Exploring Human Emotions and Psychiatric Disorders through Optogenetics

Karl Deisseroth is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and bioengineering professor at Stanford. Karl is also the author of Projections: The New Science of Human Emotion, which is a beautiful revisitation and exploration of his time as a psychiatry resident, where he encountered all sorts of people who didn’t quite understand what was happening to their brains—and by extension their minds.

In the book—and in our conversation today—Karl explores mania, autism spectrum disorder, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, and dementia, all in gorgeous prose. Karl runs a lab at Stanford that focuses on optogenetics, mind-blowing science that can pinpoint where adaptive and maladaptive behaviors begin in the brain. He’s won the Kyoto Prize and Heineken Prize for his research, which is not surprising—it just might change the entire world of psychiatry.

Today’s conversation is far-ranging and it’s also surprising, including a conversation about how some of these disorders—like eating disorders, which can be deadly, can also be strangely adaptive. Please stick with us. 

MORE FROM KARL DEISSEROTH, M.D., PhD:

Projections: The New Science of Human Emotion

Follow Karl Deisseroth on Twitter

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