Good Girls Die Last is feminist reality wrapped in fiction I was so tired of crying. It was the summer of 2021 and the news was full of the horrors of Sarah Everard’s rape and murder in London, the MET policeman who killed her, and the peaceful vigil to honour her that the same police force broke up, resulting in yet more women getting hurt. The country was angry and so was I. Women were scared and I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been. England’s capital city was once again in the spotlight. London had been my home during the most crucial parts of my life. As the daughter of a Spanish immigrant, I moved there aged seven before I could speak the language, and remained in the city until I was thirty and pregnant with my own child. I went to school in London, worked in London, learned to drive in London, and experienced every love affair, trauma, joy, and heartbreak in London. Even when I went on to live in Spain, Australia, and the Netherlands, London continued to flow through me, my very own Thames surging through my veins. The city became a character in all my books; a beautiful, grimy, ancient, sparkling hero full of wonder and secrets. That summer I was also at a turning point in my career. Having written fantasy novels for the last five years, I was struggling to secure the most beguiling of creatures – a literary agent. Two books had failed to garner any interest and I was beginning to consider a brand-new genre. Something commercial. Something everybody wanted to read. During a long drive from Spain to my home in the Netherlands, I scrolled through Twitter, tears in my eyes, as Everard’s murderer was brought to trial. Women didn’t feel safe in London. The police couldn’t be trusted. No one knew who the good guys were anymore. Somebody tweeted ‘it’s about time a feminist Falling Down was made’ and without thinking I replied, ‘I’m writing that book at the moment.’ I wasn’t, but five minutes later – notebook and pen in hand – I was. I didn’t want to write a thriller where a woman was the victim, because every woman is always the potential victim of her own story. It had to be more than that. I wanted to write a book that was a great read but also reflected society. A love note to London. A poison pen letter to every man who ever got away with their crimes. Good Girls Die Last by Natali Simmonds Good Girls Die Last is about Em, a woman on the verge of turning thirty. She’s just lost her job, is potentially about to lose her home, and as London descends into chaos amidst a record-breaking heatwave, she finds herself battling across the city to catch her flight on time. Oh, there’s a serial killer on the loose. But he’s not the most dangerous person on the streets. The summer of 2021 carried with it a lot of pain, and the subsequent process of writing what would end up being my debut feminist thriller opened up wounds I’d forgotten existed. Writing Em’s experiences as she crosses the capital on foot, encountering obstacle after creep-shaped obstacle, forced me to think back to the days when I was in my twenties; what it was like to receive unrequited attention from men, how other women judged me, and how vulnerable I felt as a lone woman walking through the city in the summer. Societal norms and levels of acceptance have changed a lot in the last decade or two, even more so following the Me Too movement, but many people haven’t. Not really. And that’s what I wanted to explore in Good Girls Die Last. I suddenly found myself remembering how at eighteen, during my first day at work, my chair broke, and my new boss suggested I spend the rest of the day sitting on his lap. Everyone laughed. Or the time I was sexually abused on the Tube. Or how my breasts were grabbed in a busy bar when my hands were full of drinks. And the hundreds, if not thousands, of times during my life as a woman I’ve wished my clothes had pockets, or the women’s toilet didn’t always have a queue, or I could walk down the street unobserved. What it is for women to live our lives perpetual aware of the discomfort and inconvenience of our clothes being too tight, heels too high, periods too painful, all while expected to smile for the comfort of others. All of that rage, that injustice and pain went into my book. My stories and those of my friends became my characters’ stories. As the heat rises in my fictitious London under threat, the tension builds, and the action mounts – until, eventually, Em snaps in a way that women all over the world have considered doing on a daily basis. Using the thriller genre as a vehicle to convey the horrors that are still prevalent today became a game changer for me and my approach to writing by allowing me to wrap reality in a fictional bow. By peppering my thriller with feminist issues, reflecting societal concerns that still need to be addressed, I’ve been able to reach people in a way no news story can. This book was never just about the plot but the people. Readers came for a thriller and left feeling seen. Their anger, fears, passion and joy right there, on the page, alongside characters as real as the people they know. Good Girls Die Last Book Cover Men have contacted me to say it was eye-opening, women have thanked me for not shying away from the raw reality of womanhood, and seventy-year-olds have been in touch to tell me their own stories – suddenly realising that, no, what happened to them fifty years ago was not OK. As a writer of fiction, I get to make up stories every day. And as a writer of thrillers, I get to come up with harrowing crimes, murders, and threats to my characters. But sadly, with Good Girls Die Last, I didn’t have to look far for ideas. And it was that blend of raw reality and crime that got me an agent in three days, a publishing deal in three weeks, and consequently a TV series deal. Because the scariest part of Good Girls Die Last isn’t a made-up monster, or the inventive ways one person can be killed, it’s that there’s not one part of that story that hasn’t and couldn’t happen to any one of us. At any point. Anywhere. The summer of 2021 feels very far away now. I eventually stopped crying and that sadness turned into something else. Something wild and hot and burning which I turned into words. I hope those reading Good Girls Die Last feel that fire. And I hope they pass the flame on. Good Girls Die Last is out now in all good bookshops, including audio and eBook. Visit save-em.com for more about Natali Simmonds and her writing.

Image by Bilge Can Gürer from Pixabay The ‘suffering artist’ is a romanticised archetype that has been perpetuated throughout history in literature, film, and popular culture. Whether the creative person’s suffering is mental, physical or financial, society tends to place a higher value on art created by those who lack the means to create easily than by those who do not need to struggle. And with that comes the perpetual loop of inequality, unrealistic expectations, and exploitation. I’ve been a published author for seven years, making my living either through writing (books, articles, copywriting) or consultancy (working with creative and marketing agencies). As a creative freelancer and author, I’m often confronted by the oversimplified notion that those who choose to work in the arts do so for the passion alone (I often wonder how they think we make our money). This longstanding cultural fascination with the image of the ‘starving artist’, the creative who sacrifices material comfort for the sake of their craft, has led to a distorted idealisation of suffering within an entire industry, thereby leading people to perceive artists who struggle financially as more authentic and committed to their art than those who are financially successful. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Society tells artists that Poverty + Suffering = Art. A convenient equation for those out to profit from the dreams and talents of those who simply long to tell stories for a living. Believe me, there is nothing romantic or virtuous about being unable to pay your bills. How do I know this? Because I am the result of the transgenerational trauma caused by such a mindset. In the 1940s, amidst the Spanish civil war and second world war, my grandfather was imprisoned (and nearly executed) for being a painter. He was so obsessed with his art that he risked his life for it. From then until the day he died he went without money, without food, without adequate accommodation. He put his work before his children, his wife, and his future. Did his suffering make his art better? I doubt it. Did he and his family also suffer as a result of this normalisation of poverty in the arts? Most certainly. Yet when I tell his story it’s met with awe and fascination, and I’m told it’s the perfect example of the sacrifices required to create art to such a high standard. This cognitive dissonance has never sat easy with me, and as a writer myself I vowed that I would never perpetuate this myth of suffering for my art equalling talent and success. As artists we deserve to be mentally healthy, treat our families kindly, and earn a fair wage for our art. No other industry would expect anything less. Yet while society continues to idolise creativity as something that emerges from adversity and hardship, artists will continue to be forced to choose between art or a comfortable lifestyle. Artists who come from humble backgrounds or face financial challenges may be seen as more "authentic" or "genuine" in their artistic expression compared to those who come from more privileged backgrounds, but the truth is there’s rarely a happy ending in any creative’s story where they don’t receive the support or financial compensation they need. The solution to this may well be to approach your art commercially. It didn’t do Dalí or Banksy any harm, did it? Yet the flipside to being applauded for being a poor creative is that you’re also criticised when you finally earn money from your endeavours. Whereas artists who struggle financially are often perceived as maintaining their artistic integrity by prioritizing their creative vision over financial gain, artists who achieve financial success through commercial ventures or corporate sponsorship are often accused of "selling out" or compromising their artistic integrity for profit. You can’t win. Yet this rarely happens in non-creative industries. Imagine criticizing a businessperson for growing their brand or telling a firefighter they don’t really care about the lives they save because they make a living from it. Today art is viewed as a fundamental right by the consumer, but one that should be produced by someone who doesn’t do it for the money. With this mindset comes much wider, and damaging, implications. Image by amurca from Pixabay Exploitation by profiting organisations By romanticizing the idea that creativity is born from pain and suffering, this archetype perpetuates the notion that artistic work is inherently less valuable or deserving of fair compensation compared to other forms of labour. This belief undermines the skills, dedication, and expertise required to produce works of art, leading to a lack of recognition and respect for the contributions of artists and creatives. The normalization of toxic work environments within creative industries, fueled by the belief that suffering is necessary for artistic success, creates barriers to fair wages and equitable treatment for artists and creatives. Employers may exploit the passion and dedication of artists by expecting them to work long hours for little pay while dismissing their concerns about burnout, exploitation, and inadequate compensation. This is especially manipulative and insidious when the arts are a competitive and subjective business so many dream of working in. Loss of talent Most creatives are also freelancers, often facing irregular income, unstable job prospects, and financial insecurity. Fair wages provide stability, enabling creatives to pursue their passion as a viable career path rather than as a precarious side gig or hobby. Without adequate financial support, many artists are forced to abandon their creative pursuits or seek alternative sources of income, detracting from their ability to focus on their art. Silencing diverse voices Additionally, the association between suffering and creativity can perpetuate harmful stereotypes that limit the diversity of artistic expression and reinforce oppressive power dynamics within creative industries. Creatives from marginalized communities, who may already face systemic barriers to entry and advancement, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation when their experiences and perspectives are reduced to stereotypes within the suffering artist archetype. This includes disadvantaged and working class voices, and those with dependents, who literally can’t afford to create without adequate and fair pay. Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay Normalising mental health difficulties The normalisation of mental health struggles within the suffering artist archetype stigmatises their experiences, dismissing their need for support and fair treatment. When mental health issues are romanticised as essential components of creativity, it becomes easier for employers and society at large to overlook the well-being of artists and justify exploitative working conditions. In conclusion, the suffering artist archetype is not only inaccurate but also harmful to the well-being and creative output of individuals in the artistic community. It perpetuates harmful stereotypes about the nature of creativity, normalises mental health struggles, limits artistic expression, creates unhealthy work environments, and undermines the value of the time and talent it takes for a creative to hone their craft. So before you congratulate an artist for having had to struggle in order to gain recognition in their field, ask yourself why you feel the need for them to be martyrs for self-expression. Would you do your job better if you were paid less? Would the results of your labour be of a higher quality if you were suffering? The answer is probably no. And artists are no different.

Behind the Science with Sofia Quaglia. Sofia and I first met in October of 2022 via Zoom. She had interviewed Carmine, Inspire the Mind Editor in Chief, not long before and shortly after that, he suggested that the two of us meet. As Deputy Editor, I am always keen on expanding our network and meeting new talents. Sofia and I instantly clicked. We spent most of our time exploring our similarities, whether that was our childhood or the similar education systems we both went through. As the discussion continued, I started to get to know her better. In December, we met again, one-to-one, and explored the possibilities for Sofia to have her very own Inspire the Mind column. Let me introduce her to you. Sofia is a professionally trained science journalist who is most passionate about understanding how the brain works, and with that, mental health. She is a Columbia University journalism graduate and explains, “I am very interested in writing about the brain, specifically mental health, because as humans it connects us all”. She has been featured in newspapers such as The Guardian, National Geographic, Popular Science, New York Times, BBC, and more. When she is not writing about science, mental health and society, she produces “Crossroads” and “Money Date” for Open Giornale Online, an Italian national newspaper. Sofia specializes in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, with a fond appreciation for the natural world. For her, understanding humans and animals is a reminder that the real world is incredibly complex, and that evolution is truly bigger than all of us. In her words “Humans are not the only ones who matter on this planet”. Joyce McCown on Unsplash For Inspire the Mind specifically, Sofia wants to shine a light on the science behind media headlines, as well as how external factors affect each person differently. Her column has a twofold purpose. She explains “my column gives scientists and researchers a space to explain the workings and the behind-the-scenes of the research they do. To me this is important, because in a lot of the journalism we see today, a lot of complex concepts must be streamlined for the general public and therefore have to be condensed”. There currently isn’t a lot of space for scientists and researchers to talk about the inner workings of the research that happens, as findings are often considered more important. As a direct result of this gap in knowledge, Sofia aims to create a space for readers where they can take some time to take a deeper look at some of the findings they are seeing online and on social media. She clarifies, “for example, if the media headline reads: ‘there is a new study that found there is a generic link between suicidal thoughts and family backgrounds’, my column will provide a lot of background about how this conclusion was made, what the research further investigated and what implication it has for the bigger picture of the research field. I also want to look into what the initial hypothesis was and what the overall research process was”. In this column, you can expect a series of Q&As with researchers who are in charge of the cutting-edge science that is changing the world as we know it, as well as interviews with scientists to directly dissect their research, from pros and cons, to hypotheses, the need for their research and the inner workings of the actual field work. When trying to dive further, I asked “Sofia, why write about mental health?”, her answer was simple: “I have grown passionate about mental health because it is a very important topic that is often overlooked, and I am personally interested in the intersection between mental health and everyday life.” She continues, “I want to operate in the middle dimension, between the ‘go for a walk’ stereotype and the very intense trauma, where, together, we can explore our emotions, the ways our brains work, and how our genes can all have an impact on our everyday life”. “Welcome to my column!”.

A interview about the Science special issue on brain connectivity In the morgue. That’s where Stephanie Forkel, a researcher whose work focuses on neuroviability, first realized that there are differences between what people’s brains look like. “The first time I saw a brain, I was like, ‘hang on a minute!’ I thought my neuroanatomy was good, but this doesn't look like the textbook,” she says, laughing. “So that was my ‘aha moment’ of realizing that there is a huge degree of variability in anatomy that we didn't capture in textbooks.” The mismatch between what Forkel had studied, and what she was seeing in real life, is partially due to the fact that neuroimaging, the scientific method used to learn more about the brain through scans, was occupied with the question of how the brain works, examining the so called “gray matter, where the neuronal cells bodies are. As a result, it largely disregarded the importance of the brain’s “white matter” — the deep tissue that stores the pathways for connection between the brain’s areas. That’s where a lot of the variability takes place, Forkel says. With more accurate methods and larger swaths of data collected thanks to advancements in technology over the years, now neuroimaging allows scientists like Forkel to upend many of the early misconceptions prior scientific research birthed. In fact, she recently published a paper in a special issue of the journal Science arguing that neuroscience needs a new framework for better understanding the brain. Brain connectivity is at the heart of what makes our brains different from other species, and what makes our brains different from each other. She is now a Donders Principle Investigator and Assistant Professor at Radboud University. I’m a science journalist, and my work — which has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic — is all about telling stories of how the mind works. On the day of the Science special issue’s release, I had the pleasure of chatting with Forkel for my first ITM column called “Behind the Science”, where I unpack the behind-the-scenes of science that’s changing the way we think about the world of mental health and neuroscioence. We talked about what her work means for the field of neuroscience, and how it can be a game changer for research, clinical practice, and pop culture. Collage featuring representations of brain-scans, a technology often used by researchers to examine patients' cerebral functions, made by the author. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, and why you started doing this kind of work? During my psychology studies, I got fascinated with the mechanistic of how the human brain works to allow for such rich functions, such as language, to emerge. That was when I switched to studying neurosciences. I love my field of research because it is interactive and multidisciplinary — clinical work, biomedical engineering, physics, maths, linguistics, and much more. It’s also a multipotential field that allows us to explore many different interests with the possibility to live in different parts of the world and interact with brilliant minds to push the boundaries of what we currently know. Can you walk me through how research over the years really dispels the whole pop culture myth of “the right brain, the left brain,”, and our modular understanding of brain function? The “modular view” of the brain — this part of the brain does this and that part does that — is founded in the history of our discipline, which is based on a handful of famous single cases. For example, patients who back in the time suffered a lesion to a specific part of their brain and lost the ability to do certain things, or lost inhibition or memory. Those patients really became the foundation and the bedrock of our discipline. For example, Phineas Gage had an iron rod shot through his brain, or Patient H, who lost the ability to form new memories and was stuck in a constant present. That was the first time we could actually associate a lesion in the brain with a specific change in behavior. Now, with neuroimaging, we can actually look at many more patients and scan them over time, following the trajectory of how they heal. This is what actually first highlighted that it's not a simple modular system, but actually, it's a lot more complex: there is this entire white matter network behind those regions that orchestrates how the brain functions. In your research, you say “circuits create networks by stringing together many brain regions to orchestrate a brain symphony.” You argue that brain connections are critical for the brain to work, and they’re basically entirely responsible for some functions. So how do these connections really have an impact on cognitive functions? We make an example with language because classically, we have this “modular view” of the language process. Different parts of the brain carry out different functions: the frontal lobe does the articulation of language, the temporal lobe does the comprehension of language, and the parietal lobe does the concept and meaning of words. Obviously those parts of the brain are quite distant from each other, so language as we know it wouldn't work unless all these different brain areas actually communicate with each other. They have to be connected and orchestrated because, in the end, language is so much more than just a sum of words. We get so many cues and information from communicating through language that is far beyond just articulation, comprehension, and concepts. This is a perfect example of why the modular view is incomplete, and connections are a really important part of how the brain works, and why we should learn more about them. And there are differences between the strength and number of connections in people’s brains, and that is also what causes variability among different people in how they perform cognitive functions… correct? Yes, exactly. So there’s a question of, how different are we from each other? And what is the consequence of that? Like if you have a stronger connection for, say, language networks, does that mean you're better at learning a second language, or does that mean that you can recover better when you lose your language after a stroke? We still don’t have the answers to that, but this new way of looking at the brain — focusing on its connections — can help to start addressing these questions. Other elements we’re also interested in learning more about are: how different are we from our older self? So how does our brain, and brain connectivity, change across the lifespan? This also puts brain evolution into a new framework. Because your research notes that parts of the brain that have evolved later on are a little bit more variable between people, correct? We compared the variability in the white matter between humans, macaques, and chimps. We found that the deeper structures in the brain that are older are also more alike between us. Then the areas more on the surface — the areas which tend to be associated with more complex cognitive functions — those are more variable. And so, this is the evolutionary component: when did this actually separate us, humans, from other species? And is variability a driving force behind that separation? Is there a cognitive advantage to being more variable? These are all questions that we can start to look into. Like all good research, this actually gives us more questions than answers, but what are the clinical implications of these new findings? We have formed a lot of models of how the brain functions in healthy 20-year-old white university students. And then, when you bring that back to an individual patient, we see quite often that the models don't fit — they don't predict well long-term outcomes after a stroke, or explain why some people recover better than others. This is where this new model focusing more on brain connections could have quite a huge impact in the real world. For example, awareness of the connections between brain areas becomes important and can help us explain “atypical cases”. Cases of injuries where you have a lesion in a certain area, but no symptom, or you have a symptom, but the lesion is in a place different from where you’d expect. And that would then be explained by a network that actually connects those two areas. In conclusion, how long do you reckon it could take to filter this new way of thinking about the brain into research, education and pop-culture? I guess there will be differential trajectories. Take-up in the clinic always takes a bit longer because obviously, you can't just put out a new theory or method and then expect clinicians to jump on it and just apply that to patients. It has to go through a rigorous testing and evaluation period. On the other hand, textbooks and educational changes could be much quicker, maybe in a matter of a couple of years. And being that there are a lot more initiatives of scientists actually going into schools, or teaching outside of school environments, I think there is a huge potential for these results and initiatives to actually come to fruition. === This interview, like all interviews of Behind the Science, was edited for clarity.

An interview with genetic epidemiologist Dr. Ashley-Koch about which genes are correlated with suicidal behaviours and why learning about them is crucial for early intervention. Allison Elizabeth Ashley-Koch is a genetic epidemiologist at Duke University School of Medicine and she’s dedicated her life’s work to figuring out the genetic basis of several diseases, especially those pertaining to mental health. She has recently published a paper pinpointing four specific genes which seem to be correlated with suicidal thoughts or actions, by poring over medical data from over 600,000 veterans. Her team’s research, which was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal JAMA Networks, can help learn more about the biology of suicidal behaviors and help target early intervention and therapeutics for those affected. Suicide is the cause of over 700,000 deaths annually. I’m a science journalist, and my work — which has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic — is all about telling stories of how the mind works. I had the pleasure of chatting with Ashley-Koch, where I unpack the behind-the-scenes of science that’s changing the way we think about the world. A collage of images made by Sofia Quaglia Why is it that you’ve decided to look into the mental health of veterans, specifically? I've probably been working with veteran mental health for about 10 years or so. I'm particularly interested in that for several reasons: I have family members, and close friends who have been in the military, and I think military veterans do an enormous service to our country, and globally to other countries as well. This research is an opportunity to help, in some small way, and understand some of the conditions that plagued them. Hopefully, this will enable them to get better treatments and be able to identify people at risk a bit faster. Where does one start to look for “red flags” to identify people at risk of mental health issues? We did our analysis on the Million Veteran Program and as the name implies, the goal is to collect health information, medical records, as well as blood samples on ultimately a million veterans. We had the opportunity to work with this large biorepository. Suicide is a little less frequent than that. So, you can imagine, statistically, the larger your data set is, the more statistical power you will have to detect associations. And with this data, you started getting a little bit closer to finding early identifiers for people at risk of mental health issues, right? Our study focused on over 600,000 veterans who have given a DNA sample and have agreed to make their medical data accessible. From that, we were able to identify a little over 120,000 of them that had some sort of “suicidal behavior”, such as suicidal ideation or a suicide attempt. This was according to both their self-reports of how they’re feeling and the reports filed by their doctors and therapists over the years — so it was probably the broadest definition of a “suicide phenotype.” Once those patients were identified, we conducted what's called a ‘genome-wide association study’, which is where you test a lot of genetic markers, in this case, snips, or “single nucleotide polymorphisms” all across the person’s genome, and you look to see: are those specific snips associated with risk for the suicide behaviors in any way? And this became one of the largest and certainly the most diverse genome-wide association studies for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. What correlations between genes and suicidal behaviors did you find? We were able to identify four genes that had some evidence for being associated with risk for suicidal behaviors — and then we went ahead and replicated the findings in an independent study too. A few things are particularly important to note here before we go ahead though. First of all, these four genes were across all the ancestral groups and ethnicities, so they weren't limited to a particular ancestral group. Therefore, they are important for every one of all ancestries. I think is particularly important because historically a lot of the work has focused almost exclusively on European ancestry groups. Secondly, the data used to replicate the experiment, and see whether certain genes made a difference in suicidal behaviors in other people external to the experiment, was almost exclusively civilian population. So, we identified these risk factors in a veteran population, but they've replicated in a primarily civilian population. This suggests that these genes are not only imported across ancestries but also across civilians and veterans. So what genes are we talking about specifically then, and why are they so important? These are the four genes with the strongest links to suicidal behavior, according to our data analysis. ESR1, which is an estrogen receptor and DRD2, which is a dopamine receptor. Then, DCC gives the body the instructions for making a protein called the netrin-1 receptor, and the gene TRAF3, which has been associated with antisocial behavior, substance use, and ADHD. What do we do with this new information now, and why do these genes even matter? We need to start trying to figure out the mechanism. Our work, essentially, shone a light on these particular genes. But the next step is to answer the question of how do these genes increase risk? That said, those four genes were really important because they have been implicated in other mental health disorders previously. For example, the estrogen receptor has been previously associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety and is often also associated with an increased risk for suicidal behaviors. Therefore, there's a lot of additional statistical support in other mental health disorders suggesting that this gene is important. But it’s also crucial to remember that these genes don’t act in a vacuum, correct? Correct! That’s why we’ve started a new study always using the One Million Veterans data and looking at a lot of the environmental factors in these behaviors too. We want to better understand what are the additional socio-demographic factors that may be interacting with genes to lead to suicidal behaviors. Therefore, having the genetic markers for suicidal behaviors doesn’t guarantee that you have suicidal behaviors? Even if we were, for example, to screen people to see whether they have that dopamine receptor gene, just because they have that genetic risk factor, does not guarantee that they're going to develop suicidal behaviors. Sure, it may put them at greater risk, but it's not 100% guaranteed that they would develop it. And that's why we are working on these other environmental risk factors too. Ultimately, we would like to identify people before these behaviors develop, based on a series of risk factors. Then we can perhaps target special interventions, to help those individuals, and possibly even stop the behaviors from developing in the first place. That would be our ultimate goal. What would early intervention for something like this even look like though? In the immediate future, the more modifiable factors are going to be some of the environmental factors, right? If you know someone is particularly at risk, genetically, to suicidal behaviors perhaps you want to also identify what the environmental risk factors are, as well as reflect on how we can potentially modify or figure out how to intervene. From the genetics perspective, we hope that understanding the underlying biology and genetics may lead us to better therapeutics. With a more complete genetic profile, you can have more information to work with, and use better and more targeted pharmacological treatment or holistic therapies. You need to really act on this in multiple directions, so I think you have both pieces developing in parallel. This interview, like all interviews of Behind the Science, was edited for clarity.

A chat with scientists Roger Olsson and Magnus Berggren We might all remember, from our elementary school science class, how to make a circuit that transports electricity. With conductive material, if we form a closed loop, we can transport electrical charge from one place to another. This usually happens with the help of metal, a highly conductive material. Over the years, this basic concept has been used to develop some cutting-edge technologies able to save people’s lives. For example, deep-brain stimulation, in which doctors implant electrodes in people’s brains — little plugs able to transmit electrical impulses from a conductive material to one that doesn’t naturally conduce electricity — to transmit signals to neurons responsible for conditions such as Parkinson's or epilepsy. This is great but quite invasive. Enter Magnus Berggren, professor of organic electronics at Linköping University and one of the pioneers in the field of making bio-electrical devices, aka devices that blend the living and the electronic. With his colleague Roger Olsson, professor of nanoscience and semiconductor technology at Lund University, their team may have found a non-invasive work around the issue. They created a gel that, once injected into a living animal, can create an electrically conductive structure inside the organism without harming it, according to a new paper in the journal Science. Scholars had managed something similar a couple of years ago in worms, but they had needed to carry out some genetic engineering. In this case, all you need is a little prick. I’m a science journalist, and my work — which has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic — is all about telling stories of how the mind works. I had the pleasure of chatting with Berggren and Olsson for my ITM column called “Behind the Science”, where I unpack the behind-the-scenes of science that’s changing the way we think about the world. A collage of images made by Sofia Quaglia Can you tell me a little bit about the research you do, and the questions you’ve been trying to answer for the past couple of years? Magnus Berggren: For the past 20 years my team has been working to develop “organic electronic devices”. Devices to both stimulate and record signals in biological organisms — everything from plants to mammals. But making organic electronic devices isn’t easy. Whenever we get too close to biological organisms, it's basically like taking to it with a knife. Even though organic electronic devices are flexible and soft, it's like using a knife: you have to damage a lot of the tissue to penetrate into the organs and install the devices. Then, some time ago, we realized we could form organic electronic devices such as electrodes in plants: the chemical energy and the enzymes within the plants could be used to create something like wires for electricity. That’s when Roger Olsson read my research and got in touch, to see if we could do this in neuronal systems in animals. Roger Olsson: Exactly. I've been in the pharmaceutical industry for 20 years, so I'm a trained organic chemist and work with chemistry in zebrafish specifically. But since plant and animal cells are quite different, we needed to start changing the formula used to make conductive materials in plants to make it helpful for animals. At least because some parts of the formula that we use for plants could be toxic to the living brain. So, we put a lot of energy into that for it to work. A Zebrafish And I know there were a lot of hurdles and challenges to making this work, and for a year it almost seemed like the project wasn't really moving anywhere, right? Magnus Berggren: In plants, the enzymes that are needed to create electric conductivity already exist, to some extent, and they help convert sugar or other compounds into a chemical energy that we can use to polymerize — basically when molecules arrange to create three-dimensional networks which can then, in turn, be used for conducting electricity . To replicate that in a living organism, that doesn’t have those enzymes, we had a long wish-list, like a recipe, to create a concoction of chemicals that could kickstart that process for us. For example, it must be dispensed as a fluid, otherwise, you cannot get it into the organ and distribute it. It had to be made of non-toxic compounds, homogeneous, and long-term stable… and more. All this is like a Christmas wish list for the perfect “invivo manufactured electrode”. And through trial and error, and thanks to the effort of very talented researchers in our laboratory, such as Xenofon Strakosas and Hanne Biesmans, we were able to put all these components together and come up with the right chemical cocktail: one containing a category of molecules called oxidases that have the ability to react with the sugars already naturally inside the living tissue. You had this list of all the boxes that you needed to tick off for this to work. After months of trying to see how to change the initial cocktail formula that had worked for plants to make it work for living cells, you basically managed to manufacture this polymerizing gel. But how do you know it works? Roger Olsson: One good thing is that when this gel is injected and it polymerizes, becoming conductive, it turns dark blue. So, you can see it with your naked eye. We started to test it with the zebrafish tail fin and in a short timeframe, you a dark blue color starts forming. That’s how we know we’re getting polymerization. After that, we started going further, focusing on the fin, the heart, and the brain of the animal. And it worked just like in the zebrafish tail, it turned darker. Magnus Berggren: The next step is to verify, is it conducting? Can you pass the current through it? Can we transport charge from this part to this part, and basically make this to become like a deep tissue electrode? We took the zebrafish brain and sliced it up and run a charge through it and you can see it conducting from here to there, and so on. And we can then monitor this with technological equipment. From the results, we could not only see that it is conductive, but it is also highly conducted. Can you tell me a little bit about when you first realized this was happening and the conductivity was working? Roger Olsson: I mean, if you think about it, what we did is take a mixture of chemicals, and when we inject it into a brain structure, it basically self-assembled to make a conductive structure. That for me as a chemist was very exciting, even just to be able to do that was very “high level”. Usually the body defends itself, but to get a gel that can arrange itself around the neurons… I was kind of surprised that we managed to do that. Magnus Berggren: There’s almost like a philosophical beauty to this. We can use the energy system of an animal and use that energy to power and fuel polymerization. We always need energy to make materials, and normally we get energy for polymerization to make materials from, say, electricity, or very harsh chemicals. Here, we can use the naturally available sugar inside living tissue as the sole origin of energy to power up molecules, to make a scaffold that has the power of conductivity. We sort of elegantly managed to tap into just a tiny portion of the energy that is available naturally in the body and that has never been done before. And you can use this gel not just to create conductive structures around an organ, but also around a cell, correct? Magnus Berggren: Here we show that the material can not only form around organs, or around structures, or within cavities, but actually inside the cell. So, can we start to build up device structures at cell level? That’s one of the pathways of research that we’re going to have to start exploring. This sounds very invasive though, no? Roger Olsson: No actually. For the zebrafish, we’re using a very thin capillary to inject the gel, one the size of a human hair, and after two days the initial inflammation of that area was gone. And there’s no inflammation from the polymer itself, inside the tissue. So, you’ve tested this in fish, but what is the likelihood that this is going to work in other kinds of organisms? And ultimately humans? Roger Olsson: Actually, I think we made one of the more difficult decisions to work with a fish. To scale up this kind of work to animals such as rats or non-human primates is easier, because, with those animals, we can do everything in a larger scale. So, we met this challenge directly. We did an animal that is in water, and we had to do different techniques to keep the fish alive during the injection. So adding the compound to, say, rodents, will be much easier because that is the standard format. So I think upscaling to other animals will be easier. So now that you’ve tested it works, what exactly can you do with this new conductive gel for live tissue? What can we use it for, realistically? Magnus Berggren: Let’s take deep brain electrodes, for example. They are used for deep-brain stimulation to treat neurological conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. This is how they work today: you penetrate through the scalp, you go deep into the brain tissue, and you reach the glial cells — the cells that help the functioning of neurons. But this process basically creates scar tissue around the cells, and over time, it lowers the efficacy and precision of the treatment. We hope that by injecting this and creating electrodes that are mixed within the neural system, we don't kill any of the neurons and we don't produce any ugly scar tissue. I think we have done one more major step towards something that could, for a deep brain stimulation electrode, get into much closer proximity to the neurons, and maybe even have the neurons embedded within the electrode. Roger Olsson: Electrostimulation is used for Parkinson's disease, there are some studies of its use for chronic pain, for example, Alzheimer's. We would like to go and replace those solid electrodes used for this therapy with these liquid electrodes that are moving with the brain, in unison. But this can take many many years, I’ve been involved in getting drugs to the market, and it can take a long time. *This article includes some heavily paraphrased information, under the guidance of interviewees*

This scientist is figuring out how to avoid their children also suffering the consequences. A growing body of research suggests that structural and interpersonal racism compound to wreak havoc on the mental health of black people in America. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, those effects were further exacerbated. Wanjiku F.M. Njoroge, the Medical Director of the Young Child Clinic at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, wanted to understand what this unique, stressful time looked like for black women. Specifically, for those who were experiencing pregnancy. She’s adamant that learning more about their experiences — what worked and what didn't — can arm us with much better knowledge to grow healthier, happier children in the future. I’m a science journalist, and had the pleasure of chatting with Njoroge for my ITM column, where I unpack the behind-the-scenes of science changing the way we think about the world. Together, we plunged into the details of her work, and the history that has carved out the patterns she’s trying to break. A collage of images made by Sofia Quaglia Why are you interested in that intersection between maternal and infant health, and the effects that racism has on it? I'm an infant preschool psychiatrist, and I'm a health equity researcher. I have long been interested in the intersection of race and racism, culture and ethnicity, and psychopathology. My interest is in those first five years of life — that’s because 90% of the brain develops, as you may well know, in the first five years of life. So, it is a critically important time when we're thinking about ensuring children and families are supported and trying to protect or mitigate against experiences that may have later associations with psychopathology. Why was Covid-19 a unique moment to look into how racism and health converge? When the pandemic hit the United States, simultaneously, we were wrestling with police brutality. Data was also coming out that communities of color, specifically African American, Latino, native and indigenous populations, were being hit harder and disproportionately impacted by the pandemic than other communities across the United States. With a group of multidisciplinary colleagues from the institutions I work with, we started imagining what it might be like to be a pregnant woman. We created a questionnaire that we sent out to all the women who were currently pregnant, and in any of the Pennsylvania Hospital Health Systems. We asked how they were doing, and what their concerns about the pandemic were. We asked about their concerns about deliveries, their pregnancies, and their mood — trying to gauge depression and anxiety. We were also interested in where these women lived, so we looked at zip codes and addresses. And what were the results of this initial feedback? We recognized that while all pregnant women were concerned and stressed, black women were more concerned, and they had different worries. For example, we know that there are disparities in morbidity and mortality for women of colour, with black women dying about 2.3 times more than non-Latinx white women in the United States. We don’t know whether this reinforced black women’s growing concerns, but there clearly was more worry about delivery among this segment of the population. Similarly, black women were more concerned about what the pandemic might mean for their jobs, for financial and housing situations. We know that black women get paid less than white women on average, in any job across the United States. So again, the disparities that already existed, were reflected in the concerns. The differences seem to speak to these larger disparities. In the subsequent surveys, we've added more questions to try to unpack these differences, and we’re speaking to these women one on one to find out if there are themes that exist across black women, or if there are some differences based on a variety of other factors. The surveys also looked at the geographical data of where these women were living, only to find a pattern of differences in their mental health outcomes and worries. Does this have something to do with America’s history of segregation? Yes, it’s called redlining. Back in the 1930s and 40s, there was a group that was mandated by the Feds called the HLC, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, which was tasked with trying to determine neighbourhoods for future investments. They were in over 230 cities in the United States and were colour-coding their maps into four different colours: red, yellow, green, and blue. The blue neighbourhoods were the best neighbourhoods, the neighbourhoods that were better for investment. The green neighbourhoods were growing, similar to the blues. The yellow neighbourhoods were hazardous and the red neighbourhoods were declining. Guess what: the areas that were deemed the red neighbourhoods had the largest amounts of Black Folk. Because those neighbourhoods were redlined there was disinvestment: they did not build any new stores or parks or museums. If you had a house in that neighbourhood, your house was worth less than if you were in a blue or green neighbourhood. If you imagine intergenerational wealth, Black folks are already being paid significantly less than white people, and their neighbourhoods are now deemed as declining and hazardous. If you passed that on to your future generations, you were already starting off at a deficit. And because of segregation, you could only buy into these neighbourhoods, or only live and rent in these neighbourhoods that had been red lines. So, you were again, at a deficit. But why is this segregation still relevant today, and how does it tie in with people’s physical and mental health? Redlining has had all kinds of ramifications. For Philly, for example, you can take the 1934 maps and overlay it onto the 2020 map. The areas that had been redlined in the 30s are the same areas where the Covid-19 pandemic was most impacting communities. When we overlaid the black women in our survey study on these old historical redlining maps, the majority of the black women were living in these historically redlined neighborhoods. This goes to show that in the United States, there are these systems and structures that were specifically built and created to segregate Americans and they have had this long-lasting and enduring impact on the health of Americans. That’s also why the pandemic was very much hitting communities on a mental health level. Does this add to the everyday racism that people of colour experience? Yes. When we started including questions about everyday discrimination in our surveys, we did find in our cohort that black women reported higher rates of racism. This can also trickle down to their children. There's been some interesting research that talks about how interpersonal racism can really impact black women's health while they're pregnant, and that that can be reflected in their child's development early in infancy — with the children appearing more anxious, having more difficulty separating, and more. How much do we know of how much in turn, then this affects the development of children? That's the question! We’ve been working with these women since they were pregnant, and we follow them and their babies through the first four years of life — the babies are now two. We have data from when they were pregnant, at delivery, and from six to 15 weeks postpartum. We're still asking moms questions about depression, anxiety, trust, and their medical team at the time of delivery. Now we're asking the fathers or secondary caregivers the same. We’re also doing interactive exercises with the moms and the babies, where we send toys to their homes and observe different tasks. From all this data, we can hopefully start to glean what the impacts of racism and the pandemic are on the developmental health of children. What is your hypothesis so far and what can we do with this initial data? What we know is that people in the United States experience multiple forms of racism concurrently. And yet, many black people are doing well, despite all of the deck being stacked against us. There clearly is resilience. Looking at our data, we can start to think about what kinds of things families may have that have helped their children to thrive despite all the challenges. Then again, babies, like adults, all have different temperaments, so that can be an important factor at play. When we're thinking about prevention and early intervention, we want to be as precise as possible. There may not be an intervention for all. If we're thinking about trying to help parents with bringing children to the future, then having a more specific sense of what factors are the most determinative. Can we erase some of those boxes? Or can we build things around them? Our goal is to do as much as we can for stages of life when the brain is building itself to be as protected as possible for the rest of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

This new meta-analysis gets to the bottom of the question. A new, exhaustive study published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals some striking new relationships between personality and cognitive abilities. I’m a science journalist, and my work — which has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic — is about telling stories of how the mind works. I met with the researchers behind the paper, Kevin Stanek and Deniz Ones from the University of Minnesota, and together, we plunged into the details of the connections between personality and cognitive abilities, and why they matter. A collage created by the author Sofia Quaglia What was the motivation behind starting this long, meticulous meta-analysis of all the research out there on how cognitive abilities and personality are linked? Why did you work more than 14 years to analyse over 1300 studies on this topic? DO: Psychology as a science has been around for over one hundred years, and thousands of people have been toiling in the background, pumping out research studies. Few people have paid attention to the bigger picture that exists. One study at a time is great and is absolutely necessary. But scientific breakthrough and scientific understanding is only possible by pooling many studies together and looking at a panorama of what happens and that's what meta-analysis does. All of my career is a series of meta-analyses, for the most part. So, I have been on this path of using meta-analysis to answer big questions for over 30 years by now. KS: There's a liability that people misunderstand it as just looking at personality and intelligence. What this study is about is understanding human diversity and individuality. Because we believe people don't seem to understand themselves. And if you don't understand yourself, how can you understand others? And if you don't understand others, how can you appreciate diversity? So that's what motivated us to step back: we can think more about who we are, what we want out of life, and how to get from here to there. Personality and intelligence happened to be two really core pillars of human individuality. So that's where we started. What are the methods for pulling off such an endeavour, what did you do in your research? You pored over 1,325 studies including millions of individuals from more than 50 countries, and basically found 60,690 relations between 79 personality and 97 cognitive ability constructs. KS: Our goal with this meta-analysis was to be the most zealous, and turn over every stone. We ended up writing letters to people, we had a research team of 30 unpaid assistants all contributing and going to libraries around the world, or having scans from librarians in different places. Having people's parents do Farsi translations for us. It was a very messy process. DO: I feel that we need to use every piece of information that has ever been produced on a topic before we conclude anything. And I believe that science is democratic. First of all, this study was not funded by anybody. We did it. So, here's democratic point number one. Democratic point number two is the number of volunteers that were involved with different pieces of the work and how they each contributed. And then number three, are the people who actually gave us access to databases that were sitting on their computers — like militaries around the world. When did you start seeing patterns, what was that Eureka moment like, and which patterns first emerged from your extensive analysis? DO: We initially started with a database and Kevin ran the first iteration of our analyses all the way back in 2014. While we could see the patterns, we weren't able to decipher what they meant for a while. So, we continued looking at different ways of measuring things, finding more assessments. And then we sort of hit a breakout point of "Oh my gosh, this is what the data appear to be showing us!! I don’t mean to make it sound immodest, but it was almost like Watson and Crick sitting with the pieces of molecules trying to make up what the structure of DNA is. When we started this, the literature told us this very loud and clear, up until two years or so ago, that cognitive ability and personality are mostly unrelated the relations between the two domains are limited. And lo and behold, in our data set we have shown that people who are industrious and who are compassionate, tend to acquire more knowledge and skills, regardless of what the domain is. I expected to find that with industriousness, but I did not expect to find it with compassion. So those were things that we have been able to show in this work. So, being agreeable is linked with being smart? DO: Agreeableness has two aspects to it. One is compassion and one is politeness. Compassion is positively related to all cognitive abilities. Politeness is negatively related. So why are people who are generally more polite lower in cognitive ability? There are two options that may explain the findings. One option is that being polite requires cognitive resources, knowledge about interactions and reactions of other people, and how to get along. Using that information and behaving in a polite way takes up cognitive resources. Whatever is invested in politeness is being taken away from some other area, and that's why that negative relationship might result. KS: The other theory is that you don't have the cognitive resources, and if you don't have as high ability to deal with complexity on your own, a good strategy in life is to actually plug into a social network where you add something, but they also have some sort of insurance. We're currently not sure which way it goes. That's probably something for longitudinal studies to tease out. But it's interesting to consider those options. Can we dive a little bit deeper into what some of those assumptions that you've been able to overturn are and the main findings that you find most interesting, most exciting, and most revealing? DO: Most people were aware, from prior research, that "test anxiety" relates negatively to cognitive performance on tests. That was a well-established finding. What wasn't well established is that we find just as high correlations with depression. We found that people experiencing depression tend to score poorly on cognitive ability tests, regardless of which type of cognitive ability we're talking about. The same goes for anxiety and suspiciousness, other facets of neuroticism. People previously thought tests were making people anxious and causing them to perform poorly on cognitive tests too. Now we're saying "No! The issue is bigger." Anybody who's depressed and who is anxious and who is suspicious will tend to have a lower level of cognitive ability. And you can ask, which comes first? Cognitive ability or anxiety and depression? There are theories that would support the primacy of one over the other. But nonetheless, those connections are more fundamental than just test anxiety. So that's one. KS: Within the Big Five personality traits — extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism — extraversion breaks into enthusiasm and assertiveness, and within those, there are facets, and "activity" is one of those. Active people are high energy, and there are people who seem to have boundless energy and bustle. It was interesting to note that those people just tended to, on average, have higher cognitive ability scores. They tend to be better at retrieving things from their memory. And they're really efficient in information processing. This was in contrast to the stereotype of the intellectual person who's in the library all the time or closeted away in their room. That's not what we found. Definitely not what I had expected going in and definitely not what the popular stereotype is. What are the implications of carrying out research like this? What can real people do with this knowledge about their personalities and cognitive abilities? KS: We can't turn a blind eye: there are real differences between people. And if we can understand them better, I think it would go a very long way toward actually appreciating them more. We also provide evidence in the paper that these traits do tend to change over time. I think what's difficult is consciously changing these traits. So certainly, these things change with age. For example, a three-year-old is not as smart as a 24-year-old. And those things develop and have their own natural curves and trajectories but what's harder is saying, "I want to be more open-minded." We don't have a lot of proven interventions that can change that in an enduring way. There are interesting things like religion, the military, and significant life events that seem to have an impact, but I haven't seen literature that shows true intervention effects. DO: The only trait that seems to be more malleable with direct intervention is neuroticism. You can have depressed folks seek treatment and it improves their depression levels. The upshot of that is that we showed that depression is negatively correlated with cognitive abilities. Depressed people's minds tend to shut down in terms of cognitive performance. By interventions into neuroticism, we can potentially also increase people's cognitive performance. There's at least one domain that we know that we can do something with. Off the top of my head, I can come up with quite a few nefarious uses for this sort of data. Doesn’t this risk prematurely labelling people as something or the other? DO: All personality traits are very fine refinements along a big continuum. All of us are incredibly unique individuals. It is impossible to categorise people into buckets. You can't bucket anybody into a single area. Simply, we can now use additional research from psychology to say: if your goal is to become a negotiator, which skills, which knowledge, and which cognitive abilities will you draw on? And how easy or more difficult will it be for you? Do you have the industriousness to bring you up to par if you don't have the skills? By using these multiple dimensions of personality and cognitive ability, it reduces the likelihood that anybody can be pigeonholed into anything. KS: You mention sorting people being nefarious, but I would actually say it's one of the biggest missed opportunities that exist. There are 8 billion people in the world: how many marriages are the optimal couple? There are millions of jobs in the world: how many people are in the optimal job for them? There's an almost infinite number of places you could live in the world: how many people are living in the place that's actually best for them? There are too many choices for us to go out and find out on our own and just experience. It's too hard to know ourselves well enough and know the options well enough, to find those matches. So, I see the optimistic side of it, where if we can understand ourselves better and we can come up with much, much better matches, which ultimately means people are happier, healthier, and more productive. Is the way we’re living right now that bad? KS: People can be given information about themselves and about others, and understand others better so that they can make more optimal choices for themselves. It increases personal choice and does so using a much higher number of personality and cognitive ability dimensions than ever before thought. The alternative, if you don't do that, is convenience: who's nearby is much more likely to become your mate than the ideal person. It's also biased: certain groups get chosen more for certain things because of preconceived bias. And it's also marketing. It's what other people want for you, brands marketing to you, or people pushing you and influencing you even without your knowledge. Because you don't know yourself well enough to have a compass. Ok, so where do we go from here? DO: In psychology, behavioural economics, medicine, and education, people study or include in their studies either a personality variable or a cognitive ability variable — but it is included by itself. Maybe you get the big five, maybe you get general intelligence. Maybe you get memory. What our study very clearly shows is, if you think that conscientiousness is responsible for an effect, you'd better include the cognitive abilities that conscientiousness is correlated with. You cannot just include conscientiousness and say, "I discovered conscientiousness does x and y," you have to make sure that you have included what conscientiousness is connected with. From a practical point of view, applications can be put together. For example, if we know the characteristics of students, how can we tailor educational programs to better suit their personality and ability constellation? People have tried it with cognitive ability alone, but not the two of them put together. How can we refine the recruitment and selection systems of companies? We think that we are selecting for compassion when we select nurses, well, guess what it's going to bring other traits along with it in terms of skills and capabilities. From a clinical point of view, we can enhance therapeutic interventions in clinical settings. The implications of this research are vast in terms of the domains that it touches. KS: The biggest threat to humanity is not predators, disease, or even conflict. It's ignorance. So the point of this research was to illuminate further some of the truths around us, so that we can lead better lives. It's really about continuing to push people to better understand themselves.

An interview with Zachariah Reagh, a brain scientist at Washington University. Do you remember what you did on this day six months ago? Do you remember who you were with? Or where you were? Zachariah Reagh, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has a new paper out in Nature Communications about how the brain remembers everyday-events by making mental sketches of people and contexts and copy-pasting them around different scenarios. I’m a science journalist, and I had the pleasure of chatting with Raegh for Behind The Science, my ITM column where I unpack the behind-the-scenes of science changing the way we think about the world. A collage created by the author Sofia Quaglia Tell me a little bit about what your lab does. I know you’re interested in how the human brain parse, store, and retrieve dynamic experiences, like those we encounter in our everyday lives, and how these processes change in healthy aging and with age-related pathology. At the core, I study human memory, and how human memory changes as we get older. Specifically, I study memory for events. The thing about memory is that it's not just one thing, there are a lot of different kinds of memory and a lot of different ways your memory can do its job. You've got procedural memory — so how you ride a bike, and other similar things that you don't necessarily need to explain, but just learn and know how to do them. Similarly, there are other implicit memories, like smelling something that you know tastes good might make you salivate. Those are things that your body has just kind of learned how to do. Then there are more explicit forms of memory. For example, if you asked me what I did yesterday, and I tell you about it, that's an explicit type of memory. And within that domain, you've got a few other different kinds: semantic memory, which is like remembering the capital of Washington State, episodic memory, which is describing the things that happened to you yesterday, and so forth. My research is more in the realm of episodic memory side. This recent paper that you published on how the brain responds to everyday events, and what mechanisms are at play, how did this come about? One of the things that we've known about episodic memory, is that your memory of events is made up of different pieces and different processes. For a long time, folks like myself have been obsessing over this idea of “item” versus “context”. What I mean by that is, if you go sit down and have lunch with your friend, the cafe that you're in is the context. And you know, the coffee cup in front of you is an item. Or even maybe your friend is an item within that context. If you think about it, that's a really intuitive way to sort out how you deal with your experiences. On the one hand, people have been doing experiments that have shown it could work this way, but those experiments have generally been really, really simplistic: here's a picture of an apple overlaid on a picture of a scene. And I'm not knocking simplicity, simplicity is great, it helps you get down to the core pieces of what’s happening, but our real-world experiences are a lot messier and grosser than that. I walk into a coffee shop, there are people everywhere, and there are cups everywhere. There's a counter full of pastries, and no one's telling me okay, these are the items, and here's the context that you're in. Over time, it started bugging me that we have no idea if that's how your brain is pulling these different pieces apart and storing them as memories. On the other hand, people like myself, who study memory, have started using really complex things like Hollywood films or television shows, and audio stories to study how we remember things. But those are expertly constructed to capture your attention and be interesting, so that's also not quite like real life, right? There's no director who's making sure your day-to-day experiences are fun. What this study really represented is somewhere in the middle. So, can we actually take something that looks like real life where your brain actually does what it's doing in everyday life and not what we're just telling them to do in the lab? And bake in these different elements of memories, like focal items and contexts? And if we set things up in that way, just like your real-world experiences, does your brain then pull those pieces apart the way we think theoretically that it should? What was your approach to finding that middle ground? I first tried to find episodes of sitcoms where the same characters show up in the same places. Naturally, my mind gravitated towards “Friends” because there are so many episodes, and the same people are constantly showing up in the same places. But the problem with that was that, again, it’s a fun show, not an experiment. So, I had to do it myself. I took a GoPro and went to a few places in Davis, California, and took two of my colleagues and just filmed them: we went to a couple of different coffee shops, and a couple of different grocery stores, and I just gave them very vague instructions such as “sit down”, “open your laptop”, “start doing some work”, “someone's going to bring you a coffee”, and so forth. I was going for this slice of life, that you would actually see if you walked into a coffee shop.. The key part of the design were the two people — Lisa and Tommy — each person would show up in four different context (in two different coffee shops, and in two different grocery stores). That allowed us to look at what the brain was doing while watching these different events unfolded. Are there parts of your memory system that care about when Lisa is there, no matter where she is? No matter what context it is? Are there parts of the brain that show a really nice, stable signal when you're in this particular coffee shop? Then we went one layer up and asked if there were areas that just liked it being in a coffee shop — no matter which one. It sounds a little counterintuitive, but if you think about it, you can go to any coffee shop in the world, and know what's probably going to happen. You know that you need to order your drink, you need to find a table to sit down and sip it. That’s what we call a “schema”. In the experiment, we showed people these videos and had them recall those events while we scanned their brain activity. This allowed us to compare activity between when they were watching the event unfold, and when they were remembering what that event was like. And what did you discover? What we found is that there are indeed parts of the brain that lay down these patterns associated with a specific person or a specific context. There was one network of cortical areas involved in episodic memory, that researchers have started calling the posterior medial network because it's in the posterior part of the brain and closer to the medial surface or the midline. These areas care more about context. So, when you were watching an event unfold, or when you were remembering an event that took place in a specific context, those patterns look similar, regardless of who was there. And there were a couple of other things we found too. The medial part of the prefrontal cortex had similar patterns of activity that were present anytime something was happening in a coffee shop. This was probably my favorite result, just because it's so mind-blowing. I guess that there are parts of your brain that know when you're in a certain type of situation. Finally, we found out that one area of the brain, the hippocampus, only liked a specific event. So this particular person in this particular context, and if you change either the person or the context, the pattern totally destabilised. And this isn't really surprising. If you know about the hippocampus, it's an area that makes very specific memories. Therefore, it makes sense that it would be a very hyper-specific combination of things. Why does all of this matter and to what extent do these findings have implications for how we actually understand the world around us? So first off, we were somewhat right about how we think memory works. And at least in my biased opinion, I think this makes an important push to say our memory probably works this way in the real world. But I think there are some other cool things that can be taken from this. A main one is that your brain is lazy. And it's efficient. So, you can think about an alternative situation where every time something new happens to you, you've got to build from the ground up what that representation looks like. Like a kid with Legos, you're just having to piece it together from scratch every time. But what the brain seems to have is a template for what this person should look like when you're encoding or remembering an event. Or it has a template for what this coffee shop looks like, or what any coffee shop might be like. This laziness is really good. Actually, it lets you flexibly create an event representation on the fly, which we do all the time. Going back to the concept of “schema”: Does it group coffee shops? Does it group all dining experiences? Does it group the act of having to be sat in an enclosed environment? Doing two things at once maybe like eating and talking? That's a far better question than you realize. Schema is used very flexibly. In my case, for example, it's just very simplistically saying, okay, here are coffee shops, here are grocery stores. But a coffee shop has a lot in common with a standard restaurant, or it has a whole lot in common with a bar really, right? It's just instead of coffee, you might be getting a beer in this other situation. Everything is very similar otherwise, would the areas of the brain that we found here doing the schema stuff look the same? If they went to a bar? Maybe. I don't really know. It might depend on the situation. But you also have schemas for situations. For example, you have a schema for what it's like to be on a date, which could be in a coffee shop, or it could be in a movie theater. We don't really know what the limits and boundaries of this are. But I think we as a field need to figure it out. I guess I also have the same question for the other element of this — the item-focused networks. To what degree do we know that network would light up if it's somebody I know or somebody I care about? Or would it be different? Would it light up if it was my pet? A lot of those studies that I was talking about, that showed a picture of an apple over picture, tend to use objects as the items. But what I'm seeing here is that a person can actually be treated by these brain systems as an item. I mean, emotion and affect, in general, are one of those things that color a lot of processes in the brain. And I often joke that memory researchers are a little bit afraid of emotion, because it takes the simple, nice stories that we like to tell ourselves about how the brain works, and then throws a wrench into it. Yes, how does emotion play a role in this whole differentiation of mechanisms? What's kind of funny in this study was that we tried to capture these slice-of-life moments. But there's one thing that we're really missing here: meaning. Your actual day-to-day moments. some of them sure you just walk into a coffee shop, and there's nothing on your mind, and you're just observing what's happening, but a lot of your life is woven together by stories. So why did you get there? Where are you going next? Are you at the coffee shop with a friend? What are you meeting about? That's completely absent from this experiment. I think what I've learned from this experiment, is that I am ready to dive into the more complex side of things such as stories and narratives. How does this fit in with the bigger picture of the research that you're doing? And how do we go on from here? One of the things that I'm interested in pursuing is: what happens to all this as we get older? And we've got data that’s been snowballing over the past couple of decades, showing that these memory systems might be impacted differently by age-related pathology. The context and item-related networks, for example, are affected differently by Alzheimer's disease. It’s maybe a golden opportunity that we're able to separate what these networks are doing by researching it. It’s an avenue that I'm pretty excited about, which I think is really needed. This actually relates to some work I did in graduate school, where we found that your ability to make really high-fidelity memories of objects is more compromised in aging than contextual information. But that, again, that's one of those really simplistic studies.

Joe Paton, head of the Learning Lab at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, has been researching the neurological principles by which the brain gains access to timekeeping, a fundamental dimension of our experience on Earth. He and his team have narrowed down a population of neurons in the striatum, a deep brain region, that possess a rich capacity to generate time-varying patterns of activity. “You can see this network of neurons in a dish, if you provide some input, there's going to be some reverberation of that input over time,” says Paton. “The patterns of activity that are produced during that reverberation actually provide you information, for instance, about when that input was given.” Paton’s team ran a set of experiments on mice, training them to distinguish between different intervals of time — like a period of silence between two tones — and whether the interval between the two tones was shorter or longer than 1.5 seconds. As a result, they were able to show that if you train an animal to make categorical judgments about the duration of some stimulus, that time-neuron pattern of activity systematically evolves more quickly or more slowly according to whether the animal categorizes the interval as having lasted longer or shorter. So, they asked, if you go in and mess with that neuron pattern, will it mess with that brain’s understanding of time passing? “Understanding how the brain basically orders and positions events in time is really critical for understanding how it learns to guide behavior,” says Paton. A collage of images made by Sofia Quaglia I’m a science journalist, and my work — which has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic — is about telling stories of how the mind works. In this Q&A, Paton and I discussed his latest paper in published in scientific journal, Nature in July 2023, and how his team went about looking for the answers to that question. So, you have this population of neurons and you know, from prior research, that they speed up and slow down in patterns that match the way the brain processes time, but how can you be sure? Those were just correlation studies, right? You're carefully looking at behavior, quantifying the animal’s sensitivity to time through the judgments it’s making and then you're looking at patterns of activity and you're relating the neural activity to behavior. But of course, correlation doesn't imply causation. To really test whether these patterns of activity are involved in causing the animal's judgments, we need to intervene. We've got incredible tools nowadays for manipulating neural circuits. What we wanted to do was just keep the pattern of activity the same, but just slow it down or speed it up. So we turned to temperature. In some neural systems, it's been shown that just by changing the temperature of the system, you can slow down or speed up patterns of neural activity while leaving all the structure of that neural activity intact. We designed a thermoelectric device for warming or cooling the striatum focally, while simultaneously recording neural activity, and confirmed that we could use temperature to kind of stretch and contract patterns of neural activity in time. You can think about networks of interconnected neurons as sort of analogous to a body of water. Just like when you throw a stone into a pool of water, and that causes a bunch of ripples that move over time when you give input to a network of neurons, you'll see patterns of activity moving through the network. What we're doing here with temperature is sort of analogous to making the fluid more viscous or less viscous. So the waves are traveling faster or slower. Before this study, we didn't really know, conclusively, how the brain was essentially knowing information about when things happen. We didn't know how it gained access to a sense of time. Since the striatum is in the basal ganglia, did making the rats perceive time as faster or slower also change whether they moved more quickly or more slowly? Yes, the basal ganglia is a brain system that's implicated in motor control, so that questions makes sense. Dysfunction in the basal ganglia underlies things like Huntington's or Parkinson's diseases, which we think of as motor diseases and movement disorders Some scholars argue that the basal ganglia is involved in learning really detailed moment-by-moment programs for motor control. If we had effects on the animal’s temporal decisions, we thought we might also see similar effects on the kind of temporal control of their movement. We didn't see that. Instead, what we saw was that both warming and cooling slowed the animals down slightly. And that's consistent with a long-known role for the basal ganglia in modulating movement vigor. So for instance, in Parkinson's one of the major symptoms is the slowness of movement, and real difficulty with initiating movements. So these findings indicate that the striatum is critical for deciding ‘what’ to do and ‘when’ to do it, but ‘how’ to do it, and how to control ongoing movement — whether fast or slow — is left to other brain structures. I know you have some preliminary data that seems to suggest another part of the brain can manipulate the speed and direction at which stuff happens? Early data suggests that – unlike when we manipulate the temperature in the basal ganglia where we only saw this sort of gain effect on movement — when we do those same kinds of manipulations in the cerebellum part of the brain, we see really striking effects on the continuous control movement. So, not only does motion change in speed, but also direction. If you imagine you have a series of motor commands that are required for continuously controlling say a reach, if I now take the time base, and I stretch it, you don't just expect that the movement is going to get slower, it’s actually going to follow a different trajectory, because you're going to be issuing those commands for longer. The prediction is you actually make a larger, more eccentric reach. And conversely, when you compress the time base, you expect that you're going to get a less eccentric reach. That's what we see. So seeing this dissociation of roles between two major brain systems is exciting. Much of this sound quite abstract, how do we make it applicable to our understanding of the real world? One key application is biology and medicine. These discoveries can provide a more satisfactory understanding of many different disorders that affect the circuits we're studying. I mentioned Parkinson's, and Huntington's, but there are also other diseases that affect the basal ganglia, like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We don't usually necessarily think about Parkinson's and OCD as being driven by a similar underlying problem. But in Parkinson's, patients have trouble initiating movements. In OCD, patients have a problem transitioning out of particular patterns of thought. So, could we understand those two diseases as having more in common, and thus could that give rise to more effective interventions? We don't know. That's for future research to try and figure out, but I think it does provide a really attractive organizing principle for what this brain system is doing.

An analysis of the public discourse of perinatal mental health on social media Writer's note: this piece was co-written with Dr Juan Chart-Pascual "But doctor, that's not what it says on the internet." This is something a patient being treated for bipolar disorder told my colleague Juan during a routine consultation. She wasn't challenging his advice; she was just telling him what she had read on social media and asking how it fit with his recommendations. That one sentence stayed with him since and sent us both down a rabbit hole. If patients are forming their ideas about pregnancy and mental health on social media - often long before they sit across from us in the clinic - shouldn't we, as clinicians, actually know what information they are finding there? Image Source: Berke Citak on Unsplash We are Nuria and Juan, two psychiatrists and researchers who couldn't shake that question. So, we did the only sensible thing two curious clinicians can do with an unanswered question and far too much enthusiasm: we conducted research to find an answer. Earlier this year, we presented our research at the UK and Ireland Marcé Society conference; now, through this piece, we want to share with you what we found, but first, let us tell you what we did. What Did We Do? Firstly, we used an AI model to sift through over 300,000 public posts on X (formerly Twitter), spanning eleven years, from 2014 to 2024. Then, we rolled up our sleeves to figure out what the internet really says about perinatal mental health, which refers to the mental health of parents during pregnancy and up to one year after childbirth, and how much of it we can trust. In practice, we used one AI tool to automatically group posts into recurring topics, and another one to gauge each post’s tone, and determine whether it was positive, negative, or neutral. We then checked a sample of the results manually to make sure the AI had got both the topics and the tone right. That process gave us 122 fine-grained topics, which we then grouped by hand into broader, more meaningful themes by reading the top terms and example posts from each one ourselves. We came up with five broader themes that accounted for 70% of all the posts that could be categorised, as summarised in the image below. Image by the authors. What Did We Find? Substance Exposure & Neurodevelopmental Risks The single biggest theme we found — accounting for more than a quarter of all the posts we could categorise — was about substance use in pregnancy and its effects on the unborn child's developing brain. Most of it concerned alcohol consumption during pregnancy and foetal alcohol spectrum disorder: a well-established, genuinely preventable harm. Its prominence is honestly a good sign, showing that people are paying attention to some real concerns. However, tucked inside that same theme was a smaller, noisier cluster: posts linking paracetamol use in pregnancy or childhood vaccines to autism and ADHD in children. The science behind these claims is extremely limited and contested, yet online, they are often presented with the same urgency, the same capital letters, the same "did you know?" energy as posts warning about genuine risks. If you are scrolling at 3 am, mid-pregnancy and anxious, social media does not hand you a neat, fact-checked list. Instead, it presents you with real risks and rumours side by side, dressed in identical fonts. To us, that is the finding most worth sitting with, as it makes evidence-based guidelines and unsupported claims difficult to distinguish, fuelling misinformation and undermining informed decisions. Lived Experience of Perinatal Depression & Birth Trauma The second-biggest theme was also the one that scored most negatively in our sentiment analysis. It was about people describing their experiences of birth trauma, sleeplessness, or simply feeling "hit hard”, which likely explains the sentiment score of this theme. These social media posts did not use detailed clinical vocabulary, but raw descriptions of lived experiences. Maybe that's exactly why they gain traction among readers: not because they teach them anything new about mental health, but because they evoke the sense of someone else going through the same experience. Image from Pavel Bekker on Unsplash While sharing difficult experiences with others who have been through similar situations can provide validation and reduce isolation, it can also spread misinformation and expose people to unsolicited and questionable advice. For example, one pattern that stood out to us as psychiatrists, was people using "baby blues" and "postpartum depression" interchangeably. They are not. Baby blues are a normal, time-limited dip that most new parents experience, while postpartum depression is a serious, potentially life-threatening illness. Blurring the two can cause damage both ways — turning real depression into something to just push through, or an ordinary hard week into a diagnosis. The Quieter Conversations The other three themes were smaller, but each had its own flavour. One focused on anxiety, panic and somatic symptoms, which made up nearly 13% of posts. Pregnancy-related insomnia was by far the biggest driver here. Yet, the theme also covered birth anxiety, panic attacks, and postpartum anxiety more broadly, alongside quieter concerns like anxious thoughts about motherhood itself. Another theme, clinical postpartum depression (PPD): screening, treatment and research, reflected a more clinical corner of the internet where people discussed screening guidelines, ongoing research, and treatment recommendations for postpartum depression. Unsurprisingly, this was the only theme that stayed fairly emotionally neutral throughout, highlighting the contrast between discussing clinical guidance and sharing lived experiences. If anything, that's encouraging, as it shows a real appetite for accurate, evidence-based information online — a chance for clinicians to meet people where they already are. Finally, there was a reproductive and physical health theme, spanning from premenstrual dysphoric disorder to contraception side effects to the kind of miscarriage grief nobody quite knows how to talk about. This theme offered a very powerful reminder that "perinatal" mental health doesn't politely begin at conception and end 12 months after childbirth. A Decade of Content Getting Harder to Read Here's the finding that unsettled us the most. Over half of all 305,619 posts — 54%, to be exact — carried a negative tone. What's shocking is that it got worse, year after year, for ten years straight. This wasn't just a vibe. It was a clear pattern in the data, one that held up no matter how you looked at it. So, What Do We Actually Do With This? Honestly? Show up more. People are getting genuine comfort from strangers online describing the same spiral they are in, and that's not something to roll our eyes at; it's something worth protecting. But here is the catch: people don’t simply find comfort online, they also find inaccurate information, unsolicited advice, and negative content. Misinformation doesn't walk in wearing a sign. Paracetamol and vaccine claims sit right next to real, evidence-based warnings and waiting until a myth goes viral to correct it, is too late. Clinicians and scientific bodies need to be in the feed before that happens. Image by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash. Why This Matters Beyond the Like Button It would be easy to dismiss this as noise, but at this scale — hundreds of thousands of people, over more than a decade — it starts to look less like noise and more like a barometer. This data tells us where anxiety concentrates, where misinformation finds an opening, and where people feel so unheard that they would rather tell a stranger online than their GP. Listening to that properly might be one of the more useful things we can do with all this AI everyone keeps talking about. Because the goal isn't to pull people away from social media, it's to make sure what they find there is accurate, and that reaching out for support never feels wrong.

How the media pushes for a narrative that Muslim women are victims to be saved, when they are, in fact, survivors. Image Source: Nikolas Gannon on Unsplash “I don’t understand why I have to put a stole to cover myself up,” I said, horrified. I was fourteen, with simmering teenage anger, making sense of the world and not liking the position Muslim women were often put into. I had clarity; if you want to wear something, you wear it, whether Hijab or dresses, and if you don’t like something you don’t wear it. But my extended family was insistent that it was the ‘right’ age for me to start covering up, a narrative common for many Muslim Women. My uncle composed himself as if he had to teach me how to be a woman. “When you get a new iPad, dear child, what is the first thing you do?” He was condescending even though I was well aware where this was going. “Get an iPad cover.” “Exactly, and women are so much more precious than an iPad. Shouldn’t they be treasured similarly?” “Women,” I snarled at him, “are breathing and living beings with agency, and rights. They are not devices that can be controlled by men or anyone else. If you have to compare, they can only be compared to men, not to things, animals or ‘treasures’.” He dismissed me as he had nothing left to say, but this, even at fourteen, made something clear; for the world at large, Muslim women were objects, not subjects. Something to be covered up, treasured, ‘saved’, and looked after. This understanding only deepened in the years that followed. I completed a master’s in Gender Studies and Law from SOAS, where I decoded Human Rights of Women across the developing world. This was after a year-long stint in the political landscape of South Asia, working in the developing sector for the welfare and education of marginalised girls and women. I learnt on the ground how the worldly narrative of Muslim women as victims was unfair to us all. At the beginning of the Iran and US war, one key theme that reportedly kept coming up, to justify the US's side, was how they were saving Iranian women. Yet, if anyone were to ever read the words of Iranian women themselves, they would know how fiercely they have been battling patriarchal control. Image Source: Sima Ghaffarzadeh on Pexels In social and political landscapes, Muslim women are often reduced to being objects that certain men have to save from other men. Whether it is women impacted by strict regimes in war-torn countries, or spaces of heightened violence across the Global South. The ‘saving’ often looks like copy-pasting the model of Western feminism, which can work for some, but not for all. Where do these women, who are impacted, get to have a say? It is reported that often the narrative of victimising Muslim women stems from a justification of taxing foreign policies that pushes for wars. Yet another reason why Muslim women are so easily deemed small, fragile and vulnerable is because there is a failure to recognise their soft power, which helps them resist in the most difficult of spaces. Image Source: Craig Melville on Unsplash Even in feminist discussions, intersectionality often takes a backseat, with the Western model of feminism often used as the ultimate way of living the 'free' life. And it is a beautiful interpretation, but it works only for a specific region with a specific socio-political economy. For survivors, the fight is multilayered, often fighting against patriarchy, political forces, religious misinterpretation, and cultural toxicity, things that all Muslim women are constantly battling with. They don't require men to save them from men (as has always been a war narrative for the past two hundred years) or reduce them to damsels, but require an intersectional approach when engaging with their existence and creating tools for survival from the media. The resistance of Muslim women, whether in Egypt as it toppled the government, in India with a 100 day long sit-in process, or a Yemeni revolution of peaceful protests, or the Anti Taliban movement by Afghan feminists, the world has seen multiple examples of their bravery. Across the globe, many Muslim women have constantly fought for their rights. The portrayal of them as damsels to be saved does a disservice to their intersectional identity where culture, religion, and regional nuances play a significant role. Kimberly Crenshaw’s term ‘intersectionality’ is central to my understanding of a Muslim woman. When Kershaw uses the analogy of a car accident that occurs at a crossroad, she means that each vehicle coming from all directions represents a layer of intersectionality. For Muslim women, their gender, religion, caste, class, and sexuality are the intersectionalities they deal with. They have been ‘othered’ due to religion and deemed insignificant due to their gender. When I am analysing Muslim women and how the media portrays them as victims, instead of agents of change, intersectional feminism is an important framework that needs to be the foundation. In postcolonial feminist theory, which focuses on feminism after incorporating the impact of colonial rule, a woman is impacted by three structures. First, the national structure, which is her country, where she has to adhere to the woman her countrymen expect her to be, one who can birth leaders; second, the patriarchal structure, where a woman’s existence has to appeal to the men around her; and third, the religious structure, where her piousness becomes imperative in her being a woman. These dynamics play a role in furthering the marginalisation of women as they punish them for deviating from structures. Minority women therefore might struggle to be treated equally and are disadvantaged by both the religion and the nationalistic structures. In this ‘gendered Orientalism’, Muslim women are supposedly ‘distressed’ under the toxic patriarchal control of Muslim men and will be rescued by the liberated West. And this is where Western feminism also does them a disservice by wanting to ‘free’ them. Image Source: Knelstrom Ltd on Pexels Equating the Western feminist model as the ultimate version of feminism negates, for example, a Nigerian woman whose battle includes fighting not just equal pay but pay in itself compared to the West’s battle for equal pay. Battles being fought in other spaces, for example, fighting against the Hijab ban and letting women in Kerala, India, wear a Hijab while giving an exam, becomes a distant future for women in Sudan as they are currently battling something more dire like sexual abuse and war crimes. Both of them are extremely important, but they have varying degrees of intensity to it both. The intensity continues to shift across regions and structures, and it is high time, as feminist people, for us to incorporate the intersectionality of Muslim Women and recognise that they have been fighting wars, without weapons or armies, for centuries, for their gendered rights. Muslim Women are survivors, not victims. They do not need ‘saving’, instead, we must join forces in speaking against injustice, and provide platforms to their voices whenever we are. This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.