Mind craft: Brain researcher Shubha Tole discusses embryos, dreams and dance
Exactly how does the brain take shape? Tole has won awards for her efforts to answer that question. She is now set to head the global brain research body IBRO.
Shubha Tole’s fascination with the brain began, she says, with the question of how colour makes its way into dreams. “How is the circuitry that makes us dream created inside our heads?” she wondered.
Michelangelo played a small but critical role too.
Tole was a Class 12 student at Mumbai’s St Xavier’s college, sitting riveted in a developmental biology class taught by the brilliant Sam Waugh, when he quoted the Renaissance sculptor’s famous words: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work... I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
“That’s when I realised that development is essentially creating form and structure out of basic raw materials,” she says.
This realisation lit a fuse. Where she had intended to study medicine, Tole now decided to indulge her fascination for the brain.
She wanted to learn more about how this mushy blob of tissue — “one that ancient Egyptians considered useless and not worth preserving in their mummies,” she says, laughing — makes us think, understand, love, and wonder about our place in the universe. She dreamed of understanding how the brain comes to be, and therefore how our sense of self is formed.
Accordingly, after Class 12, she picked life sciences and biochemistry. She went on to earn a Master’s degree and a PhD in neuroscience from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, she met her future husband and “24-hour friend” Sandip Trivedi, a physicist.
She continued her research into how the brain develops in the embryo, as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Chicago. After a decade in the US, aged 31, she and Trivedi returned to India.
It was 1999. Tole joined the department of biological sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and set up a first-of-its-kind laboratory for research into the developing mammalian brain.
She made waves internationally, for her research into how the “recorder of memories”, the hippocampus, is created at the embryonic stage.
Now 57 and dean of graduate studies at TIFR, Tole has just racked up another big win. She has been elected to lead the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), a position that has so far only been held by researchers from Europe and North America.
In January, she will begin a year-long term as president-elect, after which she will take office as president for three years.
IBRO represents 69 scientific societies and federations from 57 countries and aims to promote research, collaboration and the exchange of scientific knowledge worldwide.
As a woman from 1980s India, operating in a STEM field, Tole says she recognises that science, communication, diversity and inclusion are all part of the same conversation.
“It’s perfectly okay that not everyone is interested in knowing about science. People are interested in other people, and that’s how scientists should approach the public… by sharing their stories and not just their expertise,” she says. “It’s important, first, that the public accept scientists as contributing, worthwhile, trustworthy, quirky human beings.”
At IBRO, whose network extends to aspiring and practising neuroscientists in regions that may not have easy access to resources or networking opportunities, “my experience of working in a developing country can help shape policies and plans for the future,” she adds.
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Back to the brain itself, we’ve become used to thinking of it as a sort of computer (and computers as “sort of like” brains).
“But the brain is nothing like a computer when it comes to how it is built,” Tole says.
It’s not a question of just bringing parts together and linking them up. “In the brain, different structures need different types of neurons, which first have to be produced, and must then be connected in a proper circuit. Any mistakes in this complex choreography and we may not be able to sense, think, speak, sing, or we might have altered responses to stress, or process emotions differently.”
And… there’s no one to even do the assembling. The brain must essentially build itself.
Even 35 years into her career, Tole says she remains amazed at how this happens.
“We discovered a ‘lighthouse’ in the embryo’s brain, for instance, that sends signals to surrounding stem cells. Based on how far the cells are from the lighthouse, the strength of these signals decreases. And this is how each stem cell knows which type of neuron to produce. When this happens normally, we get a beautifully functional hippocampus, without which we would never be able to record new memories.”
And that’s just one of the brain’s many structures.
“The brain is like a magnificent building that constructs itself from the ground up, using instructions in its DNA as its only blueprint,” Tole says, “and yet somehow ends up with everything — stairs, windows, fire escapes — in just the right place.”
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When it comes to how her own brain developed, Tole says she is glad that it had the help of two free-thinking, scientific-minded individuals.
Her father, Padmakar Tole, was a scientist at TIFR; her mother, Aruna Tole, was an occupational therapist at Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital. They raised Shubha and her younger brother Prashant, now a captain with the Navy, to be free-thinking too. Both learned to cook and sew, and dabbled in carpentry, arts and crafts.
This is a culture Tole has sought to pass on to her sons, aged 22 and 19.
Watching her children grow has been a marvel, she adds. When he was about three, for instance, one son said to her: “When a thought enters my mind, it stays there. Others don’t know it.” This, of course, is a key mental milestone, and to see it take shape was magical, she says. “That’s also when they realise they can lie to their mom, so it isn’t all magic,” she adds, laughing.
What is her message to young women now making their way through careers in STEM? Fundamentally, focus on what is important to you.
“Women are often asked intrusive personal questions, even in a professional setting, that add to the idea that child-bearing is their primary purpose: Why are you single? Why married but not children? Why only one child? Who is taking care of your child while you are at this conference,” Tole says. “I’d love to see men react to being asked such questions. Perhaps that would best underline how inappropriate they are.”
What of the colours in dreams? Did she ever find out how we “see” them?
“The more I know the more I realise how much there is to know,” Tole says. She is still riveted by her dreams. “They are very colourful,” she says, chuckling. “In fact, I can tell I’m having one because impossible things happen. And I say to myself: Ah, this must be a dream, enjoy it!”
QUICK RECAP
* Shubha Tole, 57, grew up in Mumbai, the daughter of a TIFR scientist and an occupational therapist. She studied at St Xavier’s college and went on to earn a Master’s and a PhD in neuroscience from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
* Her research into embryonic brain development has won her a series of awards, including the Infosys Science Foundation Award in Life Sciences (2014), Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2010), and Bernice Grafstein Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Mentoring from the Society for Neuroscience (2022).
* When she’s not digging into the brain, Tole likes to dance. She is trained in Bharatnatyam and Kathak, and says her creative and scientific pursuits nourish each other. “Kathak is very mathematical in its rhythmic structure, and layered in its expressive ‘bhav’ components. There is a parallel in communicating science. There too, one wants to be accurate in content and intent, while engaging the audience and making the material accessible,” she says.
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