Mark Mattson: Building the Brain: Glutamate as Sculpture and Destroyer
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ม.ค. 2025
- A message from Lawrence:
You’ve probably heard of Serotonin, or Dopamine. Those are the sexy neurotransmitters that get all the press. However, you have probably not heard of Glutamate. Which is a shame because it is probably the most important neurotransmitter in the brain, responsible in large part for its growth, and also its plasticity.
Mark Mattson is a neuroscientist with a distinguished career as Director of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. While initially interested in developmental biology in animals, Mattson’s work in endocrinology led him to become to study the effect of hormones on the brain. Eventually he began to focus on the role of the Glutamate in neuroplasticity and Alzheimers disease. He realized how essential that neurotransmitter was for understanding the very formation of the brain, the growth of neurons, and the formation of axons and dendrites, as well as its key role in brain functions including learning and memory .
I first got to know Mark when we co-organized a workshop on Pattern Processing in the Human Brain, where we invited well known neuroscientists as well as computer scientists and AI researchers to come together to discuss areas of joint interest. The idea was to explore key features that may underlie consciousness, and also to explore how to ensure how to avoid the error-prone brain functioning such as one finds in Schizophrenia as AI systems are developed. The public event associated with the workshop was entitled Creativity and Madness, and involved a dialogue between me and actor Johnny Depp.
Most recently, Mark has written a fascinating book, entitled Sculptor and Destroyer, to describe and explain the importance of Glutamate in brain formation and functioning. We had a fascinating discussion about that, and also how he became interested in the brain after initially planning to become a veterinarian. I hope you find the discussion as enlightening as I did.
Cool. My son completes his veterinary surgical residency in July. Yeah, veterinary medicine is a super tough path to take. Instead of medical school, he decided he liked animals more than people. LOL
Love that you got Mattson - his science really contributed to my fasting regimen. Really valuable work.
Very interesting conversation! Thought I’ll listen to it in 2 “one hour parts”, ended up listening to the whole thing and wishing they will hold another episode together.
OMG this is such a fascinating topic!!! - Mental Health Counselor
Thank you for doing this.
LC made such a good point about the horse naturally keeping its head up. It touches on how important “initiative “ is… if that horse was sprinting in the context of a “story” it understood, damn right it would keep its head up!
There are not enough thank you’s. Egelston hospital should have my records from ‘92.. I was on 1200mg of tegretol - egelston should have initial MRI- I have MRI from eeg from 2018 in NV (these were overnight - 36 hour continous EEG tests - I have three external hard-drives and 2TB iCloud Drive
When Lawrence was talking about Action Potential, was he trying to say the charge is like lightning starting at the ground then going to the clouds?
Another great show. I like to think that I can feel my neurons forming new connections, Is that artfulness?
Yeah, the free energy principle is not a theory of general intelligence, it's a benchmark. The specifics of how information is integrated is the most important element (Parallel distribution of temporal sequential information processing). The dendrites are doing a more sophisticated parallel sequencing, correct/incorrect, amplification/degradation threshold activation, than current neural networks. In a lot of the current neural networks, sequential information processing isn't really there in the way it is in the human brain. However you can (amplitude falloff over time frame) condition latent space activation, (input spike falloff/time, with subsequent reinitialization [previous increases in the data input have ambient persistence, you could also have this ambient persistence within the hidden layers as well]), this gives that extra temporal sequential context.
Great podcast, very informative, I'm going to add some science about brain fuel: glucose, ketones and oxygen.
Ok, so hormetic changes in the first two, glucose and ketones, were discussed and I learned that ketones upregulate GABA, but oxygen as related to hormesis wasn't mentioned, So, in mice studies u can show that chronic, low level oxygen deprivation has a hormetic effect on brain cells, less cells die if you induce a stroke in conditioned mice. So, if u use an altitude chamber or practice or some other method you can make your brain more resilient to the effects of stroke. Forgive me if I got my science wrong, I'm just an amateur. Anyways, thanks for maintaining a high standard of engaging intellectual output😊.
I think an interview with Johnjoe McFadden would augment this interview quite nicely.
This is good stuff. :)
They look like brothers.
Know the stars to see the Starlinks