Dr. Martin Picard

And we know that that's not the full picture.

And there's a lot of end phenotypes, for example, in genetically identical mice, right?

There are mice that all have the same genome and some are like...

very anxious and some are super chill.

It can't be encoded in the genes somehow.

We found recently that actually there are differences in mitochondria.

Part of the reason why these animals behaviorally are different, maybe half of the variance, half of the inter-individual differences, what makes one mouse super chill and the other, the brother or the sister that is genetically identical, very anxious, has to do with energetics in some way.

So I use this slide to convey this mitocentric perspective.

If you want to have a copy and show people, I'm happy to share this.

And one way to understand this is energy comes into the organism as food.

We eat and we breathe to fuel our mitochondria.

So the reason you breathe is to bring oxygen to the body.

Most people know this.

And then once oxygen is in your lungs, it goes into your blood, and then it goes to the heart, and then the heart kind of, boom, distributes this across the whole organism.

And then when oxygen gets to your big toe or to your muscle or to your neuron and your hippocampus or some brain region,

What happens is the oxygen enters a cell and then once it's inside the cell, it looks for mitochondria.

It's attracted by a concentration gradient.

The mitochondria is where oxygen is consumed.

And then when mitochondria consume oxygen, they basically create a downhill slope for oxygen to kind of be attracted to that.

So you breathe to bring oxygen to your mitochondria and you eat