Jad Abumrad

Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support from Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. It's May, which means we are right in the middle of Mental Health Awareness Month. And because of that, I found myself thinking about an episode we did many years ago about what was at the time a brand new way of peeking inside the brain to try to see various mental health conditions like depression and many other things. It's a fascinating piece.

So it has been 17 years since this broadcast first ran. And I wondered, you know, circling back to the mental health stuff, the brain imaging stuff that we started the episode with, where are we now?

Over the last nearly 20 years, as there have been more and more MRI studies and brains scanned over and over, our machine learning is letting us predict with way more accuracy differences in brains with bipolar, schizophrenia, and depression. But we do not have MRI-based tests for these things in clinical practice.

There just isn't any biomarker that we found that's reliable enough for everyday clinical use. So we're definitely not living in the world that Eric Kandel predicted we might be, you know, where you can just scan your brain and tell you what's wrong with you and how you need to solve it. But we're not quite living in Jad's world either. We're sort of in this in-between still.

But it's one I have to say I kind of like, where on one hand, the... Science is getting better at telling us what's going on with our brains, and yet it's not good enough that doctors can quite use it. It's still forcing doctors to treat us as full individuals, as not just brains, to reckon with our full personhood. And so we walk forward at the in-between to the slow but steady beat of science.

And while it was recorded 17 years ago, and you'll find some of the language reflects that time, the question at the heart of the story is really timeless, really provocative, really fascinating. So we are going to air it today. And at the end, I will be back with a short update on where some of the technology has come in the subsequent years. So here we go.

Buckle up with the episode called How to Cure What Ails You.

That's coming up right after this break.

Radiolab, Lulu, just before the break, Jad and Robert were debating how much science really can know about who you are from peering into one of your organs.