Dr. Casey Halpern

We've talked mostly about compulsion.

compulsion being going after a reward or the urge despite the risk.

Impulsivity is similar, but different.

It's kind of going after something a little bit, if you model impulsivity in a mouse, it's related to,

you know, going after a food reward without the sort of paired tone that the mouse is supposed to wait for.

The mouse doesn't want to wait anymore.

They just go after the food.

I've been that mouse.

Yeah, we've all been.

We could all relate with this to a certain extent.

Again, it's a spectrum.

So in any case, non sequitur, but I certainly think that there is a way to use our own body's physiology to anticipate when these impulses are coming online.

How best to do that, I think we're just scratching the surface, but...

These are the kinds of solutions we need.

Some of these problems are of epidemic proportions, the largest public health problems in this country, in this world, obesity, opiate crisis, depression, suicidality.

I mean, that's like a third of our country, maybe more.

We need scalable solutions.

I'm a neurosurgeon.

I'm only gonna be able to treat the most severe of patients with these problems.

You know, we've only done about 200,000 deep brain stimulation surgeries ever.