Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry | Lex Fridman Podcast #274

Where are the darkest places you've ever gone in your life? The following is a conversation with Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. He's one of the greatest living psychiatrists and neuroscientists in the world. He's also just a fascinating human being. We discuss both the darkest and the most beautiful places that the human mind can take us. He explores this in his book called Projections: A Story of Human Emotions. I highly recommend it. It's written masterfully. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Karl Deisseroth. You open your book called Projections: A Story of Human Emotions with, uh, a few beautiful words that summarize all of humanity. The book draws insights about the human mind from modern psychiatry and neuroscience. So if it's okay, let me read a few sentences from the opening.

Go ahead.

You gotta give props to beautiful writing when I see it. Quote, "In the art of weaving, warp threads are structural and strong and anchored at the origin, creating a frame for crossing fibers as the fabric is woven. Projecting across the advancing edge into free space, warp threads bridge the formed past, to the ragged present, to the yet featureless future. Yet featureless future. Well done. Well 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 back-dropped by creviced ice, by angulated forestry, by stone and steel, and by glowing rare earths. The inner workings of the mind give form to these threads, creating a framework within us upon which the story of each individual can come into being. Personal grain and color arise from the cross-threads of our moments and experiences, the fine weft of life, embedding and obscuring the underlying 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 learned about human beings, human nature, and the human mind from those who suffer from psychiatric maladies, for those for whom this fabric is warped?

Yeah. 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, 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, to the lay public, to everybody, people who... which is, I think, uh, almost all of us who think and care about the inner workings of our mind, but who also care 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, a 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 patients, of people, of experiences of the moment.