interesting and maybe... David Attenborough. So, you know, maybe not the conventional definition of what a scientist is, but I could just, you know, if you David Attenborough, this national treasure, what if you gave him a bit of an edge? And what if, you know, you had him, you had him really wholesome, and then he just said something that was really, really off-brand and really cutting and sort of, because you imagine him as, you know, he's a nice person, encouraging. What if he was just sat, what if he was just really, you know, what if he was just sort of saying a sort of making a few dad jokes and then something really cutting about something in front row. And I can imagine sort of in his accent and it would just be so out of character. And then just talks about some really odd science to do with, I don't know, how pelicans fill in with your own imaginations. Yeah, yeah, I think that would be quite funny. Yeah, David Attenborough is with a character. I have to give him a name. yeah, I think. was just thinking David Attenborough describing a researcher like he would like an animal. Here we have a PhD student. Yeah, you could imagine that and sort of comment. Yeah, you've got you've got the conference deadline coming up and everyone's in the office or everyone's really stressed. And yet sort of commentating, commentating on a stressed conversation between two PhD students. could I could. Yeah, I could I could get behind that. I think the issue is I think you'd want you'd want you'd you'd want someone who was a bit more understated. You want you wouldn't want someone with sort of who was it was a sort of. good scientist and they know it you'd want you'd want someone a bit more I think you want someone a bit more understated a bit more humble that's why I'd go that's why I'd go at Attenborough I think it's a think it's a really good question but that's what you say isn't it when people say that's a really good question and like I know it's a really good question I ask the question It may have been like Beth is not that many like this. I do not care for, you know, some of the scientists, or maybe they just wouldn't be very funny. was trying to think of some good ones. was thinking of maybe of some like, old charlatans in the past, can when x-rays first came out and they somebody x-rayed the brain and it was actually pig intestines. I'd love to like have the lead researcher on that. Yeah. Was that a thing? I've got an image of it in one of the lectures I teach. I'll send it over. It was, m yeah, amusing. That's incredible. Shoot. the image as well. I'll send you the image. It's funny. But I David Attenborough, yeah, in character. Great. Should we ask him what his hot take now? While we're it, while we're asking him questions. Yes. Okay. Are you ready Alan? So Liam, what is your hot take? My hot take is that scientists don't know what they're doing and that's in fact a good thing. Oh, go on. Could you explain all this? yeah, I think that as scientists with sort of the incentives and sort of the model is and the funding is, it feels as though we've got to show that we know exactly what we're doing when in fact we should be doing science, we should be discovering new things. And part of that is not knowing what you're doing. I don't know exactly what I'm doing. I have a hunch. You know, I've got an idea. I'm not completely shooting in the dark. I have some idea. but I'm trying to discover something new. And I'm taking a bit of a risk here. This might be me going down a rabbit hole and not coming back with something useful. But I think that for me is it's scientists should have no idea what they're doing and that would be, and that's a good thing. And what we think of of big discoveries, it's not a lot of things having just come from sort of incremental. incremental improvements how we understand things and I feel like the current environment where we need to sort of show that our research is particularly safe or it's going to say what we think it's going to say. I think we could have better and sort of more interesting scientific discoveries if we sort of let scientists do what they do best which is discovering new things and learning how to do things when they not 100 % sure how best to do things. So that would be my view on it. I think that's a very good point. think, yeah, the system itself kind of like also limits what you can do because you're trying to prove that you know exactly which is going to happen and what you're going to do. But it also then stifles sort of innovation and things like that. Because if you could say, I don't know, but I'm going to try this. It's not like a complete shot of the dark, but there's some logic to it. Let me try it. You're probably going to get more innovative sort of ideas or findings. Yeah, things will fall flat on their face. Things will fall flat on their face. But there'll also be things that don't, you know. And I think, yeah, and I think I feel like, you know, when I've been writing grant applications and sort of having to show basically to say, I'm confident that we will get this result. And I'm thinking, I'm not, or I'm thinking, I don't feel like, I feel like the real spirit of science is. I think this is going to happen. This is my prediction, but I'm not 100 % sure. Let's give it a go. Let's work out how to do this. that's my thought that I think. And I think us as scientists, we're really good at that. And I think we should be able to do more of that, to do more of having a hunch, not being 100 % confident about it, but giving it a go. I'll have another hot take. I'll go. why not? Well, there's the one that I WhatsApp to you. ah So my other hot take is that human beings are just the same thing as pints of craft beer. When you shine light into the body, what you get, if I shine light into my finger, you see that my finger would glow red. Now what's happening is the red light is getting into my finger from, a white light source like on my phone. And what it's doing is it's getting through my finger. It's getting through, it's getting through the bones, getting through the skin. And so it's not being absorbed, but it's being scattered. So I can't see the beam going through my finger, but I can see my finger glowing red. The light's coming out my finger from all these different directions. The next time you have a pint of cloudy beer, say it's a, say you're on one of your pretentious nights out drinking beers that, you know, just don't taste like the rest. So you've got a hipster style sort of craft beer in front of you. Get the light on your phone and put it up against the side of the glass and then look through the other side of the glass. What you'll see is you won't see the beam of light coming through, but what you'll see is the pint glowing, sort of similar to what your finger would be doing. So when I talk about imaging brains using light, we're basically just treating brains exactly the same as we would treat a pint of craft beer. That was a great explanation. I'm going to now have to buy a pint. Thank you for validating my Friday night choices. I'm very pleased to just make sure it's a kai. Really important, I will go for that. I've got myself a cloudy side, don't I think we can sort of wrap up on that note. I've got one final question. You gave advice for being a science comedian, but if you had any other general advice for our listeners from your science, from your research, from your origin story, from your journey, what would it be? I think, right, I think my advice to sort of anyone, and who am I to give advice because I'm not successful, but my advice would be to be interested in things. I remember when I was doing my PhD and I was thinking, you know, I've always been really, really interested in science. But then when I my PhD and I started working on very, sort of very specific questions, I sort of only let myself be interested in that question and in things relevant to that question. And I thought, different bits of science, they're not related to my bit of science. And I remember sort of halfway through my PhD thinking, I didn't get into science just so that I could explore this very niche question, you know, and sort of thinking, no, I can allow myself to be interested in things. I can spend time on different bits of science. I can learn things. And that sort of And so that would be my advice is, if you're doing PhDs, doing something niche, you you can be interested in other things. And, you know, one of things that I am really interested in is talking with people about science and sort of us as scientists, you know, we've got a lot of skills, we know a lot of things, we've learned how to explain things, to understand things. And so, yeah, my other bit of advice is just to go out and talk to people about science because I think it's fun. Brilliant! Awesome, everybody. So thanks for that. Thanks again, Liam, for joining. That was great fun. It's been an honour to be here, it's been an absolute honour. think this is going to go on my CV. I'm going to reference this in both my Oscar acceptance and Nobel Prize acceptance. I can't even say it, I can't even make joke. uh you're in the same line up with Olivia Rodrigo, you can tell her. You did not make that joke. whenever I mentioned Glastonbury, people are like, did you go to Glastonbury, Liam? And I'm like, lol, because I mentioned it quite a lot. I got rid of the wristband the other day. And I was showing people that I didn't have the same color wristband as the rest. a performance wristband. But yeah, I was on the same line at Glastonbury as Olivia Rodrigo and Charlie XCX. I mean, I've made it. I've made it. There we go. You said you weren't successful before, those are lies. Lies, take that back. no, no, I made it. made it. Well, you know, any other big artists want get me to open their shows for them, I can say three queries in a while, I'm ready for it. Awesome. So on that note, if anybody wants to hire Liam to open shows for them, you can find him through us. But otherwise, take care. Thank you everybody for listening. Thanks again and until next time. Bye. Bye!