Stephen Wilson 0:06 Welcome to Episode 18 of the language neuroscience podcast. The last episode for the year of 2021. I'd like to start by saying thank you to everyone who's listened to the podcast over the year and for the kind words people have shared with me. When I started this podcast in January of this year, I had no idea how many people were going to find it informative and educational, entertaining, something worth adding to the mix of things you listened to and I feel so lucky to have had all these fascinating conversations with the guests who've been so generous as to come on the show. Every single one of them exceptional researchers at different stages of their careers. It's been so much fun to talk with old friends and to make new ones in this way. My final guest for the year is a very special one, Cathy Price Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimagng at University College London. As most of you probably know, Cathy is one of the most outstanding researchers in the neuroscience of language. She has been imaging the Language Networks since the very beginning and has written literally hundreds of papers on practically every topic within our field, functional neuroanatomy, speech, perception, comprehension, speech, production, reading, development, and aphasia. The list could go on. As of 2020. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society, which is a really big deal. Needless to say, we're only going to scratch the surface today of all the work she has done. Okay, let's get to it. Hi, Cathy. How are you? Cathy Price 1:26 Yeah. Well. (Laughter) That's a tricky question to start with. I'm on day six of COVID. Yes, but not too bad, given that. Stephen Wilson 1:36 Well, that's not good news. Cathy Price 1:39 Well, it's good that I've been tripple vaccinated and my symptoms have been relatively mild. I still wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to pass it on to anyone though. Stephen Wilson 1:50 Yeah. Are you having to isolate from your whole family? Yep. Yep. All our Christmas plans have been canceled. Oh, wow! Cathy Price 1:58 I'm not allowd out until after Christmas, unless I test negative, but that little light on the lateral flow test keeps bouncing up. Stephen Wilson 2:09 Ah, what a shame. Cathy Price 2:11 Yes! Strong and powerful. Stephen Wilson 2:13 So are you, like, isolating within your home from your family members? Cathy Price 2:18 Um, no. Well, I got it from Joe. So Joe got it first. My husband, Joe got it first and we were supposed to have our family Christmas on the 18th and so we had to cancel that because Joe was sick. And then on the 18th, one week later, I got it, which then canceled the Christmas Day plan. Stephen Wilson 2:39 Oh, no! I'm so sorry. Cathy Price 2:42 Now my younger daughter's homeless. So she's currently gone to my parents, but they're in their 90s. So, that's not so good because she could be a risk to them. And um, yeah, if all goes well, we'll have Christmas on the second of January. If she doesn't come home and get it and then puts us all back into isolation. (Laughter) Stephen Wilson 3:02 Right, yeah. I mean, it does seem like England has got very high case numbers right now, especially in London where you are right? Cathy Price 3:08 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so many people I know, are infected and some people are not even, you know, testing or, you know, they have the symptoms, but they don't want to know. Stephen Wilson 3:22 Right. Because what are you going to do? I mean, apart from isolate, I guess? Cathy Price 3:26 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How are the cases in your end? Stephen Wilson 3:30 Well, you know, you know, there's a lot in New York, but Nashville, it hasn't really got here yet. I mean, there's only like a handful of Omicron cases in Nashville so far. So we were kind of in a lull. We had like, a lot of delta, like six months ago and um, maybe four months ago. But things have been pretty, you know, not too bad around here lately. Cathy Price 3:50 That's good. Stephen Wilson 3:50 But I know it's coming. It's definitely coming. Cathy Price 3:53 Yeah, but I'm still fingers crossed it that you know, it'll be wiping out delta soon and we Stephen Wilson 4:00 Yeah, I mean, maybe it'll just kind of be like the vaccination for those that didn't take the one that was on offer. (Laughter) Cathy Price 4:08 Exactly. Stephen Wilson 4:08 I think we can only hope for the best. I mean, it does seem like the more data that comes in, the more it seems like it genuinely is milder. Cathy Price 4:16 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 4:17 Well, thank you for joining me, even though you know, you're dealing with this health issue. Cathy Price 4:21 (Laughter) Oh well, thank you for inviting me. It's a lovely distraction. Stephen Wilson 4:26 Yeah, I've been wanting to talk to you all year ever since I started this podcast. As you know, we talked about it back when I met with some of your students and so yeah, with you. So I'd like to start by asking you what kind of interests you had as a child and did any of them kind of point the way to your eventual scientific career? Cathy Price 4:48 Hmm, well, I'm afraid they did. I was. I was fascinated by the brain because my aunt told me that all the emotions that I had were controlled by my brain. So I had this idea that if I could understand how the brain work, I could control my emotions and that would make me a happy person all the time. (Laughter) That was, that was my childhood thing and um, yes, I was I was, yeah, I was fascinated by the brain, but there weren't any with any neuroscience degrees available and then I decided to study psychology and physiology thinking that that would be the boundary between brain, you know, the, the link, that I would, I would get to neuroscience, but um Stephen Wilson 5:41 Yeah. Cathy Price 5:42 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 5:43 What kind of emotions were you having as a kid that you wanted to control? Were you kind of? Cathy Price 5:48 Well, I think I think it was a bit hyperactive over excitable, all of those things. Too much energy. Stephen Wilson 5:56 Is that, really a bad thing? Cathy Price 5:57 I was constantly being told off. (Laughter) I was constantly saying why, I was one of those really annoying kids. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? My dad used to say 'because I said, So' (Laughter) But why do you say... yes. Stephen Wilson 6:15 And you want to just put a stop to that? I don't think that's the right strategy. Cathy Price 6:18 (Laughter) Well, the brain is obviously very clever. Stephen Wilson 6:23 Yeah. Cathy Price 6:24 Definitely. Stephen Wilson 6:25 So when you, so you got your, so you're saying you studied psychology and physiology? Is that what you said? Cathy Price 6:33 Yeah, Physiology and Psychology. Stephen Wilson 6:35 So, you went to Birkbeck College? Cathy Price 6:39 No, no, I went to Bedford College, which doesn't exist anymore. Oh, okay and that's, that was in the middle of Regents Park and I chose that because it was in the middle of the park. So, and I was, I came from the country. So, you know, I, I, yeah. So the idea of being in London, you know, wasn't that appealing, but being in the middle of the park seemed to be a lovely place to be. Stephen Wilson 7:04 Okay. Yeah. So that was your undergrad degree. Cathy Price 7:08 That was my undergrad degree. Yeah and then from there, I mean, I learned a lot about cardiology, and you know, all sorts of things, which not nearly enough about the brain. But one of the psychology courses, I read some of the early papers on deep dyslexia, and about patients that were able to look at the word 'yacht' and say 'ship', and I found this really fascinating. So, I wrote to Max Coltheart, who'd written the book, and I said, could I come and see some of these patients, and I was happy to do any help or do any volunteer work for him. And he put me in touch then, with a number of different people. So Brian Butterworth, Glyn Humphreys and other people. (Sound of someone entering) And just going to, joe is just coming in, so I stopped that. Sorry about that. Stephen Wilson 8:05 No worries. Cathy Price 8:07 Lock him in the room afterwards. He has brought dinner. What can I do? I'm stuck in, he's allowed out at the moment. Because he's already had COVID. Stephen Wilson 8:15 Okay. Cathy Price 8:16 You know, Joe? Stephen Wilson 8:18 Yeah. Not not personally, I guess I only know him from his work. Cathy Price 8:23 He's, he's, he's gone in now. That's it. Stephen Wilson 8:27 Yeah, I don't know why I say yes, when I actually only know him from reading his papers, but I guess... Cathy Price 8:31 Well, I think, he will be proud. Okay, so yes, so, so Max Coltheart have put me in touch with a number of different people, including Brian Butterworth and Glyn Humphreys, oh, and Ruth Campbell, different different people who are all doing neuropsychology. And Brian Butterworth getting some great jobs, so, transcribing Ronald Reagan's speech in the night. And, and then that speech, then went around the world, my transcription, claiming that Ronald was in the first stages of Alzheimer's disease. Stephen Wilson 9:11 All right! Cathy Price 9:12 That was quite an exciting, exciting one. And with Glyn, he had just got married to Jane Riddick, and they had a baby and they needed help testing the patients in the hospital. So, I started testing the patients with them and looking after the baby. And at some point, Glenn said, well, you know, why don't you put this towards a PhD? So, that's what I did. So I ended up staying and my, you know, going to observe these patients turned into a PhD. Stephen Wilson 9:45 And was that at Birkbeck? Cathy Price 9:46 That one was at Birkbeck. Stephen Wilson 9:48 Okay. Cathy Price 9:49 Glyn was at Birkbeck, yes. That's why I did my PhD at Birkbeck, but yes, Stephen Wilson 9:53 Okay. So that's that's how you had that connection to the end up there. Cathy Price 9:56 Yeah, that's right, yeah. Stephen Wilson 9:57 I agree with you about those patients being Just incredibly fascinating. I mean, I actually have like a really strong episodic memory of the first time I ever saw a patient make a deep dyslexic error and just Cathy Price 10:07 Yes. Stephen Wilson 10:08 How kind of thrilling it was (Laughter), like how does the brain do that? Cathy Price 10:12 Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Wilson 10:16 So, so you kind of got your PhD in cognitive neuropsychology, and you know, you were doing this stuff on dyslexia and visual recognition, right. But then after that, you started your career on the neuroimaging of language and I understand you went to the MRC Cyclotron unit. Cathy Price 10:38 Yep. Stephen Wilson 10:38 Can you tell me how that, how that came to be? Cathy Price 10:40 Yes. Well, the examiners on my PhD were Karalyn Patterson and David Howard, and they, had just got a grant with Richard Wise, who was working at the MRC Cyclotron Unit and they were about to do language studies. So they were in the early stages of doing language studies and so when Richard was, when they were looking for a research assistant, Karalyn and David, who'd read my PhD, recommended me, and that's, that's how I got, that's how I got that job. And um, and then it sort of took off from there so I, once I was at the MRC, I was able to analyze all the data that they had collected so every single one of the early studies I was involved in, in analyzing. Stephen Wilson 11:28 Right. Cathy Price 11:29 and it just just went, went from there. Stephen Wilson 11:32 So you're even behind the scenes on, I mean, I think that you published your first pet language paper in 92. That you, but you're even behind the scenes on the ones that came in the preceding year or two as well, uh? Cathy Price 11:42 Yeah, I analyze the one the one before by, with, David Howard was first author on that one. Stephen Wilson 11:49 Right. Cathy Price 11:50 Yeah. And at the same time, Julie Fiez, was doing language studies at Washington University, and um, and we wrote to each other by air mail letter, and I still have air mail letters somewhere in my boxes in my office, that we had exchanged. So once we both knew that we were publishing, we were always waiting to know when the next paper was coming out. There was only about one paper a year coming out from each side. So we were waiting to get get hold of what was happening. Oh, yeah. So that was just goes to show so many, we're only talking, you know, 30, 30 or so years ago, but um, yeah Stephen Wilson 12:38 Were you, did it feel collaborative? Or was it competitive? Or is it to some kind of like, blend of the two? Cathy Price 12:45 Oh, I think it was it was definitely a blend of the two, but there were, I mean, there was definitely competition. I mean, yeah, there was definitely there was definitely competition coming from the whole units. Because there was a big race to you know, to do things. But, when there's so few studies coming out, every study is so important. Remember, when Kenneth Pugh wrote his brain paper on on reading, and I was reviewing, reviewing that, I remember, I mean, just four days, I did nothing, but go through every single little detail of it. Stephen Wilson 13:25 Right. Cathy Price 13:26 Such a big thing to, you know, every time a new paper came out. Stephen Wilson 13:31 Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, things are so different now, obviously, right? I mean, there's just this pressure to publish, like, quantity and, you know, as a reviewer, I mean, like, what are you going to do? I mean, like, I, you certainly kind of go through a fine tooth comb every paper in your area? Do you think um, I mean, I don't know if there's any alternative, but I mean, how do you feel about the way things are changing to this kind of like, fire hose science that we're doing now? Cathy Price 13:59 I think the field is changing so much in what people are publishing. So I mean, recently, I've done a couple of papers with a student sort of looking at, you know, different parts, what different parts of the left Superior Temporal sulcus do and what different parts of the, you know, left, you know, premotor cortex are doing for in speaking. Um, I was, I was staggered by how few papers that there had been recently in that area, it was, was almost like it was a sort of done deal and all that it wasn't an area of interest anymore to do any work on functional segregation. You know, it's the field has moved on and I and I, which is good, it's good. I mean, because that has that, you know, there has to be there have to be, you know, new perspectives. Stephen Wilson 14:56 But, I don't know I feel like when there's a foundational question terms that haven't really been answered, maybe we shouldn't have moved on or I haven't moved on. (Laughter) Cathy Price 15:06 Well, I wonder if it's actually difficult to get funding for that sort of work. So, you know, you know, when you're applying for funding, you know, the funders want, you know, big impact. papers they don't want they don't want, well, I'm going to nuance what we already know and you know, we don't you know, there's a cloudy area, we're not really sure what's going on here. I'm going to nuance it. I think it's much more difficult to get funding for nuanced work, Stephen Wilson 15:36 Right. But do you think that like parcellating the Superior Temporal Sulcus, which is probably the most important language area of the brain and contains, you know, many square centimeters of tissue, is that nuance or is that like, pretty foundational? I kind of think it's, I mean, to me, it seems, not just nuance. But I can see how the funders might. Cathy Price 16:02 I think it's difficult to know, I, I've worked with so many people where there is so enthusiastic about every paper that they they write, and it's like, This is it. This is, you know, this is such a brilliant study, and they're telling me what a brilliant study they've done and it's, you know, when every paper I write I, you know, or co-author mainly, I'm so involved in that study and every little detail of it that I love, every every contribution that I can find, you know, where there's a development, I like taking it forward. But it's very difficult to look from the outside and say, well what on earth the reviewer is going to say, you know, what, so often reviewers will say well, don't we already know enough about that? Or Why didn't you answer this question? Or why did you do this analysis? Why couldn't you've done another analysis? That the the enthusiasm then gets completely knocked down by, you know, reviewers taking it in a new direction? But I mean, that's part of learning, isn't it? Stephen Wilson 17:07 Yeah. Cathy Price 17:07 There's still so much to do. There's still so much to do? Stephen Wilson 17:12 No, I think there is. Yeah, so that first paper that you published, so just kind of like going back to that, like, early time. I mean, how did it feel to be like, one of a dozen people really like, kind of on this threshold of like, a whole new field of science? I mean, did you have a sense, then that you were on the you know, that you were starting something big, that was going to grow? Cathy Price 17:40 No, I had the sense that I was very privileged and I was doing something that I personally was fascinated by and that was my area of interest. I didn't have, no I didn't get that feeling. I mean, even when, because PET, you know, PET was, I mean, there weren't going to be PET scanners that were going to be everywhere, because there was such a limit on how many studies that you could you could do. I don't think that really happened until fMRI became available, and then the scale which it could be conducted, and the ease with which it could be conducted and then became apparent and, and you know, that it was going to be, you know, explosive. Stephen Wilson 18:31 So what did you how, what was it like going from being a PET researcher to an fMRI researcher? Was it kind of cold, like have, everything becomes so much easier? Or were there things you missed about that? Cathy Price 18:43 Field of fMRI was so huge, so it was much, we, you know, it took a while to work out how to design fMRI studies to get the same level of signal that you've got in PET and there are so many advantages to fMRI, that the benefits of PET and the strength of those signals that you would get from, you know, very small samples, you know, wasn't wasn't appreciated. Yeah, and then, you know, the first thing that, that I did was just sort of systematically going through, could we replicate what we'd already found in PET, and we did replicate, we did replicate it over and over and over again. But it always felt like it was much easier with PET and then fMRI, obviously, obviously, you know, the ability to look inter-subject variability, and that sort of became a big thing that I'm interested in but um, but those group findings and the speed at which you forget the results was so much easier with PET. Stephen Wilson 19:48 So why couldn't you look at Inter-subject variability with PET? Cathy Price 19:52 Because you, you you are, you're summing over, you're summing over 60 seconds of activity in different conditions. You just didn't have the power and then you'd only have a limit. You could only give 12 bolus injections, because you know, there's a radioactive marker going into you and so you just didn't have enough power really at the single subject level. Stephen Wilson 20:19 Oh, okay. Cathy Price 20:20 Well, you could try. I mean, we certainly did single subject and when we did a deep dyslexic case with Karalyn Patterson and David Howard, we had one of their deep Dyslexics come in and um, yes we tested out, you know, the right hemisphere hypothesis. So we could, but not at the same level that you can with fMRI, where you you can even you can get a lot, a lot more measurements from the same people who can do these longitudinal studies, Stephen Wilson 20:48 Right. Cathy Price 20:49 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 20:51 Yeah, definitely longitudinal, because you can't be putting radioactive injections in people constantly. Cathy Price 20:58 No. Stephen Wilson 21:00 Okay, so can we like fast forward like a decade, to this 2012 paper, where you're at this rather spectacular review paper, in your, it's published in Neuroimage, where you basically review the first 20 years of the whole imaging of Language field and it contains not only an analysis of, you know, work from hundreds of investigators in our field, but also there's this intriguing image that you have in there, that's got about, it divides the language, well, I want to say the language network, Cathy Price 21:29 The brain. Stephen Wilson 21:30 The brain, Okay, it divides the brain into, it shows about 30 or so different language regions with distinct functions, all based on your own prior studies, overlaying activation images from your own prior studies. It's very cool! I tried to teach it one year, in my in my Cognero of language class. (Laughter) That was something that I didn't try again. It was like a little much for the students who are having their first encounter with our field. But it's, it's Cathy Price 21:58 My sympathies go to you. (Laughter) Stephen Wilson 21:59 Yeah. It's very cool, though and I and I, and I know that we can do justice to this paper and a brief discussion, but I was wondering if you could kind of like, share, like, you know, what is your big picture perspective on how language is organized in the brain? Like, can you? Is it even possible to summarize that paper? Cathy Price 22:16 Well, I think that's two different questions there. One is about the paper and one is about the big view picture of language. So maybe I can just start with the paper. So that was an invitation for a special image of neuro, Neuroimage, to celebrate 20 years, you know, in the imaging field, and I was asked to do language, and we had a deadline, and I started reviewing these papers. And then for month after month, I was going through hundreds of papers. I mean, hundreds and hundreds, and it almost became a bit of an obsession, because you know, I kept picking up themes the whole time, this again, this again, is again, this again, you know, that this, you know, this people reinvented, reinventing the wheel all the time, you know, as well, and, and themes that I had never appreciated before. So for me, it was, an incredible experience and learning experience. But I'd like to say very clearly, I never finished that paper. (Laughter) At the end, I had to wrap that up so quickly. I had somebody working in my office at the time and I remember, just like, can you help me just how do we get the references together, the figures and everything was a mess. Nothing was how I had planned it from the beginning (laughter) and so it was all wrapped up. And then I just thought, Okay, well, that's just one of these papers that are like this. And it's been so surprising that it's been cited so much. Stephen Wilson 23:50 Yeah. Cathy Price 23:51 Oh, but I do well, not recently, I you know, I mean, I have been back to that papers, so many times, checking particular references and things in it. But I've only in it, I only published, you know, themes that I kept seeing over and over again. And I guess one thing, you know, that I always wonder is, are these things, you know, they're there. We replicate these things over and over again and we keep giving them the same psychological labels, but I don't, when we get to the talking about language, I don't really believe in any of these psychological labels. I don't find them particularly useful. You know, so the word phonology, for example. I mean, phonology is so many different things. Stephen Wilson 24:40 Yeah,. Cathy Price 24:40 Let me just finish finish off the the paper. It was a huge learning experience for me and I dumped a lot of stuff onto paper but is useful for me, but it was much more like a sort of dictionary or Encyclopedia of what I had read and tried to produce this paper and put it into sort of historical context and just go through it bit by bit. Stephen Wilson 25:06 Okay. So, so it's like an index or a dictionary, but it doesn't, perhaps, I mean, and probably it informs your view of how language is organized in the brain. But maybe it's not all expressed in that paper. Is that what you're saying? Cathy Price 25:18 Well, no, I mean, the big themes that I've had, and I know the these are very controversial now, but they're sort of my two hypotheses going into grant applications would be I, I, I don't see strong evidence and I know, there's a lot of evidence coming against this view, that there are brain regions that are specialized for language, I see language as the combinatorics of many different processes that come together, to enable us to communicate, including moving your mouth and moving your tongue and I've written loads of papers at every level on that. You know, how we hear listening to different sounds, you know, is there anything that's specific about speech sounds? Is there anything specific about how we produce speech? Is there anything specific about, you know, the semantics? Well, maybe at the semantic levels, there are things which we wouldn't have if we didn't have words, but overall, it's these, it's the combination of all of these sensory motor, or higher level, cognitive, executive attentional type memory type skills that enable us to speak. So that has been my hypothesis and at the moment, you know, it is being challenged by other other claims, and I'm looking at that very carefully and I am going into our own data to say, does that hold out in what we see or what are alternative, you know, potential views there. But overall, at the level that we have, I think that, that's the case and if, if that's the case, it also becomes very difficult to, to name the different types of processes, because, you know, phonology, semantics and syntax are all very linguistic language type processes, but they emerge from lots of other different things. So with phonology, you know, it's, you know, this the sounds of speech, that there is, there is nothing that I have been able to find or see in, in, you know, my own data, or in other people's data, that shows that there's anything that's specialized, just the speech sounds. And, and likewise, at the, you know, speech production, you know, sort of, you know, phonological output, phonological memory, all of these, these terms that we use, are tricky, but that's our level, that's our way of communicating. So, I use those terms in the 2012 review, but I was using those terms, because that's what's in the papers. So, it sort of proliferates those ideas, but I don't actually think that any of those regions are language specific. I think they play different roles and that they're much more lower level roles and it's how they combine together that creates, you know, you know, word processing even, not even going beyond that to sentence processing. Stephen Wilson 28:44 I think that's a pretty radically different perspective than what most people, how most people think about it. I think a lot of people would probably get on board that all of these other systems are kind of involved and, you know, in particular, uses of language. But I think most people also think that there's kind of a core language network too, right? And you're essentially denying that there's a core language network? Cathy Price 29:09 Oh, I believe the core language network, but I don't think the core language network like Broca's and Wernicke's area are specific to language. They are regions that are used during language or regions that we need for language, but in terms of how we describe them functionally, I, I, they're, they're not just language regions. I mean, we will use our motor, motor cortex when we, when we, when we move our legs and we go cycling, but you wouldn't say well, this is the cycling area in the brain. It might be an area that's always activated when you're cycling. But that doesn't mean to say that it's a cycling, it's, it's dedicated to cycling. So, it could be involved in lots of different things. Stephen Wilson 30:06 Right. Cathy Price 30:07 And that's, that's how I see the same things with language. Wernicke's area will be involved in, in sound processing that is not just speech processing. Stephen Wilson 30:17 I agree for the STG, certainly. Cathy Price 30:21 Yep. Stephen Wilson 30:22 But getting back to our friend, the STS that we were, you know, talking about earlier. I feel like I mean, don't you feel like that's kind of like special for language? Like, what else does the left STS really do? Like I mean, what else, I mean Cathy Price 30:36 Well, it likes, it likes sounds, it likes discriminating sounds and learning different sounds, which is what we do for language and it holds sounds in memory, but this, this, you can you can find tasks, that, it responds to lots of things other than speech. It likes music, but it responds more to speech than it does to music. That's in that way, you know, some of these regions are involved in multiple different low level processes and then more engaged by speech. But that doesn't for me, doesn't make it a speech area. Stephen Wilson 31:16 Okay. So you don't find it helpful to then put a label on it? Cathy Price 31:20 Yes, because it's then denying the fact that it's also important for other things as well. Stephen Wilson 31:28 How does like laturalization kind of emerged from that framework? I mean, these all these other processes that you mentioned, are mostly pretty symmetrical, and yet language Isn't. Does that, how does that get explained in your way of thinking? Cathy Price 31:42 Yeah, well, I don't know! Do you? Stephen Wilson 31:45 No! (Laughter) Well, I Okay, I guess I have like a fairly, you know, modularized view of language in the brain where I think that there are some areas that are language areas, in some sense that, so I do think I have a different perspective. Cathy Price 32:00 But what happens when you know you have a stroke patient and they, they lose their Broca's and Wernicke's area and they, they managed to, you know, regain some speech? Stephen Wilson 32:11 Well, isn't that the question that we would both like to know the answer to? (Laughter) Cathy Price 32:14 Yup! Well, we would like to know the answer to that. Yes. Stephen Wilson 32:17 Yeah. I was gonna ask you more about that in a moment. You just, I think that you said a moment ago or five minutes ago that there are sort of two big principles to your thinking and like you just said one, which is basically that there aren't really language areas that it's kind of emergent from other stuff. If I'm, if I'm not paraphrasing too much, was there another principle you would want to put forward? Cathy Price 32:41 Yeah, the, the other one is that, that the brain can do the same thing in different ways. So we know Stephen Wilson 32:50 Degeneracy? What you call degeneracy? Cathy Price 32:52 Well, I mean, I'll be careful with word degeneracy, because it's been so misunderstood from what, what it's meant to say. But um, yes, that things even with object naming, if you look at well, when you study inter-subject variability, and you see how different people have different activations, you can either say, well, that's just noise, fMRI is really noisy or you can start to find patterns in it and that's what I, I'm very interested in pursuing, and have been interested in pursuing for a long time, but haven't really done too much dedicated work on it, to try and group people, you know, into different types that process language in different ways and also seeing how, how people can flip between different, different neural pathways. The same, same person can use different pathways. So for example, we have a paper at the moment looking at auditory repetition, and looking at how Broca's and Wernicke's area connect and you can see that, you can see that, you know, even with even with a simple task, like repetition, there's variance in how the, how the connectivity appears, the evidence for the connectivity appears to be in different individuals and also, within individuals, you see them, you know, if you repeat the task multiple times, you see them switch from what backwards and forwards between these different pathways. Because there's a lot of redundancy in you know, in the system there, and people can sort of veer to one, you know, one system or another and that's what I really want to test, you know, with patients is then what happens when you remove one of those pathways. Can we see the other one, you know, taking over and if another one takes ove,r Is that pathway? Can you actually see it in some of the control subjects to suggest it was there all along? But it might not be the dominant pathway? Stephen Wilson 35:09 Right. Yeah, that theme has been running through your work for at least 15, 20 years, hasn't it? Cathy Price 35:15 Yep. Stephen Wilson 35:16 And it's, I think, maybe now that you're starting to really do the empirical studies to, to investigate it. I mean, I think it's very interesting that we mostly throw away variability. I know, you've got a paper where you discuss this, I can't remember off the top of my head, which one it is, you know, we mostly throw it away into these group studies, you know, but there are these really interesting differences and between individuals, and you just have to do a little work to figure out like, the sources of variability, like how much of it is genuine inter-individual variability versus scan to scan variability, just kind of for meaningless reasons, like how much caffeine they had, versus interesting reasons, like what their task strategy was and how that was changing. But we've barely scratched the surface on all this, right? Cathy Price 36:00 Exactly. This, there's just too much work to be done. Stephen Wilson 36:04 Yeah, well, I think you're gonna do it. So, over the last dozen years or so, I think the major focus of your lab has been what the your PLORAS project and so PLORAS, as our listeners might know, stands for predicting language outcomes and recovery after stroke. And you introduced this project in 2010 paper with Mohamed Seghier, and Alex Leff, in Nature Reviews Neurology, and the project has kind of yielded a steady stream of really interesting papers ever since then. So can we talk about this now? And kind of, I think, what we're turning to some of these other themes in the context of talking about this patient work, but can you tell us like what are the overall goals of the PLORAS Project? Cathy Price 36:47 Well, it is exactly, you know, as in the title, is to try and use the knowledge that we've already got to predict what's going to happen when you damage the brain. So it's sort of comes from the background of trying to understand, you know, what are the neural systems of the language? And then, what happens if you damage them? How does it change? So, that's the underlying theory that runs through probably all of my work since for the last 30 years, that's, that's been the sort of key thing trying to understand it. And then the ultimate test of understanding is, to be able to predict what's going to happen if you damage the system? And how much more complicated is it going to get after that, because we know that patients change. And then what has become very clear is, is that, you know, it's not that easy to do patient studies, you try and find patients, as we've done recently who've got damaged, you know, just to, you know, an inferior frontal region and we see so few of them, you know, because when we get patients referred to us, they've got lesions all over the place. And there's so much variability in lesion sites, the brain, you know, damages itself in multiple different ways, or, or we have the sort of common middle cerebral artery lesions. And it's trying to get at those focal lesions and find as many as we can and then it became clear, really from that, that we need to have as many, as many patients as possible, we need to do this large scale, and how do we increase the numbers, so that we can start to build up little groups of patients that have got similar brain damage and make predictions from there. And if you don't have that data, and how can you make these predictions, so there's, there's, there's kind of three ways of doing it, there's one sort of, like, totally theoretical, which is one that I do all the time, and everything is based on, you know, the theory, but that's never going to be enough, you need to have the data. And then when you've got the data, you can either just, you know, throw machine learning at it, and, you know, try and find, you know, ways of explaining it. Or you can, you know, you can use a much more constrained, constrained approach where you systematically try and have sort of hypotheses that you you test out, and we're trying all three of those approaches. And, you know, as our as our other people and there are some things which are highly predictive. Stephen Wilson 39:41 Let's talk about oh, sorry, go on. Cathy Price 39:43 Yeah. No, no, that's fine. Stephen Wilson 39:46 Oh, I was gonna say let's, let's talk about the data. Right? Can we talk about the data? So, you have established a network of sites, where you recruit patients throughout the United Kingdom. Can you tell us how you did that? Because I mean, I, that doesn't seem easy at all. Cathy Price 40:04 No, that was fortuitous to start off. So to start with, to try and get patients, we had to, we went into communities. So we were going into stroke clubs, we were seeing people who many years post stroke, and we were asking them to come and volunteer. So that was a huge amount of work. But to go through GP clinics, or to go through the hospitals, the clinicians don't have the time to refer us the questions that the sorry, the clinicians don't have the, the time to refer us the patients. And then the stroke research network was set up, which was actually set up and this is funded by the government, was set up to facilitate stroke research, where they have dedicated nurses in the hospital that recruit patients for different studies. And then, you could, you could apply for one of these, the, you know, to apply for a project, you know, putting up a proposal for what the project is. And then you have your protocol and you, you know, your get your ethics support. And then that is opened up for any of the hospitals with these research nurses to choose if they would like to take on that project, or they'd like to contribute to it. And that just worked out in our favor. We, we started off I think with 60 sites, It was, it was it took years to build up. So we're talking because of the paperwork, the data, sharing all the procedures. I mean, literally, when we went for our final ethics, I think, you know, I'm talking a mountain of papers that we took with us. Stephen Wilson 41:59 So this was my audio podcast. So, I'm just gonna say that Kathy is indicating a foot high IRB form, Cathy Price 42:05 Oh, bigger than a foot! One person couldn't carry them. It took two of us to carry the papers, we had so many papers Stephen Wilson 42:12 IRB farms that had to be carried by multiple people. (Laughter) Cathy Price 42:17 So, but once, once um, once, once that had been done, and we then had to stop, because we couldn't take on any more, we couldn't take on any more sites, we didn't have the staff to, to deal with all the patients as well, you know, to test them all. So then we had, you know, this backlog of, you know, 2000 patients who volunteered to be part of our study that we couldn't accept into the study, because we didn't have time to test them. And so then, you know, a huge amount of work has gone into well, how do we automate our processes, so that we make it easier and easier to, you know, to acquire the data and store the data because, you know, for every patient that you you test, you've then got, you know, just as much time transcribing all the results onto the database. That was time. And then there was the metal checking. So we had all of these patients that are all volunteer to come to London and have their brain scanned. But we had to go through all of her medical records, you know, all and that was so time consuming too. Stephen Wilson 43:27 Tell me about it. Yeah. And then you, you test them with the comprehensive aphasia test. Right. That's your Cathy Price 43:34 That's right. Stephen Wilson 43:35 Cool. Battery, and then you do structural MRI on everybody and functional on a subset of them? Cathy Price 43:41 That's right. Stephen Wilson 43:42 Yeah. I mean, are you like, a person that's comfortable dealing with large amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork? Are you just really good at delegating that to other people? Cathy Price 43:54 Oh, well, undoubtedly, my, the team. The team dealt with it. I mean, I've spent the last few weeks going through all of our protocols, you know, again, checking every single line, and it is so tedious, but it's so important to and it's quite clarifying, to get all of that paperwork neat and sorted, you know, to avoid any confusions, you know, for the team as well to make everybody read the paperwork so that they know what's happening. Stephen Wilson 44:25 Right. Cathy Price 44:26 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 44:27 So how many patients do you all have now? Cathy Price 44:31 Well, Stephen Wilson 44:32 That you've actually acquired data on? Cathy Price 44:34 From March 2020, that was before the lockdown, we had around 1500, one thousand five hundred. So that was that was on our first testing. Since then, we've maybe we're heading up to nearly another 1000 collected through lockdown. And the reason we've managed to do that is that rather than ask them to come into London, we've asked the research nurses in the hospitals to send us their clinical scans. Stephen Wilson 45:07 Okay, so you guys gonna make use of those. Cathy Price 45:10 So, now what we're doing is we've got, you know, the initial predictions based on the research scans and the CAP testing. And now we have got now got the clinical scans, and we're testing out the predictions that we generated on the research scans with the clinical scans, and then doing a prospective study to see you know, how accurate the predictions are and how much we can improve them. Stephen Wilson 45:40 Oh, wow! And the clinical scans, are they all acquired acutely? Cathy Price 45:45 Yes. Stephen Wilson 45:45 And the research scans are acquired at various chronic time points? Cathy Price 45:48 Yeh, mainly. Most of our patients were months or years after stroke. I mean, months, because, Stephen Wilson 45:54 Yeah. Cathy Price 45:55 one, it took so long to do the metal checking and two, for them to be well enough to come to London. And then three, our massive backlog of waiting list people who are coming. Stephen Wilson 46:05 Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go all technical here, but just really, as a quick aside, like, have you compared how different the strokes look on acute and chronic? Because in my lab, we're finding that people's chronic lesions look pretty different than their acute. Cathy Price 46:19 Oh yes! Yeah, we have we have some papers on that, too. You get the growth that you see. Yes. Stephen Wilson 46:28 You see the lesion get bigger. Cathy Price 46:31 We see the lesions get, well, we see, yes, the automated lesion identification that we use, it does get bigger, because it's picking up on, you know, more more water. Stephen Wilson 46:44 Right. Yeah. I mean, there's like some degeneration that goes on of like, white matter tracks and stuff. But, I mean, we've also noticed the opposite, you know, like sometimes things that are acutely appear damaged, don't turn out to be damaged. You know, they, it turns out to not have I mean, you know, we kind of have this idea that, like, restricted diffusion is predictive of irreversible, you know, cell damage. Cathy Price 47:07 Yes. Stephen Wilson 47:08 But we're finding that there's like a, not insignificant amount of cases where, actually, you know, you can see that it didn't die, because it's still functionally active like ELA. Cathy Price 47:17 Yes. Yes. What I, we've been investigating that recently. Just looking at the fMRI, fMRI signal and seeing that, in something that looks like it's in the lesion, you can see some tasks specific responses. Stephen Wilson 47:34 Yeah. Cathy Price 47:35 And then if you go into the image, and you change all the, you know, effects, you brighten it all up, you can see what looks like, you know, tissue that potentially is, you know, working underneath. Stephen Wilson 47:49 Yeah! It's pretty shocking. I mean, I guess we all sort of quantify Cathy Price 47:54 But good though, isn't it? Stephen Wilson 47:55 Yeah, it is good. I mean, I mean, one thing that's always struck me about scanning patients is that, like, little activate, activity in the lesion, yeah, you'll see activity in areas that were, they're objectively damaged. I mean, they're not normal, but they can still be functionally active. That one thing we always see, and I'm sure you do, too, is that like, any activations that were supposed to be there, I always gonna go right up to the edge of the lesion. You know, like, if somebody has, like, if they missing like, half of Broca's area, the other half is going to be doing just great. Cathy Price 48:23 Yes. Stephen Wilson 48:24 Do you see that? Cathy Price 48:24 Yup. Yeah. Yes. Stephen Wilson 48:27 It'll just go right up to the edge. It'll be like, I don't care that like my neighbor, one millimeter away is destroyed. I'm just gonna keep on activating to this language task. Cathy Price 48:35 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 48:36 Okay. So yeah, I don't want to get it's hard for me not to get like sidetracked into the details with you, because we have really common interests. But um, kind of just getting back to our main themes. So you know, the central goal, as you said, is predicting, right? Predicting outcome and you have at least one Cathy Price 48:53 Understanding and explaining and explaining. Stephen Wilson 48:56 Okay, yeah. Predicting and explaining. Cathy Price 48:57 Predicting and explaining. So, in the last five years, my my program has been called LORAS, not PLORAS which is explaining language outcome and recovery after stroke. Stephen Wilson 49:10 Okay, well, that's because you got the prediction taken care of and now you get to understand why. Cathy Price 49:14 Well, no, I haven't got the prediction, but having the explaining is very important for improving the prediction. Stephen Wilson 49:19 Right. Cathy Price 49:20 Though, the two things go hand in hand, but the explaining part has all the FMRI in it, whereas the predicting part is based on the structural and all the non lesion factors. Stephen Wilson 49:32 Right. So I think the major paper that describes the predicting part so far, and I am sure you've got more in the pipeline, is Hope et al., 2013, right? Cathy Price 49:40 Yep. Stephen Wilson 49:41 Can you tell us about that paper? Like To what extent were you able to predict people's long-term outcomes based on their lesion location and other factors? Cathy Price 49:51 Well, um, I think the main point of that paper was to identify what are the main predictors and that was focusing on the importance of lesion site, you know, time post stroke. It wasn't about making clinical type predictions, which is what I want to be able to do. So, but it was about trying to explain the data and identify what are the most important predictors and also, the other thing that I love about that paper, and, you know, all credit, this is to, to Tom Hope. He is the person who led that, he's the person who, who, you know, designed and ran the analysis and knows how to do the machine learning, is the the output was probabilistic. So it wasn't about, it always gives you a confidence in how you can be about a prediction. So, many of the predictions, you know, we can generate, you know, they, you can you can you can show a sort of predictive trajectory. But there's also, you know, you know, there's, there's a confidence interval on it, which can be very wide, where you could possibly, clinically, and sometimes you see it, it's, it's, you know, it's very tight and you could do that those predictions. Stephen Wilson 51:26 Totally. Cathy Price 51:27 I really like that approach in that paper, because it it gives you those two things, that what are the different variables and these sort of beautiful outputs. Stephen Wilson 51:38 Yeah. Because it's, it's the other point estimate, as well as the the extent of variability, both need to be communicated to clinicians and patients and family members, right? I mean, it's not you, I mean, like, you could tell somebody that had like a, and I agree with you, like, sometimes you can make a really accurate prediction, like if somebody had like a small lesion, even if they're very bad acutely, you can tell them with great confidence that they'll be fine in a year. Cathy Price 52:06 Yeah. Stephen Wilson 52:06 If it, depending on where it is exactly. I mean, not the STS maybe. But whereas a large lesion, like you're gonna have a much wider confidence interval, and that needs to, you know, because some people are going to do great and are going to recover way better than what most stroke neurologists would expect, and others are going to be like, you know, permanently, severely impaired and being able to communicate that uncertainty, I think is very important as well, right? Cathy Price 52:28 Yes, definitely. Stephen Wilson 52:31 So, has the PLORAS project or the LORAS project, supported your concept of degeneracy? Are you seeing evidence for that notion that many speech and language functions can be performed by multiple different systems? Cathy Price 52:48 I think the fMRI data undoubtedly shows that the problem with it, is it that we, it's there are so many different activation patterns that we see and it's trying to, is trying to organize them, and dissociate them from from noise in the measurements that we're having. But it but so I mean, we're just scratching the surface, because it's extremely difficult. It's extremely difficult, because, you know, even even with the same that, we know, it's a moving target all the time that so for example, if we take damage to the, you know, you know, the left inferior for the left prefrontal cortex on left inferior frontal gyrus, we just take damage to that, we know people are going to be changing over time and their behavior. So even if you match up the lesion location, it's very difficult to match up the the time poststroke, that you're actually testing them or how fast they're going to recover. And that's why what I want to do next is to try and do it longitudinally right from the beginning, where we pick up patients who've got specific lesion sites, and then we watch what happens to them over time and is it the case that if we control for the amount of relearning that they do, that we see that they're all going along different parts of the same trajectory? Or is it that they're going off, and they're doing different, they're using different strategies to overcome for the loss of, you know, what we consider as an important region? So I think, you know, I haven't seen any evidence against it. Because we see patients change, they have different activation patterns and there's, there undoubtedly appear to be some that are lesion specific and then there are others that seem to be irrespective of their lesion. You know, so for example, the right frontal you know, increase activation in the right frontal cortex. I mean, that could be a strategic, you know, attention type strategy that happens when your your brain is working brain is working hard on the parietal lobes as well, when your brains working hard, you know that they're there, they have to come in to help you. So there are those strategic things that are helping. But then there also appear to be things which are lesion site specific. And then what did those ones mean? Does it mean that, you know, there's, there's sort of reorganization of a specific sort of functional network? You know? Yes. And what's what's what's happening? And, you know, how is it that, you know, you can, how is it that you can do the same task when you've removed an important bit of tissue? Like Broca's and Wernicke's area? Yeah. Stephen Wilson 55:51 Yeah. I mean, to what extent do you think it's the right hemisphere? And I'm going to like, kind of like, scaffold my question a bit more than that. So you have this great paper from a long time ago now, 2005, with Jenny Crinion, that shows that patients that had more activation in right temporal cortex, did better on, I think auditory sentence comprehension measures, after stroke. But you didn't argue that that was a reorganization to the right, because you, you observed that the right hemisphere activity wasn't really out of the bounds of normals, because normals also have some rate, you know, I'll be at less less than left. So I mean, to what extent do you think is the right is the right hemisphere, mirror of the left hemisphere network is that a degenerate or part of the, you know, kind of degenerate pathway that's available to different extents for different individuals? Cathy Price 56:45 I, I don't have much evidence to support that. I think, number one, it's really, really task specific. So it's going to depend, it's going to depend on the task, and it's going to depend on the lesion site and depend on how much of the left hemisphere is damaged. I think the only, you know, evidence that we really have is when we get these large left hemisphere lesions where there's nothing left in the left, and they're not activating anything in the left and they're activating on the right. That's the only time when you see, well, that's what the right is doing. But most of those patients tend to be pretty impaired, with the huge left hemisphere middle cereb... So that's not a good illustration that the right hemisphere can completely take over but it can certainly do some of the functions that the left hemisphere can do. Stephen Wilson 57:36 Yeah. Cathy Price 57:39 These are all questions that we've been thinking about, you know, and when I say we, I mean, you mean, you know, the whole community for so long, and it's just taking so long to address them because we don't have sufficient data and resources, I think. Stephen Wilson 57:57 Yeah, I mean Cathy Price 57:58 Just backed up by many other questions we've all got so many questions we're trying to answer at the same time. Stephen Wilson 58:04 But the data's I mean, the size of your data set is definitely gonna make progress possible. You know, I mean, Cathy Price 58:11 I hope so. I hope that you know, we, we will not we, you know, that by opening that data up making it available, other people can in the future, you know, tap in and address these questions. Stephen Wilson 58:24 Yeah, I mean, I know, you said you had about, now about 2500 structural scan to be I don't know, you don't have fMRI and all of them, but you probably have fMRI on at least a few 100 now, right? Cathy Price 58:36 Yes, but the thing with fMRI is that is the changing of this. So we've got about 100 on our latest paradigm and then we've got, you know, another 100 on another paradigm. So that makes it slightly difficult for trying to bring things together and the FMRI paradigm was only really up and running for about two years before lockdown. So we've lost two years of that scanning and we won't be able to replace that because that's yeah, the way the funding works is we don't have funds to do those particular scans. Stephen Wilson 59:10 Yeah. But I mean, this is definitely going to be the way forward I mean, like, you know, in, just to kind of put things in perspective, like, you know, my, my student Sarah Schneck and I did this meta analysis with the literature on, you know, reorganization and aphasia and I, we included every study that had six or more participants, you know, we're talking six, like we're, I mean, a lot of the seminal studies have like, 6, 12, you know, maybe 20, if it's a big sample, and you are going... Cathy Price 59:39 Great start! Stephen Wilson 59:40 Yeah, it's a great start but it sort of, it definitely makes clear like once you start thinking about like lesion variability and the need to have like, coherent groups of patients that actually had the same lesion so you can kind of see like, then what do they do differently functionally, you know, you're not going to get that with samples of six or 12 or 20, right, you're gonna need to have like hundreds of patients with Cathy Price 59:59 Unless those samples are carefully matched the lesion site, but generally they're not. Stephen Wilson 1:00:04 Yeah, mostly not. So yeah, I'm excited to see what comes. What's coming in the next few years from your lab. Cathy Price 1:00:12 Oh, me too. (Laughter) Stephen Wilson 1:00:16 So just to kind of wrap things up, I just have a couple of just a couple more questions, more general. Like one of the things I admire about you as a scientist is that you write in a really sort of simple and unpretentious way and I was wondering if I was wondering if you had any kind of mentors, or how you learned to write like, was it by copying certain writers or did somebody teach you to writr or did it just come naturally? Cathy Price 1:00:42 Wow, um, you know, I was I was a scientist, with, you know, I was good at maths. I'm not I'm not English. So English was my weak point. Stephen Wilson 1:00:55 Maybe that's why you write well. (Laughter) Cathy Price 1:00:57 So I, Stephen Wilson 1:00:58 because you keep it simple. Cathy Price 1:01:00 I read really, really, slowly, if I read or when I read, you know, Karl Friston's papers, probably, it takes me eight hours to, you know, get from one start to the end of it. But, yeah, there are so many different writing styles and I think some of my students have helped as well and I think that, you know, Karl Friston , and I remember him once telling me, you know, what did you weekend, he said, he'd written three papers. I said you can't write three papers in a weekend, that's not possible, you know, takes a year to write three papers. And he goes, Oh, well, if you've got the formula for writing papers, you can write papers. I mean, he described his formula, which was the aim of the paper is blah, the hypothesis is A, the alternative hypothesis is B, we tested this by doing this and we found, you know, but actually, there's better evidence for something called C. Huh done, see? through papers. Stephen Wilson 1:02:04 Yeah, you're right and I see that in some of your papers, too. Like, I know that Karl Friston has this style, where he'll he'll write literally, this paper is about blah, blah, like, that'll be the first line of the paper. This is a paper about blah, blah Cathy Price 1:02:17 And then it gets a bit more tricky. Stephen Wilson 1:02:20 Yeah, it goes downhill from there, but uh (Laughter) It's really easy to read the first paragraph of his papers, for the reasons that you just said. Okay, so the last thing like, you know, you've co authored over 300 papers, and, you know, I think we all know that in, in science, we sometimes get to be a middle author on things where we, you know, made a somewhat fleeting contribution, but I don't think that's largely the case for you, I think, you play an uncommonly large role in an uncommonly large fraction of the papers that you're a co author on and so my question is just basically how are you so productive? Cathy Price 1:02:52 Um, (Pause, Laughter) I really enjoy the papers of the best fit for me. So I as you know, I'm in isolation at the moment with COVID and before this before, but having COVID, the week before we were in isolation, because my husband had COVID. So on my second week, and I have just engrossed myself in writing a paper with one of my students. It's, it's becomes a bit of a hobby, I mean, I am going through it in detail over and over again. Yeah, so and it's a way of communicating with people. So, I guess I do really, really enjoy it. I love the learning process. I love you know, I enjoy looking at the literature. I you know, and I like doing it with somebody you know, where you're flipping something backwards and forwards, and everybody comes back with a different thing. I had a wonderful experience. If I can just tell you about this, writing a paper with a Chinese man called Wei Hu, and this was a paper that was about developmental dyslexia in China, and Chinese and English dyslexics. And it came about because he wrote to say he wanted to do a study on developmental dyslexia and I had been working this developmental dyslexia and so I sent him all of our stimuli, all of our data, all of our paradigms, everything. And then two years later, he wrote back to me and he said, Yes, I've now collected 400 Data for 400 people. Now what do I do? So I then, then went through, like, well, let's exchange you send us your data. We'll send us your, our data, and then we can both analyze it and see what we come up with and see what we can compare the Chinese and English dyslexics. And so eventually, we got to be writing this paper together and I literally think that every day he would take everything sentence that I put and put it through the English Dictionary of some sort of translation of some sort and come up with sentences. This sentence means this. I don't think we mean this. I think we mean that and so often he was right, I think, Oh, goodness. Okay, that's technical. I mean, sometimes it didn't work, obviously, as we know, you know, the translators are sometimes bizarre, but it was such a fun experience and I truly, truly missed writing papers, I only wrote one with him, but I truly missed it after that. So I do, it's such a, it's a way of communicating with people and developing ideas. So if you've got an enthusiastic co-author, then it's it's fun. Do you agree? Stephen Wilson 1:05:40 Oh, yeah, I kind of like writing. I, there's other stages that I enjoy more, you know, I think that my favorite stage is, is the data analysis. You know, where you get to see the patterns for the first time. Cathy Price 1:05:51 But don't you do data analysis when you're writing and checking backwards and forwards? For me it's a two way Stephen Wilson 1:05:56 Not so much. I mean, I think I pretty much like, make all my fingers before I even write down a word and they're like, they don't change much after that. I mean, like, sometimes something will come up in the writing where you think about it differently and realize you need to analyze the data differently. But mostly, it's more sequential for me. Maybe that's my mistake. (Laughter) Well, I wouldn't take any more of your time, you probably got a paper that you need to be getting to (Laughter) and I really appreciate you joining me on the podcast. Cathy Price 1:06:27 It's been fun. It's been fun to see you too. Stephen Wilson 1:06:30 Yeah, you too. I am sorry that your Christmas got messed up by COVID and I hope that you can have an alternative one in the new year. Cathy Price 1:06:39 Thank you and I hope I hope you you have a fun one. What are you doing for Christmas? Stephen Wilson 1:06:44 I'm just well, this is I need to scan one more person this afternoon and then I'm gonna be off for a week. We're gonna just hang out with my kids. My wife's parents are staying with us. We've got six people in the house and it's just me, you know, fun time. A lot of eating and drinking. Cathy Price 1:07:01 Lovely! How old are your kids? Stephen Wilson 1:07:02 They are five and eight. Cathy Price 1:07:04 Well I hope they have fun too. Stephen Wilson 1:07:05 Ah, they will. They're having a great time! Cathy Price 1:07:08 Yeah. Good. Stephen Wilson 1:07:09 All right. Well, take care and I'll hope to catch up with you soon. Bye. Cathy Price 1:07:14 Bye Stephen. Bye. Stephen Wilson 1:07:15 Okay, well, that's it for episode 18 and for the year of 2021. I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a happy new year. I'd like to thank Marcia Petyt for transcribing this episode and also episodes 14, 15 and 16, which were not transcribed before now. Thank you all for listening and see you next year. Bye for now.