Dr. Michael Kilgard

People live in Greenland.

It's amazing.

It seems like in evolution we were in lots of environments, and you might have been in an environment where the only thing to eat was poppy flowers.

And so, okay, I'm always surprised how not bad these things are.

I mean, we had the crack epidemic, and it was clear that all these babies were going to be just a bunch of wandering zombies, and then, you know.

They were impacted, but not nearly as bad as the worst doomsday scenario.

So I'm always telling parents, babies are tough.

They're not as fragile as you might think.

Things we do to ourselves, not as fragile.

Because evolution has prepared us for all these pushes and pulls, which is a big shock.

You don't want to get a bunch of traumatic brain injuries.

But exposure to drugs, it's remarkable what we can tolerate and still be fine.

There's an interesting idea that the psychologists first came up with, but we see this in neuroscience as well, the inverted U, where you've got to get it just right, not too much.

So more serotonin or norepinephrine enhances memories, but you give more, and now it degrades impairments.

Why is that?

I've got a pet theory, no evidence for this whatsoever, that because we sometimes take an agent, let's say eat some berries or something like that, that then send us over the moon, we have all these mechanisms that then shut down and say, here are conditions that we don't want to change.

Because rewiring your brain is dangerous, right?

You might live through the food poisoning, but you might now have a rewired brain that would be bad.

So it seems like there's these mechanisms where you want to get, in our case, it's the alpha receptors, the norepinephrine, low affinity receptors, the ones that are easiest to activate are the alpha receptors.

You want those.