YouSaid · the spoken record

Karl Deisseroth

lines on the record: 178
first: 2022-04-07
most recent: 2022-04-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We need these bridge people who can do both. Nabakov, for example, writing English beautifully, one of my favorite poets, Borges, who mentioned earlier, he wrote both in English and in Spanish. I think beautifully in both. We need those people who can serve as bridges across cultures who really can do both.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of international translations now, and all those rich connotations aren't captured in other languages. And so for some translations, connections is used instead of projections. In fact, even in England, the British version is connections instead of projections because apparently projections doesn't have the full connotation, I was told.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of narrative onto them 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 well they align. That's called introjection. So projections turns out to be a really rich word. Then finally, of course, there's the very common sense of it as a projector that illuminates by conveying information across space with light. So for English language perfect word to use for this book. But what was funny is not every...”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly straightforward along these long range projections that connect different parts of the brain, but it works over shorter range too. But then there's this other meaning of projections which you were bringing up, which is very relevant, which is at some point you can reduce something from one level of dimensionality to another. You can project down into a lower dimensional space, for example. And then finally, there's a psychiatric term projections, which comes up all the time, which is we very often will look at our internal states and to understand somebody else will. Project them onto somebody else will try to understand someone else's behavior and make sense of it by projecting our own inner feelings.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Representation of something. So that's one meaning it's 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, works particularly well with. We can use light to turn on or off the activity along these projections from one spot of the brain to another.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Word projections definitely serves that purpose here, but it's got a few other really appropriate other connotations as well. So the first thing is a projection in terms of neuroscience is this long range connection that goes from one part of the brain to another. And so it's what binds two parts of our brain together. There are projections, long-range connections of axons. These are the outgoing threads that connect one part of the brain to another part. There's a projection that links, for example, auditory cortex where we hear things to reward centers where we can feel where feelings of pleasure and reward are initiated. And it's been shown that if you have reduced connectivity along that dimension, you are less able to enjoy music. And so these connections, these projections matter. They define how effectively two parts of the brain can engage with each other and join together to form a joint.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't turn it on and off right away. I had to first, I would start by thinking about the person or the people. One or two people based on real patience and the stories that are put forth, the symptom descriptions are real. They're from the patients. Of course, all details change to protect privacy. But the actual symptom descriptions are real. And I would sit with them and really try to enhance the space of the mind of that person that I knew. And that's not instantaneous. It would take some time. I needed quiet. I needed to be still. That's another reason late at night is good.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't as if there was a single mode I could be in for the whole book for each chapter. I had to put myself into a different mode to capture that inner feeling of the disorder.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other interesting thing is each chapter, each story, it's about a different human being with a different class of psychiatric disorder. That's what each story, each chapter is anchored in. But I'm trying to use words and style of writing and diction that captures the feeling of the disorder. And so it's different in each story. In the story about mania, which is a very expansive, exuberant, at least briefly uplifting state where the words come out in a torrent and they're complex and pressured and elaborate. I try to capture that feeling with the words used in that chapter. And then in the schizophrenia or psychosis chapter, where things slowly fragment over time and become looser and separated, I tried to capture that in the writing too. So for each...”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did explore which was there a particular altered state that would help me to be most creative. I found actually the best while sober but slightly disinhibited in the late hours of the night or early morning. Yeah, particularly late hours of the night there. I have a friend who would tell me that she thought that very early in the morning her inner critic was still asleep and she could write more effectively before inner critic woke up. Actually, I found that outstanding advice for me that I often found that I was looser and could write more in the morning.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot. I think it's known that his daughter suffered from schizophrenia. And this is what's depicted here on the page is something that I'm sure he either felt himself in some level was able to access this nonlinearity of processing or had seen enough in family that he knew what it was and was able to reflect it down in black and white on the paper. So what he was able to do 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 talking about altered human. Thought processes and thought disorders, but that was an aspect that he was so good at representing that it had to be intentional to some extent”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to see it from a distance, from a safe distance. There's an association between schizophrenia and what we call schizotypal personality disorder, where people are not quite in this severe state of schizophrenia but have some magical thinking, have some unusual thought patterns. Very often those are family members of people with schizophrenia. So this points to this idea that there is a range even along this very severe very genetic biological illness that human beings dwell on different spots along that spectrum.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or logical. And you can't read Finnegan's Wake, I think, without, certainly as a psychiatrist, you can't read it without thinking about schizophrenia. And then when we look at 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”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you look at what shows up in schizophrenia, with many cases, what we call thought disorders, what we call the individual speech symptoms of schizophrenia, Finnegan's wake is loaded with them, and it's just full of them. We talk about clang associations in schizophrenia where the word that is said echoes in some way the previous word. And we call that a clang association because there's no other reason than the similarity of the sound, like a clang of a garage door being hit. And it has a, and sometimes not even a word, and we call that a neologism, a new word being created, and of course Finnegan's Wake is full of that. We also, in schizophrenia, where there's what we call loose associations or tangential thought processes, of course, full of that where things just go off in directions that are not linear.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned love earlier. I mean, that's a great example of how belief in something. Makes it real, right? It's not reasonable on the face of it, but because you believe it's reasonable, then it actually does become reasonable, and then it is real. And so that's a good example. That doesn't happen. I'm also in a bioengineering department. We don't imagine that a bridge is soundly built and that it is soundly built. That's something that it doesn't come up in too many realms of human existence, but love is one of them. And the ability to... Have a fixed idea and to say it's true, and then it is true.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when someone tells you that, then it creates a. One sees an opportunity, and then it would be a tragedy if the opportunity weren't captured, right? And so then that creates some impetus, some motivation to do something good.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But did you have a feeling, though? That's one thing I found interesting about Finnegan's week. I never fully understood it, but the words caused feelings in me, which I found fascinating. And sometimes I couldn't predict it from the semantic black and white context of what I was seeing in front of me on the page. But the rhythm where the melody would make me feel certain ways. And that was what I always was intrigued by with Joyce. Of course, that was his He existed on a spectrum too. And he wrote, as you say, more accessible works. I learned a lot about Irish history from Portrait of the Artist as a young man. And there was just, he could be as objective as he wanted to be. But then when he let himself loose, he was in this realm where the words had their own purpose separate from semantic meaning, from their dry dictionary definition.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Day after day you encounter the abyss of suffering from patients. How much do you let yourself feel? How much do Make it abstract and objective and try to make it clinical. And that range, how you're able to move yourself on that spectrum is very important for survival as a physician. And the way you protect yourself and your feelings turns out to be very important.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here again, the numbers help us, and here's where being rigorous and quantitative actually really helps. If you look at disorders like autism and bipolar disorder, And eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, for example. These, you know, particularly bipolar and anorexia, these can be fatal, they can cause immense suffering, 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 attainment, of and even of income. And so you look at this severe disorders in many cases causing quite immense morbidity and mortality, and yet they are positively correlated at the population level with positive things.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's another issue that we have again. Take nothing away from the severity in reality and biological nature of these disorders, which are very genetic. We understand that these are very biological. And yet we lack right now the lab tests and the blood draws to make the diagnoses.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at self report numbers, then those numbers get even higher beyond 25% or more. The most rigorous studies are done with structured psychiatric interviews where people who are trained in eliciting symptoms carefully do complete psychiatric inventories of individuals. And these are Time consuming, laborious studies that not often repeated when they're done, they're done well. But very often you'll see a report or something in the news of a very high number for some disorder or symptom, and very often if it's shockingly high, that's coming from a self-report of a person.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nearly functional to completely dysfunctional life threatening and even fatal. And so that number 25% more or less it doesn't capture that spectrum of severity.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the numbers, if you look at how our mental health disorders are currently defined, you can look at population prevalence values for all these disorders. Up with estimates that somebody will have a lifetime prevalence of having a psychiatric disorder that approaches 25% or so. And so that's In some studies, it could be more, some studies, it could be less. Now, what do we do with that number? What does that mean? And in some ways, that's the essence of what I was hoping to approach with the book is to reflect on this spectrum that exists for all the disorders. There is Taking nothing away from the severity and the suffering that comes at the extreme end of these illnesses, but nearly every one of them exists on a spectrum of severity.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say to give ourselves license to capture the whole spectrum, let's say disorder, because that captures. Truly, I think the essence of it, which is we need to talk about it when it's not working, when there's disorder. And that's the fairest and most inclusive term to use.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But of course, psychiatry has a long way to go in terms of developing quantitative tests. We don't have blood draws. We don't have imaging studies that we can use to diagnose. And so that line ultimately that you're asking about between order and disorder, function and dysfunction, it's operational of the moment. How are things working?”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is always debated in psychiatry, probably more so than any other medical specialty I'm a psychiatrist. I treat patients still. I see acutely ill. Who come to the emergency room where there's no doubt that this is not something that's working well where the manifestation of disease is so powerful, where the person is suffering so greatly, where they cannot continue as they are. But of course it's a spectrum and there are people who are closer to the realm of being able to work okay in their jobs but suffer from some small dysfunction. And everywhere in between In psychiatry, we're careful to say we don't call it a disease or a disorder unless there's a disruption in social or occupational functioning.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story to be told where the protagonist really is the human mind. And that was one thing I wanted to share as well in projections, is that broader story. But still anchored in the moment of patience, of people, of experiences of the moment.”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a mutated gene, sometimes the gene is turned up in strength or turned down in strength, and that lets you see what it was originally for. You can infer true function from dysfunction. And this is a theme that I thought needed to be shared and needed to be made communicable to the lay public, to everybody people who Is I think almost all of us who think and care about the inner workings of our mind, but who also. For those who have been suffering, who have. Mental health disorders who face challenges, but then more broadly it's a very much larger story than the present. There's a”
2022-04-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #274 – Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source