Martin Picard
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Martin Picard reads as The Visionary because his research at Columbia asks questions most biologists are not yet asking. By mapping how mitochondria respond to psychological stress and social experience, he is constructing a framework that links cellular biology to human emotion, dissolving the boundaries between neuroscience, psychology, and molecular biology in the process.
“And what de energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this.”
“Well, I think that, yes. So the subjective experience, right? What you describe there is an experience of energy starting to stall. Because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electrons like, where do I go? And then there's extreme level of resistance.”
“It looks like stress hormones can make a cell struggle, for example. Cortisol, yes, if you're a cell, right? And your perspective on the world is pretty simple. You don't have the senses that we enjoy. But you do nevertheless sense the environment.”
“Yeah, something goes wrong, something can break. So the resistance is if you push a lot of energy into a very small container or into a channel that can support that, then what happens kind of physically is an increase in the resistance to the flow. And then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself.”
The Diary of a CEO: “Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard”
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