Classic sitcom ‘Friends’ helps grad student endure 104 brain scans

The science of getting Z’s has progressed rapidly in recent years. A growing body of research links poor sleep to increased risk of cognitive decline, a higher likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease, and even greater chances of developing heart problems. At the same time, wearables, like smart rings and watches, are transforming the way everyday people view sleep, turning their resting hours into rich datasets to pore over, sometimes to unhealthy obsessive levels. What’s still less understood, is how the subtle, everyday fluctuations in sleep quality that come from simply living a normal life can alter brain chemistry. People don’t live in controlled lab settings, and even the most avid bio-optimizer still has nights where quality sleep takes a backseat. Actually understanding how someone’s day-to-day sleep patterns affect their brain chemistry would require putting them in an MRI machine and collecting data over and over again, over long stretches of time to get a more holistic view. That’s exactly what Auburn University electrical and computer engineering graduate student Joshita Majumdar signed up for. Over 76 weeks, Majumdar slipped into the university’s 7-Tesla MRI scanner 104 times. That’s a level of commitment that would make even a stalwart Zen meditator fidget with frustrated boredom. Thankfully, Majumdar had a special companion to accompany her during the loud, cramped, 90-minute sessions: the hit television sitcom Friends. Majumdar recalls how a screen in the machine would cycle through four 10-minute videos of the staple from the 90’s and early 2000’s, each made up of several different scenes clipped together. The idea was twofold. Majumdar needed something playing during the sessions that would keep her from getting bored, and Friends just happens to be her self-described “guilty pleasure.” It was also one of the first shows she connected with as an international student adjusting to her early days in the United States, so some scenes strike particularly nostalgic, emotional notes. And like any great sitcom, Friends runs the gamut from numbing brain-rot to tear-jerking sentimentality. That’s potentially a great backdrop for a study analyzing changes in brain chemistry. “If you’re happy, you watch Friends. If you’re sad, you watch Friends,” Majumdar tells Popular Science. “So all times [are] a good time to watch Friends, right?” Past studies have looked at the way sleep variability affects brain chemistry, but many of those involve intentionally depriving the subject of sleep. This longer-term approach takes a more subtle approach that should better reflect the nuances of everyday life. “This is a person living her life, going through normal ups and downs and we are seeing how brain chemistry responds to that,” Majumdar’s advisor and Auburn University Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Gopikrishna Deshpande said. “That’s what makes this dataset so powerful. It’s not artificial. It’s not forced. It’s real.” The journey to 104 brain scans Majumdar grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, and moved to the U.S. in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Georgia, with an emphasis on mechanical engineering. Early on, she became interested in how different environmental factors affect brain function. And while she was busy pushing forward with her rigorous academic work, she also dealt with occasional homesickness, living in a new country thousands of miles away from friends and relatives. Around that same time, Majumdar says she started watching Friends to see what all the fuss was about. People around her seemed obsessed with the show, but she hadn’t seen it, and initially didn’t really understand the hype. Eventually, she went back to the show with fresh eyes and everything clicked. The sarcastic Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry) and affable actor Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) are among her favorite characters. “I gave it another try, and then I was like, oh no, this is fun,” Majumdar said. “And then it became a guilty pleasure.” When it came time to pick a test subject for this new, lengthy MRI study, Majumdar says Dr. Deshpande asked her if she’d be up for volunteering. Majumdar has some experience with MRI machines from past projects, enough to know that she wasn’t prohibitively claustrophobic or bothered by the machine’s loud industrial noises. Still, nothing she’d done before this could compare to the endurance and commitment it would take to see this through. The team decided not to commit to a set number of scans at the onset, and took it day by day to see how much the grad student could handle. “We said, like, ‘Okay, we’ll take one day at a time, one week at a time, and see how far we can pull it through,” Majumdar explained. Don’t sleep on Friends Majumdar was the one who pitched playing Friends episodes in the machine. She compiled four 10-minute videos, each made up of different scenes from various episodes. The material ran the gamut in tone, with the goal of eliciting a range of brain responses. One particularly strategic choice was to include clips of episodes aired around Thanksgiving. These fan-favorites tend lean heavily on themes of family, friendship, and camaraderie. Friends, in other words, was meant to roughly simulate the backdrop for Majumdar’s everyday life brain state. “In a task-based MRI, we are giving a particular stimulus, so we kind of have an idea what we are trying to activate in the brain,” Majumdar said. “But in a naturalistic run, it’’s kind of like you’re putting yourself into a real-world situation.” But that wasn’t all. Every session, the team would also play a roughly four-minute music video to the song “Love You Zindagi,” from the 2016 Bollywood film Dear Zindagi. Similar to the Thanksgiving episodes, this video was thoughtfully selected for its depiction of friends and family. It also helps remind Majumdar of home. “I have left my friends and family back in India,” Majumdar said. “So depending upon what my emotions are on that day, I used to really connect to it differently each day.” Majumdar and her colleagues quickly settled into a routine for their MRI odyssey. She would come to the university’s neuroimaging center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, typically around 7:30 in the evening. She had the choice of that later time slot or first thing in the morning, but chose the former because she says she isn’t really a morning person. That choice came with some trade-offs, though. Early on, she discovered that eating a meal immediately before entering the machine made her feel dizzy. After one fraught experience, she made a point of giving herself a gap of 90 minutes to two hours after eating before going into the scanner. Coming in later at night, especially after a long day of PhD work, also meant she sometimes had to fight the urge to fall asleep. Even though she was stuck in the machine for 90 minutes at a time, the tests required that she keep her eyes open for the vast majority of it. That struggle is partly what makes subsequent findings all the more interesting. “Sometimes I was a little bit sleepy, but that’s part of it,” Majumdar said. “And that’s the thing that we wanted to bring out through this research: that you are in a very natural setting. You’re not in a kind of a forced experiment where you are either sleep-deprived or put under some conditions that might evoke a different brain response. We really wanted to look at the real-world condition where I’m just living my life, and in parallel I’m getting scanned and seeing how the brain chemistry responds to it.” In addition to sitting in the MRI machine, Majumdar logged everything she ate and wore a sleep-tracking ring. With all of that data, the team was able to match each night’s sleep metrics with the next day’s scan and compare patterns over time. Though there’s still data being combed through, they’ve already found an important connection: across the 104 sessions collected over 76 weeks, nights with less deep sleep and more light sleep tended to be followed by higher glutamate levels the next day. Glutamate is an amino acid that acts as a kind of chemical messenger in the brain. In a previous university blog post, Majumdar compared this finding to the brain flushing out byproducts that build up during active, wakeful moments, allowing for a more restful night’s sleep. “You wake up with a fresh mind,” she said. “But if that process is blocked, it’s going to hamper you the next day.” But is she sick of sipping coffee at Central Perk? Majumdar’s work in this area has only just begun. Moving forward, she and her colleagues hope to bring on more study participants to make the dataset even richer, though they’ll likely make adjustments so that each participant doesn’t have to go in for scans quite as often as she did. Eventually, she says she also hopes to use AI and other tools to try and extract the feelings and emotions experienced during those MRI sessions (and during certain Friends’ moments) to get a better sense of what’s happening in the brain when certain feelings are evoked. Miraculously, even after watching the show in a cramped, rumbling tube for 18 months, Majumdar says she still isn’t sick of Friends. When asked if she can still watch the silly sitcom without getting bored, Majumdar responds with an emphatic, “Yes, definitely.”