Dr. Michael Kilgard

What's the thing that's causing schizophrenia?

What's the thing that's causing stroke?

Sometimes it's easy.

For stroke, it's a blood clot.

It causes damage to the brain.

But for the vast majority of things, it's a whole bunch of nature-nurture mumbo-jumbo where a bunch of experiences, stress, anxiety, plus a bunch of genes interact it.

But the part we have control over are these synapses.

The brain, as you know, is mostly not going to get very many new neurons.

You get some new neurons, but not very many.

Most of your neurons you've got now you're going to die with.

But all those spines are turning over all the time, just like all the cells in your face are turning over every few weeks.

Those spines are turning over and changing and reprocessing your memories.

And by understanding now how this works, we think we can help people who are stuck.

So there's a large number of people in our society, maybe because of social media, but maybe that happened before social media, who are really broken, have really bad traumatic events, fear of death, and they just can't get over it.

They're stuck in a way that's not helpful.

It's called post-traumatic stress disorder.

And we're now switching this from the exciting knowledge, learning in the lab how fruit flies and worms and sea slugs work,

And finding out there's a lot of similarity to how the mouse works and a lot of similarity to how the monkey works and a lot of similarity to how we work.

Mostly the same, the genes.

Certainly the ones we've been talking about so far, all the identical genes in all these species.