Amit Etkin
speaker
111 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2005
last heard Mar 2015
Amit Etkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And we don't know the answer to that question yet, but at least it identifies how we'll start to answer that question.
So you don't
There's actually a lot of similarities between some of the things that go on in somebody who's delusional and somebody who's depressed or somebody who has substance use.
One of those is something that we actually tried to highlight in the paper, which is higher level cognitive functions, which is related to gray matter in this network.
Just be more specific about that in practical terms.
There's something called executive function, which is a type of higher level cognitive function.
Like planning ahead, controlling your actions and so on.
Exactly.
Inhibiting inappropriate responses to distractors, not paying excessive attention to things that just capture your attention because, say, they have negative emotional meaning or they're related to a drug cue or they're things that relate to your anxiety or your delusional content.
It relates to basically your ability to flexibly manipulate information and deal with the challenges of the world around you.
So there actually are then quite a lot of similarities across disorders in these capacities that then can get expressed in different ways in different types of patients.
In other words, your
Right, so it could be genes, it could be environmental influences like maltreatment from kids, it could be stress that you experience, it could be a number of different things that all impact this system.
And so what we're trying to do in the lab now is part of a new initiative from the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, something that we're leading that we're calling NeuroCircuit, is to develop tools to get at these brain circuits and manipulate them non-invasively.
Rather than having one type of hammer, whether it's psychotherapy, medication, or brain stimulation, and hoping that we have the right nail, we're now trying to identify the right nails, like with this study, and design the hammers that best get to those nails.
So it's too early to say what the treatment or diagnostic implications are?
Well, there are some implications that exist already.
But in terms of the future, and by future I mean really only in the next couple of years, we should be able to answer the question of whether you restore this network, what happens?
In other words, if you improve functioning in this network, the prediction is people's cognitive functioning should improve, people's emotional functioning should improve, and that would show cause and effect.
However, one thing to already come out of this study is that it should facilitate translation of knowledge from one part of the field to another.
Showing 41–60 of 111 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →