Trevor Robbins: What makes people tick?

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith chats to Cambridge neuroscientist, and expert on OCD, Trevor Robbins...

Chris - Trevor Robbins was born in London on the 26th of November, 1949. He attended Battersea Grammar School and then he read psychology at the University of Cambridge. Here he graduated with first class honours before embarking on postgraduate studies. He is a leading authority on the frontal lobes of the brain and the role that they play in mental and behavioural disorders like depression, drug addiction, OCD - that's obsessive compulsive disorder - and ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He's also an expert on degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Trevor's currently the director of the University of Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute and an emeritus fellow at Downing College in Cambridge. He has in the past served as the president of the British Neuroscience Association. In his spare time, he likes to play chess and has represented both England Juniors and the University of Cambridge back in the day. You certainly need your frontal lobes for that, Trevor.

Trevor - Especially when you get old like me. Unfortunately in chess you peak when you're in your late twenties and then when you get older you get worse. But I used to be a pretty good player.

Chris - As in you could give Kasparov a run for his money?

Trevor - I played someone called Mikhail Tal who was the world champion many years ago, and I got crushed by him in a simultaneous exhibition in London many years ago.

Chris - Let's kick off with one of the things that you're really interested in and that's OCD. This I think is trivialised a bit. People tend to just say, 'Well it's my OCD kicking in' as they reorganise things on the table in front of them, for example. But for the people who have this, they're absolutely plagued by it. Can you just paint a picture of what a day in the life of someone who's got that is like.

Trevor - It's a disaster. It's a really severe and disabling disorder. Imagine that you perform a ritual like washing your hands because you are scared of getting germs, but instead of washing your hands and then drying them off and going off to work, you feel compelled to keep on washing your hands and then they're still not clean enough. You're checking: 'no, not clean enough.' So you have to get the bleach out and you're using bleach on your hands and damaging your hands and spending hours and hours and never actually leaving your house so that people at work think, 'is he ill? What's going on? He can't hold down a job.' Eventually your whole life collapses. Personal relationships, everything goes. People become suicidal with severe OCD and they have to resort to very strong treatments, which surprisingly can be quite effective, but nevertheless are quite invasive.

Chris - And thanks to you, we now have a much better insight into why this is happening and what we can do about it. You talk about those treatments and we'll come back and talk about those in a bit, but let's, let's wind the clock back a bit. First, I mentioned that you got to university here in Cambridge, became very good at chess, what led you into psychology? That's what you studied here to start with. Why did you embark on that in the first place?

Trevor - Well, you know, actually Chris, I'm a failed molecular biologist because that's what I was really interested in. I did study biochemistry for a while as well, but I was inspired taking a course in experimental psychology to go the other way, to study the brain. I got very interested in what makes people tick: motivation. I was going to be a clinical psychologist, but then did well in the exams and you get this offer to do a PhD. So I did a PhD in very experimental work associated with the effects of drugs on the brain and behaviour, and I was particularly interested in drugs of abuse like amphetamine, which caused a lot of compulsive like behaviours. I guess that's where it started.

Chris - Perhaps you could just orientate for us the different bits of the brain that we're going to talk about and where they fit together to make the brain tick as it were.

Trevor - Well, amphetamine is a drug that releases dopamine in the brain. I think a lot of people have heard about this chemical messenger, which provides signals particular for structures in the brain called the striatum, which is right in the middle of the brain and has been associated with Parkinson's disease and the expression of motor behaviour. But I also think it's to do with emotions and thoughts. For a long time I studied how dopamine works in the striatum and its relevance to Parkinson's disease, for example. But then I got interested in what controls the striatum. It's a bit of the brain, but does it have a kind of supervisor? And the supervisors are your frontal lobes. These are the bit of the so-called cortical mantle of the brain (the outside bit, the huge bit of gray matter in the human brain) and the frontal lobes are right in the front, just behind your eyes, Chris. They send projections to the striatum, connections which control the striatum, and in a sense maybe control compulsive behaviours.

Chris - Different animals have different sized ones. We have a very characteristically overdeveloped front part of our brain. How does that manifest then in the way our brains work compared to say a laboratory rat?

Trevor - That's a really interesting question. First of all, I should say the frontal lobe has many different areas. There are 20 different areas, and we're trying to understand how they all work together, like a committee, to control behavior. Now, our relatives, the non-human primates, monkeys, they have similar bits of the frontal lobe. Not quite as well developed as us, but more or less the same thing. If you saw a monkey brain frontal lobe, it would be quite similar to a human one. Now you ask about rats, rodents, they don't seem to have all of the components of the frontal lobes. They have some of them, some of the ancient parts of the frontal lobes, but not some of the more modern parts, which probably give us our cognitive sophistication.

Chris - Does that mean then that these disorders that you are interested in don't manifest in a rat? They are unique to us and animals like us, like monkeys?

Trevor - I think some aspects of these disorders you can study in rodents particularly. So for example, I mentioned the striatum, well the striatum in the rat is pretty well conserved, similar to the human striatum. So to the degree that compulsive behaviour depends on the striatum, yes indeed, you can study this in other animals. But if you are interested in the frontal lobes, frontal cortex, really the full component of the frontal cortex, you probably need to study this in non-human primates or in humans.