"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..."

"scaffold with intricate and sometimes lovely detail here are stories of this fabric fraying in those who are ill in the minds of people for whom the warp is exposed and raw and revealing what have you..."

"probably more so than any other you know medical specialty i'm a psychiatrist i'm i treat patients still i see acutely ill people who come to the emergency room where there's no doubt that this is not..."

"things working can we just like linger on the terms for a second so this uh disease uh dysfunction how careful should we be using those words can we just even in this conversation um from a sort of te..."

"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..."

"uh just the the dance of human emotion and interaction and the it's like uh well it is love when it works and is love when it breaks down uh biological or is it something else so we're gonna talk abou..."

"right what's that book forgot the book name but uh is intelligence a burden uh well you know people can get into trouble when they think they're smarter than they are i will say that i don't know some..."

"so you quote finnegan's wake uh mad props for that james joy's book i took a class on james joyce in college i think i read parts of finning and way i might have been on drugs of some kind or i um i s..."

"you know semantic meaning from their their dry uh you know dictionary definition you know there's a funny story that was told it doesn't matter if it's true or not but they they said that uh james joy..."

"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..."

"full complexity of its origins the word projections definitely serves that purpose here but it's it's got a few other really appropriate other connotations as well so the first thing is a projection i..."

"pure neuroscience the word projection is used all the time and it happens to be something that optogenetics a technique that we maybe we'll talk about a little later it works particularly well with we..."

"and use that as a way to help us understand them better and we'll do the reverse too we'll take things we see in the outside world and we'll bring them into ourselves and see how well they map how wil..."

"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 i love language and how much is lost in ..."

"how much incredible science is going on in china that is lost in translation and i'll never i mean that makes me very sad because i'll never learn chinese in the same way that i've learned english and..."

"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 ..."

"side too and that was there's a lot of vulnerability that comes with that but that's that comes with love that comes with writing you have to be open you have to be vulnerable and so i thought that re..."

"the your dark rich life and then a few lines in here are just i mean those are i'm going to just use them as as pick up lines at a bar i offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset years befo..."

"what do you think about love carl what's what's the role of love in the human condition we'll talk about the dark stuff yeah but uh maybe love is the dark stuff too i mean it's it's the most powerful ..."

"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..."

"this and then this video i saw a lonely this is this is misinformation so the name of the video is lonely deranged penguin i don't know if he's deranged so if you play it so he left his pack and uh an..."

"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..."

"but some carry a burden a risk for themselves but it's good for the species that they're explorers and they will venture out the migration patterns that different species blunder into and that turn ou..."

"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'..."

"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 because an emerging theme ..."

"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 your sense that as you get closer to that underst..."

"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..."

"and so that's that's what we do with optogenetics we take genes bits of dna from microbes single-celled organisms and these single-celled organisms like algae they make uh little proteins that sit in ..."

"ability to do that we get that initial specificity that you could never get with an electrode okay so let me say that this is uh we recently got uh the alaska prize for this is a brilliant idea um so ..."

"really study these these proteins and so we we've discovered some of these proteins other other groups have as well we've dived deep into their structure just like the double helix structure of dna wa..."

"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 happen and specific actions means..."

"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..."

"someone who's blind in both eyes and he gave a one of these options into one eye of this human being who was blind and with the goal of conferring light sensitivity onto this retina that was not able ..."

"how it operates partial recovery of visual function in a blind patient after optogenetic therapy so he went through the full process of doing primate societies and then and then going well that's dedi..."

"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 ..."

"here because there's a lot of ideas under the umbrella of neuralink but one of them is to use electrical signals to stimulate and then you also record you collect electrical signals from the brain at ..."

"record from many thousands of neurons and that's not the only way it's a it's a very interesting way we and others are using uh brain penetrating electrodes that actually get quite deep this whole str..."

"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..."

"extremely uh powerful so like opto electric brain computer interfaces which by the way there's uh efforts on the computing side to build optoelectric uh servers so like where you have both electricity..."

"so but we've developed workarounds the longer wavelength light you use if you get into the infrared there's less scattering you can use two photon methods or three photon methods where the photons hav..."

"mention because i remember mentioning elon um i recently got for the first time ever got covered um how did i go so long without finally so i'm all vaccinated and everything like that and so i got uh ..."

"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..."

"uh somebody has to get lucky right somebody has to get like all right if we can actually uh go back to this idea of trying through optogenetics to find origins of when the wave first starts origins of..."

"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 ..."

"sort of stimulate religious experiences 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 brai..."

"and nobody in his family either so no family history no personal history of any psychiatric illness and he had never been religious particularly before either certainly no no passionate you know uh ty..."

"so there's certain things that are really satisfying to my ocd in my mild ocd i think it's pretty much a religious experience so i understand that there's it if it's not direct it's at least uh rhymes..."

"as well but the depression why do i focus on that it's so uh one feels tantalizingly close to helping these uh people who are suffering so deeply that's and that's why i focused on it is these are peo..."

"certain regions of the chromosome and twin studies there's a clear genetic link it doesn't explain everything but it's a big part of it genetics are a strong contributor and although you can have depr..."

"interpretation of the problem we have all these symptoms but we can't yet point to a set of cells or a set of circuits or an activity pattern that is causing major depression this disease state per se..."

"it's sort of in other fields of medicine you know someone with congestive heart failure who comes into the clinic they have very different symptoms they have shortness of breath and they have swollen ..."

"motivation the safety and the insight that's critical uh and particularly for the severe cases for the mild cases where people still have you know have some insight and motivation and energy to get so..."

"moderate cases so you're basically have to train yourself to see the world as a collection of triggers and you have to first understand like collect the data like basically see every experience as a t..."

"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..."

"it can be more productive to be very systematic about it or is conversation itself the art form of of helping each other understanding each other and helping each other there are forms of talk therapy..."

"open himself up in return so so how do you do that as a as a as a psychiatrist as a therapist you have to be careful you know you don't want to do too much uh but opening up a little bit does help it ..."

"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..."

"and then then if you're deeply self-honest you're going to realize that there's a lot of beautiful things about life that you can discover and if you do that how can you possibly then take your own li..."

"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 ..."

"to our knowledge this is not something that that can be studied in other animals so it remains this this uh uh very poorly understood action and in predicting it so what do we do with psychiatrists we..."

"the end 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 clinic..."

"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..."

"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 information ..."

"i know [Laughter] i don't well i don't know how to moderate anything but even even fruit uh this apples and cherries is a nightmare anyway that's such a psychiatrist thing to say very interesting um b..."

"it's it's it's it's overwhelming it's a distraction and it's going to cause errors of of understanding and of course our eyes that's part the way we use our eyes as part of the human communications yo..."

"you could switch between them here's the kind of cells that you would predict almost like predicting the higgs boson here's the kind of circuitry that i would predict should govern the switching or mi..."

"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..."

"the world and has this progressive quality to it untreated so it's very interesting there's a break that happens we call it first break when someone experiences their first disruption of reality they ..."

"but the amazing thing and this is emblematic of where psychiatry stands we don't have the deep understanding just like with depression we don't have that heart as a pump level of understanding that we..."

"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..."

"there yeah yeah 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 e..."

"i wrote down a question why do we cry our tears a window into some depths that we ourselves don't know i almost want to make fun of myself for that question but you do talk seriously about crying in t..."

"now how could that happen well the lacrimal gland is controlled by structures in the ponds which is a structure deep in our just above our neck between our neck and our head and reflecting its ancient..."

"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..."

"the flip side could be consciousness it's just the few neurons that are generating some useful thing that make us it's like uh the the sense of self that you talked about in the uh in the mice maybe i..."

"optogenetics you can there's an engineering question can you turn consciousness on and off like a light switch okay so here here's where exactly consciousness frames the problem extremely well and it ..."

"there's a philosophical question there i'm if if you ask me specifically i would say yes okay good most people would say that because it's hard to say no right it's very hard to say if every cell in y..."

"your brain cells don't need to be in your head anymore at all right the only reason they're next to each other the only reason they're wired together is to affect each other to stimulate or inhibit ea..."

"that's actually literally theory of everything uniting the small the sort of the theory of the neuron um the functioning of the neuron with the big just the um the functioning of the entire mind that'..."

"but the other aspect of this whole thing is that your life is pretty short that's true so first of all you can die any day i tend to try to think about that that it ends and get in at any moment becau..."

"you think about your mortality i do yeah it's it comes back to what we talked about earlier i you know i never think i've done enough and it's it's relevant to that for sure there's a deadline yeah do..."

"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..."