Dr. Martin Picard

We hear and I hear your voice because my eardrum resists the pressure waves that you're producing.

So your energy is being channeled and projected through the air as sound waves, another form of energy.

And then I'm feeling you.

through your energy that's carried through the air, and then because my eardrum resists the pressure wave that you're producing, and then it's that resistance and that change, that delta, again, in speed, by resisting the sound waves coming from you, by resisting your energy, now I can perceive them.

And then there are little ossicles in the ear that transmit what used to be pressure waves into now mechanical motion and then into like fluid into the inner ear and then the cilia that move and then ions that come in.

Then eventually they get transformed to electricity, right?

So again, it's one form of energy.

Pressure waves turn into electricity.

And then the brain uses electricity as a form of energy.

There are many, right?

But that electricity is just so amenable to computation, processing, and integration.

So once you have this common energetic language for sight, for hearing, for touch and smell and taste, then you can integrate that.

We perceive energy transformation and change in energy.

We don't perceive energy per se.

I use a slide often as an opening slide when I give presentations to academics or non-academics, which is kind of a mitochondrial view of the world.

At some point, we realized that the Earth was not the center of the world, and then we switched over to a different form of a different model of the universe.

So my sense is we need to do something similar in biomedicine.

We still have, I think, in most...

people's mind, especially the older generations, a very gene-centric, you know, nucleus-centric view of biology that the genes are there and then central dogma, right?

The genes drive RNA, drive protein, and then drive phenotype.