"where the darkest places you've ever gone in your life the following is a conversation with carl deisseroth professor of bioengineering psychiatry and behavioral sciences at stanford university he's o..."

"you open your book called projections a story of human emotions with a few beautiful words that summarize all of humanity the book draws insights about the human mind for modern psychiatry and neurosc..."

"done sir the tapestry of the human story has its own warp threads rooted deep in the gorges of east africa connecting the shifting textures of human life over millions of years spanning pictographs ba..."

"and one thing we learn as biologists is that when something breaks you see what the original unbroken part was for and we see this in genetics we see this in biochemistry it's known that when you have..."

"projections is that broader story but still anchored in the moment of patience of people of experiences of the moment is there a clear line between dysfunction and function disorder and order this is ..."

"that you're asking about between order and disorder function and dysfunction it's operational of the moment how are things working can we just like linger on the terms for a second so this uh disease ..."

"so is it fair to assume that basically every member of the human species suffers from a large number of disorders then well and we just have to pick which ones are are debilitating and for each person..."

"where do those numbers come from is it self-report is it people who show up and say i need help is it somebody else that points out that person needs help or is it like estimates that even go beyond t..."

"talk about it just how biological they are because it's a that too is a mystery i mean you know in terms of from a perspective of how to probe into the disease how to understand it and how to help it ..."

"but they are heavily genetic all three of these and what's very interesting is each one of these three is actually correlated positively positively with measures of intelligence of educational attainm..."

"there is how much you think versus how much you feel this comes up all the time in medicine we encounter this all the time when you day after day you encounter this you know the the abyss of suffering..."

"i felt like i was reading things words and the words made sense like standing next to each other but when you kind of read for a while you realize you didn't actually understand anything that was said..."

"instead of ireland drinking and so on and telling everybody that he's going to be one of if not the greatest writers of the 20th century and uh he turned out to be that so the that i always think abou..."

"finnegan's wake is is loaded with them and it's it's just full of them we we talk about uh clang associations in schizophrenia where the word that is said is echoes in some way the previous word and i..."

"and then when we look at the families of people with schizophrenia and joyce was no exception there very often are people within the family who are on the spectrum some have it some are able to see it..."

"along that spectrum i should mention that we have my friend sergey pulling up stuff young sergei or old sergey i don't know what to call you but uh there's drafts of finn can squake yeah i actually sa..."

"on the paper so it was what he was able to do is was quite authentic in that sense of course i don't want to pigeonhole him he was doing much more than that it was much more than than talking about al..."

"which it is like uh you know elucidating something about the human mind kind of thing but you could also probably write really strong like novels uh so maybe that's in the future but anyway what is yo..."

"uh human being with a different class of of psychiatric disorder that's what each story each each chapter is anchored in by trying to use words that and style of writing and and uh you know diction th..."

"inner feeling of the disorder when you put yourself in that mode does that change you yeah i couldn't turn it on and off right away i had to first i would start by thinking about the person uh or the ..."

"uh it's not wrong he's not wrong why projections is it uh i mean there's some instead of putting words into your mouth because i can imagine a lot i mean i to me you know i will start putting words in..."

"when there's any kind of disorder we get to only see that disorder through that narrow window as opposed to the full complexity of its origins the word projections definitely serves that purpose here ..."

"how effectively two parts of the brain can engage with each other and join together to form a joint representation of something so that's one meaning it's pure neuroscience the word projection is used..."

"try to understand someone else's behavior and and make sense of it by projecting our own inner feelings our own uh sort of narrative onto them and use that as a way to help us understand them better a..."

"have the full connotation i was told you have to sacrifice some of the rich um ambiguity of meaning uh with connections that's interesting i mean connect and words are so interesting they have so many..."

"is and of course maybe that's what love is because maybe uh maybe that's the whole pursuit like a lifelong pursuit of getting at that person maybe that's what that is and like that uh insatiable sort ..."

"science and and that wanting to dive deeper is it's almost like again where the it could be a love affair with investigating the human mind for example and and that was one reason it spoke to me also ..."

"the for the book because i'm offering up hard stuff too and in fact a lot of it and also hard stuff from within me from my my own personal side too and that was there's a lot of vulnerability that com..."

"where did these few lines come from because i i read it as a curiosity of a scientist those lines were alone and also as a desperate uh human being searching like offering himself for an understanding..."

"universal form but it's but he did it in this very artful uh and very vulnerable way it was it was both both beautiful and you could you could feel the hurt coming from him too and that was important ..."

"dark stuff too i mean it's it's the most powerful connection we can form and that's that's it's that's what makes it so important to us it's the it's the strongest and most stable connection that we c..."

"is and that that's hard to do in a in a compact form and so you have to take time to talk about love you have to take time to to do it justice um it takes a book or at least a poem or several thousand..."

"forget whatever the absurdity whatever the suffering of life is together you get to like huddle for warmth and that's why i love the uh sort of just the uh the honesty and the intensity of the way pen..."

"of a of a mind yeah i don't know if i don't know if you have a deeper analysis on this penguin well i i like you as a psychiatrist i i would i would want to sit down with a penguin and go i want to se..."

"rest and stay in one place at the level of the species that's really good that there's that diversity in their willingness to forage some stay where they are the species is somewhat on a firm footing ..."

"your heroes and also um you know getting to meet the people who uh the best at the top of the world at the thing you've failed to pursue so there so there's i'm getting a free therapy session on top o..."

"in some ways it's maybe unnecessary from the perspective of modern neuroscience to divide things up that way from the you know the moralistic drives and the primal gratification drives in some ways th..."

"way if there's a town hall of competing drives and desires and there they interrelate to each other they involve different aspects of the of the brain and the history of the person and actions and cho..."

"neuroscience uh whenever we seem to get closer to addressing a question like this at the level of cells it seems to get farther away and i'll give you an example of what i mean by that so one thing i'..."

"well that's so awesome yeah at one level you might think how excited would young have been to see this or freud or the early you know psychoanalysts to see where this starts but it's not so simple bec..."

"and nobody uh what i what i tweet today uh all generalizations are wrong [Laughter] so including this one let's actually talk about that sort of the study of individual cells if you could linger on yo..."

"cells and the way we do it is pretty cool i think it's you know right away there's a problem if you think about how do we do this how could we play in well-defined activity patterns and provide a stre..."

"thing yeah so if you could exactly so if you could turn on or off the brain or parts of the brain or cell types or individual cells at the natural rate and rhythm and timing of normal brain activity t..."

"it in the brain and you send current through it all the cells near the electrode will be stimulated it's like trying to control fish by spraying them with water yeah right because there's already a lo..."

"versatile method could be applied to essentially any cell by 2012 we could get to single cell resolution we used light guidance strategies to target individual cells in the brain of a of a living mous..."

"across the entire brain now if you look 10 20 years in the future um you know i think we'll we'll surprise ourselves but the fact that we're already able to yeah to cause specific perceptions to happe..."

"uh therapy and he published this in the journal nature medicine so about uh 10 12 years ago he and i published a paper together where we gave him one of our optogenetic tools one of these light-activa..."

"it was you know that's an amazing thing um do you know the title of the pit what's his name again uh roska r-o-s-k-a can you look up the nature paper yeah nature medicine nature medicine so that that'..."

"about schizophrenia about bipolar all those kinds of things that are the tools are low resolution currently for determining what like the degree to which you have a thing and whether you have a thing ..."

"they've done is actually pretty cool so i i like the uh robots yeah from the from the design perspective and it wasn't a it was a design approach that wasn't being taken in academia and it's great tha..."

"not getting to and so we and others are using these very long electrodes that help us get deep and we can still record for many cells many thousands of cells we can have multiple of these at once in t..."

"especially when obviously on the other side of your signal is a biological um [Music] well the the mushy mesh is kind of interesting because we we have there are problems with light light scatters in ..."

"but it's engineering too it was just super super super exciting i should mention because i remember mentioning elon um i recently got for the first time ever got covered um how did i go so long withou..."

"like what is there some like uh again don't want to romanticize it but if your system goes to some kind of hardship and you come out on the other end i wonder sometimes if there's a greater um maybe k..."

"hope to find the answer one day yeah and we have early clues so for example when patients with epilepsy have uh experiences of religiosity as part of their seizure or the aura before their seizure ver..."

"change everything across the brain okay so just just the fact that you maybe give them to a mouse let's say or eventually to a human you won't know yet which cells to hone in on as the causal players ..."

"so religious experiences are one of the most deep kind of experiences and so here you could first understand where they originate how they propagate to the brain and then to stimulate them yeah yeah a..."

"life who had no predisposition for it and know even without a neurochemical so there's the the the causality of that is very interesting to explore how did the the manic state unleash this religiosity..."

"um can we talk about bipolar it may be depression well let's talk about i mean i don't know if there's a a nice way to discuss the differences in the full landscape of suffering that's here but maybe ..."

"unstoppable hopelessness and inability to see into the future a discounting of the value of their own action anything they can imagine themselves doing seems worthless or they are unable to enjoy thin..."

"beings why do you think you can't yet from an optogenetics perspective is it because there's so many possible causes is it so much so many things involved so i think the answer is there are many thing..."

"theory of everything don't get me wrong i don't think we need a first date of the century it would be nice it's also a good question if it's possible yeah yeah well that that i i have uh some thoughts..."

"brain stimulation treatment do you have advice for people who suffer from mild forms of depression or feel as they might both for those people and do you have advice for people who love the people who..."

"right yeah and so you you have mild uh i mean uh if you're very careless with the triggers all around you then you you're just i think all of us have the capacity to really suffer uh from that kind of..."

"uh and all animals that have been studied in one form or another show this even the worm that i mentioned earlier c elegans with 302 neurons it can effectively give up in challenging situations we've ..."

"useful roots in in our uh that contribute to our survival so both depression and motivation have uses and in the pain sometimes it's nice to just shut the hell up and huddle with the penguins right uh..."

"but it's still interesting as for insight people a lot of people still do it to gain insight into themselves and in general it's a good uh sort of conversation starter those methods you know they're g..."

"people to feel better see i use that as a conversation opener to the freudian thing where i try to delve at a bar of the deep sexual desires in a person's subconscious and i find that opens up possibi..."

"there are forms of talk therapy that are essentially conversational or they much more approach pure conversation there's uh there are there's a befriending therapy there's interpersonal therapy these ..."

"artfully can be as powerful this reminds me of robin williams so i have to ask you several questions here on that but one of my favorite movies is goodwill hunting i don't know if you've seen it with ..."

"is selected to be appropriate for that view of the relationship and so i and many other talk therapists actually prefer not to let things get um not let the connection get that deep you want to have t..."

"uh arm's length than that let's pretend this is real life sometimes can't you leave a little bit of yourself in the interaction with the patient i mean it's another human being yes so it's a balance a..."

"where are the darkest places you've ever gone in your life you know i had uh things haven't haven't always been been easy personally or you know or professionally i had i had moments you know i was ef..."

"learn a lot about yourself in those moments you know what's what's left and and then what are the the the roots out from there and and that's that's that can be powerful to to see uh in yourself have ..."

"yeah that's right what wisdom do you draw from that time about so first of all you said something funny which is i wonder if it that it's somehow not having thoughts of suicide limits your capacity to..."

"that's right that's right do you yourself have to practice observing triggers just as a human operating in this world i've definitely those those skills that have come from from therapy i've i've foun..."

"channeling in order to present the happiness but it feels like that realness is only possible when you're deeply self-honest and analytical and and then then if you're deeply self-honest you're going ..."

"actually do that in real life that that that sexual fantasy serves some kind of purpose in imagination only and in that same way suicide might serve a purpose and imagination only is very unlikely to ..."

"that that didn't lead to death what do we do well there's a whole range of options you know was it a suicidal gesture in the sense of not intending death or was it was the intent death and if it was t..."

"loss of a loved one loss of a job loss or you get screwed over in some kind of um some kind of way i don't know those and then also in the negative voice is just you and the negative voice for days an..."

"dopamine neurons die in lewy body dementia those are neurons that give rise to much of the feelings of reward and pleasure that we experience among other roles so uh clearly in his case there could ha..."

"what is autism what do we know about autism human beings exist on a spectrum of uh how social we can be and this is pretty interesting actually scientifically but also very important uh clinically the..."

"so why why does this exist what is it uh it's very genetic as i mentioned it's it's one of the you know top three or four most biological in the sense of most genetically determined of the psychiatric..."

"fast social interaction now on the flip side there are brain states that maybe don't have to work so fast that are extremely important still dealing with something that's not moving or that's predicta..."

"system so autism in a sense is a is a spectrum that has identifiable characteristics about the way people deal with dynamic information often expressed itself as like social that's right dynamic infor..."

"yeah it's so interesting i mean um i tried to not to think about that stuff um i'm afraid of thinking disor about disorders and things like that because just like i don't like sort of economics or gam..."

"question i can't have all this cool rich visual information coming my way that's literally because i often close my eyes to think it's not because i'm afraid of something whatever it's just like too m..."

"here's a huge opportunity for very creative model building in theoretical neuroscience and linking that to these data streams we're getting across the brain that we talked about earlier these immense ..."

"oil that would work well uh what in your practice is um treatment or advice for the people on the autism spectrum so right now there's no real medical treatment there are behavioral treatments that ar..."

"anxiety what i just talked about eye contact i am richly even with eyes closed and all those kinds of things i'm richly experiencing the world and it's not like you're afraid of the world or you're no..."

"symptoms are i've had patients who are pleasantly hallucinating so frankly psychotic but doesn't affect their lives so i don't give that person as diagnosis because there's not social or occupational ..."

"but then you're right the concept of the spectrum does become a useful uh you know pigeonholing um device which is maybe not not the best thing yeah and eye contact is interesting one is interesting o..."

"and i i think about it all the time why do we have all these ways of being human uh and even within one individual you go through phases of life where you express different sides of your way of being ..."

"boring world you want the weird you want the crazy that's what fun is made of that that that's the uh the foundation of humor and the all the ways in which we deal with the with the with the suffering..."

"schizophrenia is a state where there is a break from reality and so this can show up as we call them the positive symptoms of schizophrenia these include hallucinations hearing something or seeing som..."

"percent genetically determined um one percent of the human population around the world it's it's universal okay it's not confined to any one culture not even really biased in one you know culture anot..."

"to erratic behavior that leads to accidents now it can be treated there are medications that help uh fortunately they have side effects so they're not perfect you can have movement problems and uh act..."

"more typically um you'll end up in some intermediate state where there's a symptoms are reduced powerfully but there might be still something there and you've got a drop down in functioning that may b..."

"and so that that's so it's a it's a it could be conceptualized as a communication within the brain problem notifying what's another part of the brain what's going on and there's some evidence uh consi..."

"out of the water uh in our evolution we've needed this sort of thing so long-standing biological structure recently co-opted it seems by our evolution as social uh primates now how could that happen w..."

"all those cells are down there in the ponds too right next to the lacrimal gl duct the tear gland neurons and so almost certainly this fear anxiety anxiety-induced crying arose from a very slightly mi..."

"and because it was coming from the fear and anxiety circuits that regulate that necessary involuntary change in heart rate and respiratory rate it also was involuntary and that became valuable as a as..."

"big concept so that's your sense of because like a flip side could be with optogenetics you can there's an engineering question can you turn consciousness on and off like a light switch okay so here h..."

"seconds something like that that exactly matched what was going on when you were feeling that inner subjective sense okay so in that thought experiment a question for you is would you be feeling that ..."

"existing as a physical object anymore would be feeling that subjective feeling and it's inescapable because it's exactly the same as the previous situation all the neurons have to be uh spatially like..."

"head we don't know why that would be the case that they do and so that's a huge unanswered question in the field is is what is it that binds the activity of neurons together so they can form a joint r..."

"pretty good you think you'll get there i i you know with something with nature always has surprises for us we're always the curious mind is always after more but yeah true but biology gives us other r..."

"right this is we're clearly designed to to ask why and to answer and and that i think is i don't i don't know the meaning of all life i think a meaning of our lives is that and you know this is the th..."

"completely from having anybody to know like that i know that person that's good i mean i suppose you could do that in a single person's body but dissociation you can you could yeah well but i do wonde..."

"carl you're an incredible human being um i'm a huge fan of who you are as a person who you are as a scientist who you are as a writer i just thank you so much i'm so honored that you would sit down an..."