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Welcome to another episode of Neuroscience Perspectives.

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I'm Kelsie Smith Hayduk, the show's producer, sitting in for Dr. John Foxe.

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In this episode, we're revisiting origin stories.

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What launched leading neuroscientists into a lifetime of learning and interest in the brain?

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How'd you get into science? When did the love of science develop?

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The love of science developed when I was a young age, when my mother bought me a little microscope

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and I used to catch little butterflies outside and examine the wings of the microscope.

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And it started when I was little. I was an avid reader and everything else, but I always loved science.

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I always wanted to do science. And most of the time, especially my family was like,

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oh, you can either do a doctor, but you don't hear about scientists.

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But, you know, and so I had that dream of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon or neurosurgeon.

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So you were really heading off in the clinical direction when you were very young.

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Very young, right. And it was all due to Ben Carson's book, Gifted Hands.

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It was like a book that was passed down to many in African-American families,

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because Ben Carson was like a hero to us all.

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And we read that book and you get captivated.

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And I was like, oh, my God, I want to do neurosurgery. I'm now interested in the brain.

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I have it on good authority that you were very interested in science very early in life.

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Tell us about that. Why did that passion develop?

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Is it something from your family or was it just curiosity?

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I would say it's probably just curiosity. And also part of that is I'm always a nerdy child.

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So socially, I don't feel like I have lots of friends or I get along with other kids.

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But when I read scientific books or when I'm just studying it, I'm totally in my element.

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So honestly, I am always the number one student from elementary school, middle school, high school

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and college. So I'm just a sort of a nerd. I think it's probably genetics.

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I'm proud of it.

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So I know I'm always going to be a scientist.

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Could you quantify that? How early are we talking about?

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As early as in middle school, I just find it reading scientific books.

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A lot of things I learn on my own. So I'm just so interested in learning everything.

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You weren't born on these shores. Can we go back to the beginning, the genesis of Takawa Hensh?

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And what got you to where you're at at Harvard, one of the great institutions on the planet,

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studying autism and mouse models. Where were you born? How did that impact your development?

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Right. Well, as you can guess from my name, I'm half Japanese, half German.

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I was raised in a multilingual environment. They took it upon themselves to speak only their native

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language with me. And then we moved to New York. My father was moved to IBM.

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Let me jump in. So your father was learning Japanese at this point?

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Yes, of course. Given the job he was asked to do. And my mother was studying German, actually,

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as it turned out. And so they happened to meet in that way. And I was raised in a multilingual

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environment. And then his job took him to New York. And the whole family moved to the United

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States when I was three. So my... But at three years of age, your bilingual Japanese, or at least a

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proto bilingual Japanese German speaker, you haven't heard a word of English at this point?

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Not a word of English. That's right. And then English came in. But fortunately, for me,

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I was compartmentalized. So English was friends and outside the house. And I grew up in that way.

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I also attended a Japanese school in New York in parallel to the American school. And so I was able

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to keep the languages separate in that way. And that's what drew my interest to the brain.

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And that goes to extraordinary plasticity. I mean, I think this is one of the things, of course,

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being in America and painting in broad strokes, but a great number of people in America grow up

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in a monolingual environment. And just the idea that you can pack three entire languages

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simultaneously into a child's brain. I mean, the plasticity must be extraordinary.

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Yes, it was surprising to me, actually, that, you know, in school, we learn a second language.

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And so I took French. So just for good measure, you decided to do number four.

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And the French class really opened my eyes that most other kids were not growing up in a

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trilingual environment. And I'm really struggling with it. Yeah, learning French was somehow easier

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because I guess I was used to the idea of multiple representations for the same objects. And so that's

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when I started to develop this fascination with how early life experience can change brain

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function. Right, right, right. Amazing. Any other languages that we need to know about?

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Well, my wife is Italian. I have to tell that story. What went on there and how did that happen?

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And how did your mother tolerate this? It was partly their idea, my parents right now.

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This is again back to high school science fairs. You know, I had we actually done some science fairs

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using pet guinea pigs in the years prior to this. So I had guinea pigs and we we had done

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learning and memory experiments, you know, with like, can they learn to associate a cue with a

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food reward and that kind of thing. And so what age are you now? This sort of been like eighth and

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ninth grade. So preteen, you know, preteen, you know, somewhere 12, 12 to 13. Yeah, young, you know,

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and and I I had wanted, you know, to do another science fair project like this. And so my parents

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helped me find a researcher to local university. This is Southern Methodist, you know, in Dallas,

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and a very kind researcher who gave me a set of mice lab mice to work with, which we would never

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do now. Right. Like, you know, sending lab mice home to some kid's house. So we took the mice home

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a group of males and a group of females. And I was interested in sex differences and learning and

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memory. And so we had a group of males and a group of females. We kept them in the laundry room for a

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while. And I would run them on this T maze based task where there was a queue. And I also learned

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a bit about programming because this is the we had to collect all the behavioral data and then do

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statistics on it and everything. And, and then even in Texas, it gets cold at night sometimes. And the

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laundry room got very cold when I didn't we had a whole bunch of mice with hypothermia. And so my mom

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would tell you that she spent hours resuscitating hypothermic mice. Was the hairdryer involved?

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Or I think just towels. And, you know, but in the end, it was it was actually a really cool data set,

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you know, we did great statistics. And I learned all about chi square tests and like, you know,

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and we had this sort of longitudinal learning data for males and females, it turns out the males were

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better. And better at learning this task. And, you know, and it was, you know, you could look at that

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and say that has all the parts of a the same thing that I do with my grad students now.

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How does a girl from Brazil end up in the US? And how does a girl growing up the way you did end up

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thinking I want to be a neuroscientist? Yeah, so I think, you know, life is full of

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coincidences and circumstances. And I think those make a huge difference to people's lives. I was

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I was a small kid in Rio in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, my dad was a very good student,

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and he got a fellowship and we ended up he spent a little bit of time at Princeton NYU

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doing some he was doing law. And that's when I was like, in my real formative years, I was four,

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four to six, I went into an international school, like the United Nations School, which was amazing,

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because I met, you know, friends from all over the world that had like my best friends were from Kenya

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and Peru and Canada. And so we all had our little flags, you know, in different countries. That was

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a blast. That was amazing. When I went back, when we went back to Brazil,

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my parents realized that I had this great gift that I spoke English, you know, perfectly, and

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they thought that this would be a good thing for me. So they kind of convinced the then the American

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school there to let me in on a scholarship to continue studying and in being able to speak English.