Dr. Martin Picard

greater power beyond them.

And then they died, gave their brain to science.

We got a little piece of brain and now we're measuring the mitochondria.

And Carolyn Trump, a researcher who works in our group, who's a bona fide mitochondrial psychobiologist.

So she asked questions between the psyche and the biology of mitochondria.

So she asked, could it be that how people felt before they died

relates to the mitochondria in their brain and the prefrontal cortex, the DLPFC, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

And what she found is that people who felt more purpose in life and who felt more connected to others and who felt, you know, well-being for whatever was bringing them well-being, it seemed like that was sufficient to increase the energy transformation capacity of the mitochondria in their brain.

So is this because of the experiences that they're fortunate to have or that they're actively fostering in their life that's actually transforming the mitochondria in their brain?

Maybe.

Or it's the other way around.

For some reason that we don't understand, they have more of the energy transformation capacity in their brain mitochondria, and that is leading them to experience the world as more positive and as more purposeful and as more meaningful, right?

Animal studies say it probably goes both ways.

So if you tweak the mitochondria in a rat brain, you can change the behavior of that animal from more submissive to more dominant or from more dominant to more submissive.

Beautiful work by Carmen Sandy at EPFL in Switzerland that showed this.

And then the other way around.

If you chronically stress animals, you deprive them of kind of freedom of choosing different options.

So chronically stressful things actually damage the mitochondria in the brain.

And in some brain areas, there are fewer mitochondria and they don't transform energy as well.

So the mitochondria are responsive, it seems, to our states of mind and that the mitochondria in our brain can also influence our states of mind.