COEUR d’ALENE — Ahead of his retirement in May from teaching at Arizona State University, behavioral neuroscientist Brian Smith has put his focus into making science more accessible to more people.
“There’s a lot of misunderstanding what science is,” Smith said.
Smith has been hosting monthly science talks at 6 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month at the Innovation Collective at 418 E Lakeside Ave. The next meeting is Wednesday, April 1, and will likely be conducted over zoom.
One of the topics he has been most interested in sharing with people outside the field is how scientific knowledge proceeds and advances as more information is known and more data is reviewed.
When the coronavirus first emerged and people died, Smith said that scientists, “grasped toward what they know, which is be careful, wear a mask.”
As more data was compiled by scientists, Smith said the information the public received also was updated in real time. This confused some people because their awareness of science was that once something is known, it was fixed in perpetuity.
“People say science is not reliable because the story is changing, but it’s reliable because that’s evidence that it’s working,” Smith said.
When a fresh discovery is made, “it’s at best an approximation of the truth as it currently is,” Smith said. “We can probably expect that that story is going to change through time and with time as people do more research.”
Learning how honeybees and fruit flies process new information is something Smith does in his research at ASU.
He doesn’t work directly on Alzheimer’s research, but the work he does learning how memory works is then applied to humans as part of Alzheimer’s research.
“I work on basic research on learning and memory using fruit flies and honeybees and study how they learn, what changes in their brains when they learn,” Smith said. “What does that mean for our general understanding of how the nervous system can learn or remember anything?”
One of the Innovation Collective science talks Smith held last year focused on why memory research on fruit flies can teach us more about human memory.
“The neurons of any nervous system are the same neurons in you and me and a fruit fly,” Smith said. “When a fruit fly learns something and its brain becomes modified.”
The work Smith and his colleagues are doing is to see how brain neurochemistry works in honeybees as they learn to associate an odor with a reward.
Dopamine and serotonin can support memory and mood to help us learn.
“If we give somebody a candy bar and they eat it, dopamine is released in certain brain areas that tells you something good just happened, remember that,” Smith said. “My colleague has shown it’s not just dopamine.”
Instead, Smith said they are finding in their research that it’s a balance of biogenic aspects and dopamine is one part of the whole.
“We tried his technique for humans to try it in bees and it works,” Smith said. “The usual argument is we’ve shown this to be safe in bees and mice, therefore we’ll try it in humans, now I can make a joke that now that we’ve shown it to be safe in humans, we can use it for bees.”