Episode 145 - Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos: "I'm a scientist, I love discovering new things"

Professor Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos from the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy is on The Course this week to discuss his career path. From majoring in physics to psychology, to playing the Bouzouki and working in Greece for a year, it was only later in life that Professor Hatsopoulos found Neuroscience and found his passion as a scientist working on how the brain directs body movements. As his research team continues to explore this field, wearable robots or exoskeletons might not be too far in the horizon. Tune in to hear more about his career story!

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course.

I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Nicholas Hatsopoulos of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the Neuroscience Institute.

He researches the cortical basis of motor control and learning, which is to say how your brain directs your body's movements. And he's very nonchalant about all this, but Professor Hatzopoulos is doing some fascinating work that could allow people who've lost the use of their hands to control a prosthesis via implants in their brain.

He's here today to explain how far that research has already come, teach me what a bouzouki is, and tell us how he became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Hatzopoulos, thank you so much for joining me this evening. How are you doing?

Professor Hatsopoulos 00:42
 I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me. 

Stephen00:44
Absolutely. We have much to get to, but let's just get the basics out of the way. Could you please tell our listeners what your position is at the university and just a little bit in lay people terms of about what you study?

Professor Hatsopoulos 00:58
 Sure. Sure. I'm a professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy. And it's kind of a unique department cause it includes many different disciplines, but included in that is neuroscience and I'm a neuroscientist. My interest is understanding how parts of the brain control movements of the arm and the hand and how that works basically.

When you reach out to grab a cup of coffee or you play a game of tennis or whatever, how does the brain send commands down to the muscles to move. 

Stephen 01:36
 I am now going to be conscious of everything I do with my hands during this interview. But we tend to start pretty far back, and I'm curious when you were a kid or maybe, you know, like a young adult, middle, high school age. Were there any signs that you were going to end up being a neuroscientist?

Professor Hatsopoulos 01:55
 No, zero signs. I mean, I was a curious kid. I think I was curious about things. And so I think I had a scientific sort of mind frame. And my father was a scientist also, scientist slash businessman. So I was, you know, encouraged by him, but yeah, I was just curious about things. But you know, I was like a regular kid, just, I liked playing baseball, playing tennis.

I wasn't particularly good at school. I was okay. But I like exploring in the woods. We lived in a wooded area. So I loved exploring but I had no idea. I didn't even know the word neuroscience when I was young. 

Stephen02:42
Did you come across the field in college or like?

Professor Hatsopoulos 02:47
 So in college I studied physics, majored in physics and at some point, realized I didn't want to continue into physics and semi accidentally, not totally, but I took some psychology courses. Again, not really studying neuroscience, just understanding how we think and what goes wrong when problems arise, like psychiatric disorders or other kinds of disorders. 

And it was only after college that I figured out what led me to neuroscience. It was a long path, actually. It took a gap year and went to Greece cause my family's from Greece and I worked in Greece for a year. And I thought, I fell in love with a musical instrument that Greek music uses a lot. So, I thought I would become a musician. 

Stephen03:42
Which instrument is that? Sorry, I have to ask.

Professor Hatsopoulos 03:44
 It's called, it's called the bouzouki.

Stephen03:46
I like that way. That sounds 

Professor Hatsopoulos 03:47
 The bouzouki is like, it's like a large mandolin. And if you've ever heard kind of popular Greek music, you'll hear that instrument. So I loved it, fell in love with it. Took some lessons, realized I didn't have talent. And then returned to the States and then worked and then I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

And I knew I was interested in psychology a little bit and I ended up working for a math, a so-called mathematical psychologist, who use tries to develop mathematical models on a computer to explain psychological phenomena and so, and he hired me because I had studied physics.

So I had my math background, but I didn't know any psychology. Well, I didn't know much and he said, I'll teach you the psychology. Don't worry about it. And so I worked there for a couple of years. And at that point in psychology and more broadly in the sciences, you know, it was the first renaissance of like, artificial neural networks, what we, today, we call AI. 

So that was in the late 80s, was the first renaissance rebirth of that whole field. And I got totally hooked on neural networks. And I said, this is what I want to study. I want to build computer models of the brain. And so, I went to grad school at Brown university but not in a neuroscience program, in a cognitive science program.

So, cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that combines psychology, some neuroscience, some computer science, and some linguistics, I guess, although I didn't really focus on linguistics. And so I did computer modeling and with neural networks, I did experiments with humans subjects, visual experiments, motor experiments.

And then only when I applied for a postdoc position at Caltech. And there that was, I was being hired by a, you know, a real neuroscientist who was actually recording from the nervous system of insects. 

And he wanted, he hired me because he wanted to do modeling, computer modeling of the insect nervous system. So I went there, he taught me some neuroscience and I got hooked. And then I, you know, I learned the methods and to be able to record, I mean, there are many different kinds of methods in neuroscience, but the method I'm talking about is recording electrical signals from the brain while it, while an animal or an organism does something like moving their arm in their hand.

And then I did a second postdoc at Brown. I went back to Brown university, started working with non-human primates and monkeys, basically. And there we train monkeys to play video games, with their arms using a joystick, and then we record from their brain while they're doing that.

To try to understand how the motor areas of the cortex, the outer layer of brain cells in the brain control movements of the arm and hand. 

Stephen07:27
I'm sure a younger listener might have questions. Were the monkeys playing actual video games? Are they playing like Mario cards or is this something that has been specifically designed

Professor Hatsopoulos 07:35
 No, no. These were very simple video games. You know, moving a computer cursor to a target or a series of targets. And if they do that, they get rewarded with juice. Not like Super Mario Brothers or anything like that. Yeah. It's really simple stuff.

Stephen07:54
Just had to ask. Cause I'm imagining the mental image that people might have. But I also want to zoom on your decision and like the path that you followed. Did you ever have a moment or like a period where you really settled on the specific, like, study of movement that you're talking about?

Do you feel like it was more a result of the people you were working with? Or like, you know, how do you think, how would you say you really like fell into that specific niche? 

Professor Hatsopoulos 08:23
 I think it was a combination of there was I was inspired by some neuroscientists that were studying movement, some famous neuroscientists. I thought that was super cool and how they could predict, you know, the monkey's movements from recordings in the motor areas of the brain. I just thought that was super cool. 

I was interested in like, how you could get a robot to move in a kind of fluid way, the way we do it. you know, I thought about like, could we get a robot to dance the way a professional dancer plays, performs? And I just thought that I don't know, just somehow I got, I was interested 

I dance Greek dances. And so I was interested, a little bit interested in dancing and movement in general. So, I just, yeah, I just said, wow, how does this work? And it's sort of glommed onto it, but there was also some famous neuroscientists work that really inspired me.

Stephen09:31
You know, moving to your current role and what you're doing now. Could you just tell me a little bit more about like what your recent research has focused on and just, yeah, you know, what it looks like?

Professor Hatsopoulos 09:45
 Yeah, sure. So, well, one thing that, one direction we moved into, which was completely new for me, and that started as a postdoc when I was at Brown, which is to take what we learned with the monkeys and translate that into humans. 

So, we in the late nineties, we decided to form a company, which no longer exists, by the way. But the goal there was to implant electrodes in people that have severe motor disabilities like spinal cord injury or ALS or other kinds or maybe amputations. And so being able to record from their brain and have them think about moving because the brain is still intact in the spinal cord injured person. 

And they can think about moving, they just can't execute it because the connection is lost between the brain and the muscles in the arm and hand. So, we did the first, one of the first clinical trials where we implanted humans with severe motor disabilities and showed that, in fact, these humans can think about moving, we can decode the signals from the brain and actually have them move something in real time just by thinking. 

So we started that in the early days. It was just like, can you move a cursor just by thinking on a computer screen? And they could do it and they could like, you know, surf the web just by moving, just by thinking. And more recently and we're continuing this now at the University of Chicago, we have two human subjects implanted.

They're spinal cord injured individuals, and they're controlling now robots, robotic arms and hands just by thinking. 

So that work is continuing and what we're doing now, the latest thing is, not only having them think about moving and have the robot move, but also provide, touch information back to the brain. So if they're controlling a robotic hand. They touch something with a robotic hand, there are touch sensors on the robotic hand, those signals are fed back to the brain by electrically stimulating another part of the brain that's involved in touch perception, and they can now perceive, they feel like it's their own hand that's touching it.

Stephen12:25
That is wild. I'm trying to wrap my mind around how that would feel. And I think I'm failing on a couple of levels. 

Professor Hatsopoulos 12:30
 That’s the basic idea. So that's, that's what we're trying to do now is just closing the loop. So we have signals coming from the brain that the subject is thinking about, they're moving something. And at the same time, when they touch things, especially when you're, let's say you grab a cup of coffee, right?

And bring it to your mouth. Well, you don't want to apply too much force on the cup because you'll break it maybe. But you don't want to put too little force because it'll slip. And so, you need that touch information to apply the correct amount of force and you can't rely on vision You can't just look at it and say, okay, I'm applying the right amount of force. So that's where touch comes in when you're manipulating objects.

Stephen13:16
I will move us along, but just, since I feel like, you know, I feel like there's like maybe a misconception that a lot of people have where you're talking about, you know, if someone loses, you know, the use of a limb or whatever, I feel like in most people's brains, most people's minds, it's not really intuitive to think like that in a way, you know, that the impulse or whatever is still happening.

My question is just like, I'm curious, like what misconceptions you frequently encounter, maybe from your students or yeah, is there anything else you feel like people maybe get wrong about neuroscience?

Professor Hatsopoulos 13:47
 It's maybe not that they get it wrong but just the realization that if you, when you experience a touch experience. You're feeling something on your fingers. You kind of feel like it's happening at the fingers, but really it's happening in the brain. 

And that's what's remarkable is that you stimulate a part of the brain and it feels like someone's touching your thumb. It's out there, but yet it's actually happening in the brain. 

I don't know about misconceptions. I think it's something that attracts a lot of students, this kind of work, because it's one of the, one of the rare cases where you can take basic science, basic neuroscience, and then translate it into something useful. 

Like with a lot of translational science. There's a lot of intermediate steps to go from the basic, you know, stuff you do in the lab all the way, to something that. could help people. So there's not a lot of steps in between. We went, you know, we went from monkeys to humans. 

Now, granted, we don't have a device, a product that's available to be bought by people with spinal cord injury. It's not, there yet, but we're scientists. We're not business people. So that needs to happen at some point.

Stephen15:15
Yeah. It really, it's not a difficult concept at all. It's funny when you hear. It sounds so futuristic, the idea of like moving a cursor with your mind, but in a way, I guess we're already doing that. It's just, it's going through an instrument.

Professor Hatsopoulos 15:29
 Yeah exactly. That's actually, that's a really good point. And, you know, the term that's used is brain computer interface. So, we're interfacing the brain with a computer, but we're essentially doing that every day, especially these days with cell phones. The cell phone is a computer.

We're interfacing our brains with it. Of course, we're using our fingers as the interface as opposed to going from electrodes in the brain, but essentially, we already have brain computer interface that we use all the time. 

Stephen16:03
Okay. So you, you mentioned like undergraduate students and I did want to ask, just sort of how your time breaks down. I know it probably varies quite a bit, but even if we just take like this quarter, as an example, like how is your time divided? Like how much are you teaching? How much time are you spending on research? 

Professor Hatsopoulos 16:20
 Yeah. So because I'm in the division of biological sciences, I spend most of my time doing research. And I don't have a big teaching load, so I'm teaching now. I have a course now, but I don't teach other times. I mean, I can, I give guest lectures throughout the year, but I don't have a full course dedicated that's run by me.

So now I'm teaching. I also run a lab, so I have graduate students. So you know, I've got a bunch of grad students now. I've got six of them, but it's actually gotten quite large. And I meet with them every week and they're doing the research. They're actually doing the work. And then so I have meetings, a lot of meetings, then we're writing papers, writing grants to get money to continue the research. 

That and then just a lot of administrative stuff. That takes up a lot of time.

Stephen17:22
Yeah. One of the questions, we often ask is what do you enjoy about what you're doing, but also, is there anything in particular you really don't enjoy? 

Professor Hatsopoulos 17:30
 Yeah, I don't enjoy the administrative stuff. You know, anywhere from, you know, things like getting approvals to when you have a new person join the group, they have to go through a lot of training to work with them, with the monkeys or to work with the humans. 

Stephen17:47
I would imagine.

Professor Hatsopoulos 17:48
 There's a lot of approvals that you have paperwork. There's a lot of, you know, getting student, the graduate students to continue through their careers. There are a lot of steps to get a Ph.D. You need to pass certain tests and that's, there's a lot of administration with that. And yeah, that's the part that I don't always like. I love the science.

You know, the best thing is when, you, know, a grad student comes in with a new result. And it's kind of cool and it's something I didn't expect and that just, I love that kind of thing.

And I love teaching, by the way, I love teaching undergraduates, they're very at the University of Chicago, they're very engaged, and they ask lots of questions and I just love that. So that's my favorite part, teaching and then interacting with the grad students with new results.

Yeah, administration is less interesting. Writing, it's not, it’s okay. It's work. It's not the most pleasant thing, but it's okay. Writing grants is miserable, but yeah, you have to do it.

Stephen19:10
Yeah, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear a lot of your colleagues have echoed that sentiment. I'm just curious, no pressure if like a great example doesn't immediately come to mind, but you talk about, you know, surprising results and how exciting that can be. Can you think of a moment when something like that has happened either in your own research or something that happened in your lab that like, you know, unlocked something.

Professor Hatsopoulos 19:36
 Yeah. So, it's a long story, but basically one of my grad students said what if we just showed the monkey the video game they're playing? Yeah. And just play back the game that they just played. So they're seeing the cursor move, but they're not actually doing anything. They're just watching. They're passively watching the cursor move. He says, I bet you, we're going to get cells in the motor cortex that controls the arm, those cells will start firing as if the monkey is moving. 

And I said, I'm not sure, I didn't think that would work. And sure enough, it worked. I was very surprised. Those cells that normally are activated when you move your arm are activated when the monkey just passively watches the video game he just played. 

Stephen20:28
Yeah. Wow.

Professor Hatsopoulos 20:30
 So that was surprising.

Stephen20:34
Trying to think, does that mean that like, if I'm watching a football game. My brain is imagining me doing what they're doing, even though I’m just sitting there?

Professor Hatsopoulos 20:41
Yeah, I think in many cases, I think you are covertly trying to do the same thing sometimes. And so you're doing a covert motor plan and motor execution. Something that doesn't result in movement, but you're sort of activating the same areas. So I think I do that like, cause I'm a tennis player.

So when I watch tennis players playing on TV, I sometimes feel like I'm almost doing that in my head.

Stephen21:08
That's really cool. I wanted to ask if there's anything, you know, are hoping to pursue in the future any specific things that you're like, that you kind of see coming down the road or just like areas of interest that, you know, hope to get to. 

Professor Hatsopoulos 21:25
 Well, there's a number of things. I mean, I guess in terms of the human brain computer interface work. One thing I would love to explore is, you know, we have these humans controlling robots, but what if they were controlling wearable robots or exoskeletons, exoskeletal robots? 

So they put them on like it's almost like Iron Man, and you put them on and you're controlling the wearable robot arm with your brain. 

So you're actually moving the subject's own arms with the robot. And there are reasons why that would be interesting. One of which is that, you know, these subjects who are paralyzed, don't, probably don't really want to control a third arm. They want to control their own arms and their own hands, right? 

They don't need a third arm. They need at least one of their own to work. So if you could actually have them wear those robots, so that's work that, you know, engineers, biomedical engineers and others are trying to develop, more sophisticated exoskeletal robots. And those, that could be a really cool avenue to pursue.

Stephen22:42
Yeah, I mean, I feel like a lot of what you're hearing is stuff that I've heard or just encountered in like science fiction and I’m trying to calm myself down, but that is really cool. Okay. So to wrap up, what advice would you give to someone who was considering or hoping to, you know, follow in a similar path to you? 

Professor Hatsopoulos 23:05
 Yeah. Well, first of all, realize that you can always change your trajectory. So even if you major in something, if you're an undergraduate, let's say, and you major in something, and that's not the direction you want to go into, you can make a switch. I made the switch. I've made two switches, actually. 

I went from physics to psychology and psychology to neuroscience. And so, you can make the switch and everything that you've learned in the past, well, oftentimes what you've learned in the past can help you in the future. So, like I had, I studied physics and I had a math background that helped me get a job with a mathematical psychologist, you know. So you can take advantage of what you know, so it's not a waste what you already learned if you've changed direction. So you can change directions. 

I also think if you're not completely sure what you want to do after you finish college, maybe take a gap year. I love the gap year experience. Do something different maybe, or explore something different because you won't have that opportunity later on in life.

Do something really different. Go traveling or whatever. But yeah, I mean, you can switch, you can change directions all the time. And even after you, well, even if you go into like non-academic job and then you want to, you say, well, actually, I want to go back to school. You can go back to school if you want to or vice versa. 

You go to graduate school and then you say, oh, that's not for me. I want to go into industry or something. You can do that too. I mean, I have a lot of my graduate students. Who didn't go into academics, they went into industry. And I got one who just got a job at Meta. So, they're working for Facebook. So, you know, you can change.

Stephen25:11
Yeah. What would you say you find most fulfilling about what you do? 

Professor Hatsopoulos 25:17
 What's most fulfilling is, there are two things: one is, hearing from students either in the classroom or in when I'm mentoring grad students, hearing them say that, you know, you really influenced me in a positive way. And it really, yeah, and it was a really positive experience that you gave me. And that just, that's really fulfilling. And I hear that sometimes from students, and even years later. 

And then the other fulfilling thing, because I'm a scientist, I just love discovering new things. Something that no one's ever seen before. It's just super exciting. It just gets I like that so much. You know, I just more so than other things like getting a salary raise or something, you know, it's just like discovering something new. It's super cool. Super fun.

So it's not for everybody. Some people are more interested in like building things or that can be used by people. 'm really interested in discovering things.

Stephen26:29
Thank you, Professor Hatsopoulos, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. 

You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.