Genius, Mental Illness and Everything in Between: Dr. Lamont Tang at TEDxHongKongED

so um I like to first start out with a quote that no great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness this was observed from Aristotle and 300 BC and I think this this observation probably has been noted even before hand before Aristotle but to what extent we actually know that madness and genius are related I'll touch a little bit on this today but first I just like to do the flip side of this if you're mad it doesn't mean that you're a genius oh this is castle my favorite cartoon Calvin says I'm a genius but I'm a misunderstood genius Hobbes says what's misunderstood about you and Calvin says no way thinks I'm a genius and so today I'm going to dispel some myths about mental illness and the first three out of the long list and I'll only spend time today on the third point but the first two is that mental illness the one myth is mental illness is caused by bad parenting we know that the data suggests that most diagnosed individuals actually come from good families the second myth is that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous the data again suggest otherwise most mentally ill people are actually the victims not the perpetrators and today I'll spend more time on people on the myth that people with a mental disorder are not smart or they're not capable having a successful career or even a brilliant career again the data suggests that people with mental disorders have average ibill average to above-average intelligence and so I'll just highlight just a few quote-unquote geniuses Edgar Allan Poe on the left eminent poets in the 19th century then he killed himself around when he was about 40 he suffered from bipolar he had immense periods of prolific productivity went in his manic stage when he had lots of energy feeling like his invincible invulnerable but he also succumbs to periods of depression and suicidal thoughts which led to his eventual death and we've got ven go everybody should know the guy who cut off his left ear he also suffered from a lot of depression he coped with drinking and finally he succumbed when he was 37 with self-inflicted gun wounds and we've got Silvia flat one of the eminent poets of the 20th century she also had a very long history of depression and she killed herself when she was 30 finally we've got John Nash perhaps some of you might better know the movie A Beautiful Mind Russell Crowe plays John Nash and the one of the he founded a branch of mathematics known as game theory and won the Nobel Prize for that and so today I just want to talk more about mental illness and sort of D stigmatize it so that people have compassion for some of these individuals and so as a neuroscientist I study this 3 pound piece of meat this biochemical electrical I think a fascinating organ just to tell you a little bit about its oh sorry some of its complexity your brain has a hundred thousand miles worth of blood vessels it can go around the world four times over you have a hundred billion neurons and each one of those neurons contacts another thousand neurons so it's a remarkably complex organ but today I'll talk to you mainly about structural and functional deficits at the macro level what we typically use from brain scans to look into the inside of the head and here just here's a cartoon of some of the major areas of the brain I'm not going to quiz you afterwards but I just like you to focus on the core cortical areas and the reason to focus on the cortical areas is because a lot of mental illness actually stems from this area I mean of course there many other areas that impacts but it's curious that do evolution from invertebrates such as the lobster and then going to fish mice frogs birds and all the way to monkeys and humans that humans have by far the largest volume of cortices that's indicated in orange that piece of brain there and this you can consider is the pinnacle of evolution this is how we have our advantage over everybody else this is how we plan ahead is how we carry out our plans these are how we make decisions this is how we make all our executive decisions and so when we think about mental disorders such as schizophrenia we often take regretted as normal people that our mental representations of the world are always constant imagine what you would be like if you were a schizophrenic patient this is something that approximates the disorganization some of the delusions the huge donations that people suffering from schizophrenia might experience obviously this is just an image but you can imagine your audio information streams your visual audio information streams all of these will be discombobulated and furthermore you might have some deficits and be able to do basic functions just planning ahead just having some simple working memory tasks and so in our community today I'll just focus mainly on schizophrenia but there's also mania depression and many other mental illnesses I'll touch upon mania depression just a little bit but um I just want to make one statement first I'm not going to back it up these disorders can affect persons of any age race religion or income it affects everybody and today I hope to convince you that mental illnesses are not the result of some personal weakness or some lack of moral fiber or that you had a poor mom or bad dad it affects all of us and so you might be asking why should you care the World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the 10 most debilitating zees is affecting human beings so I hope that by giving you some biological physical and genetic evidence to suggest that this is a real illness that this will come to an understanding of mental health issues that will bring awareness to our communities and help bring these individuals along so the first bad news is there is no one cause of schizophrenia however the data suggests that there's biological environmental and genetic factors there's currently no reliable way to predict whether one will develop schizophrenia or not however we do have some handles on your transmitters and your modulars some hypotheses but it's really our ability now to produce images that have identified some as structural and functional deficits I'll quickly go here so one of the first things you'll notice between twins where one of them suffers from schizophrenia and the other is normal you'll notice that the ventricles is much larger in the schizophrenic brain there's a decrease in hippocampus that's the brain organ that's in control of working memory there's a decrease in overall size there's also an abnormal development of prefrontal cortex which I mentioned before is in charge of all your executive functions planning and so the other phenomena that clinicians have noticed is hypofrontality and so this is you can just think of a heat map where the warm colors in difficut brain a lots of brain activity and green are cooler colors as low brain activity so we have a pair of twins one on the right side this is the unaffected twin on the left side is the schizophrenic twin and what you'll notice is in the frontal area you have much lower activity and this is thought to account for some of the inability of schizophrenic patients to organize their thoughts to properly temporally buying all the information that they need to properly execute whatever actions they have planned the other interesting thing to note is people who are schizo type this is a milder form of schizophrenia they also exhibit these same symptoms and when you give them tests of creativity and originality they actually score very high and one thought for this is because schizophrenic sandscape two types tend to be unable to filter the information they're able to hold lots of information in their head you know a lot of the normal people they will cut out all the unnecessary information when you can recombine them just like that image you can see that there's a lot of substrate for them to recombine details or ideas into new forms that many of us won't be able to and so just as a small trivia we all know that the brain has two hemispheres the left size is analytical the right is a creative and anecdotally and also studies suggest that men process information primarily from this left side of the brain and women tend to use both sides and I can I can say from personal experience my wife she can drive the car she can brush your teeth do her makeup and do everything well you know whereas I myself and barely chew gum and walk at the same time without tripping over myself and one of the reasons people think is that there is this brain structure called the corpus callosum which connects the left side on the right side and this relay allows more information and allows women presumably to be somewhat more creative also to multitask so in terms of what we know about from the data I've given you are these causes or releases symptoms of schizophrenia I would argue that these are more actually the symptoms we have the hypofrontality phenomena enlarged ventricles we've got some ideas about dopamine and neurotransmitters but we really want to understand the genetics of this and so one of the cleanest ways to do this is to do dodging studies of twins where it's a natural experiment where you discharged disassociating the genetics from the environment so in these identical twins if you have one twin that has schizophrenia what's the likelihood that the other also has schizophrenia it turns out that in identical twins it's only about 50% and that's somewhat striking because if you assume that it's a purely genetic disease it should be a hundred percent and so what this is telling us is this is sort of a messy you know gray area is not a black or white issue and so a question that I often get is okay we've sequenced the genome in 2000 2003 we've now have a dozen two dozen genes that are susceptibility genes for schizophrenia so why are these genes so controversial and why is this all so complicated I'll give you two - one fundamental answer the first that genes do not encode for psychiatric illnesses a gene does not encode for hallucinations delusions panic attacks or manic episodes but what they do do is they build the fundamental building blocks amino acids proteins which then builds your cells in the brain these are called neurons and these neurons then connect each other forming networks brain circuits and finally these circuits give rise to behaviors such as perception cognition your moods all your deepest thoughts so you can imagine going from each of these different scales of organization there a lot of biological mechanisms that allow for robustness that allow compensation so it can't be just one single gene for the complex phenomena such as mental illness the other piece of it is there's genetic complexity if you imagine in the white circles these are people with who are normal and then the red circles you have people who have schizophrenia and these little puzzles puzzle pieces these indicate mutations in these mutations you can see that people have zero one or two mutations have little mutational load and they're normal however as you get to three to four mutations that's when these genes interact and this is what can tip you in the threshold in addition to advisors to get you into the regime of schizophrenia and so I'll quickly go over some have a dozen two dozen genes I won't go over all of them we have these susceptibility genes we also now know that there are some environmental insults from infection nutrition environmental chemicals and we know that each of these processes will interact and this can cause gene impairments this will also cause when you have changes in gene expression you'll have changes in your chemical and metabolic changes once you have these kind of changes you change the network activity of your circuits once you have these changes in network activity you have changes in brain activity and this could in principle lead to mental illness so I'd like to produce to give you two pieces of data about gene environmental interactions here is data from science the science magazine one of the eminent journals for scientist and this is a very similar simple study looking at the genetic background of people with different forms of serotonin so there's a short form in a long term long form you can inherit a short in the long form from your mom and your dad so there's three possibilities three genetic backgrounds short short short long and long long and what you find is if you asked people the number stressful events over ten years and what qualifies as a stressful event is a loss of a loved one spouse sibling parent or loss of a job as you go from 0 to 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 from 0 to 2 you see relatively little differences between the genetic backgrounds but as you get to 4 you start seeing this contrast and the probability that one of these individuals becomes depressed in this case it's the short short form another gene-environment interaction is the incidences of schizophrenia due to cannabis use during teenage years so this might be of interest to both teenagers and parents here in the audience in blue are the boring people like me the non users and then you've got the green cannabis users and you've got the three different backgrounds again just it doesn't really matter whether it's just met met Valmet and val/val and what you'll see is only in the genetic background where you have Val Val there's about a five fold increase in the incidence of developing schizophrenia if you've used marijuana during your teenage years and so there are two things you can think about this if you're a parent you might want to get your kid genotype and sit him down and say hey here's the data but if your kid and you happen to be met you're like hey mom you know it doesn't really matter I can smoke all the weed I want you know it doesn't really matter so I hope through these very short vignette I've showed you that mental illness is not you know something due to just your own moral lack of moral character or your upbringing that there's actually a real physical biological basis to it it's something akin to asthma diabetes or heart disease where you know for example in diabetes or heart disease cholesterol is an indicator for heart attack but it doesn't predict necessarily a heart attack in the same way we have these susceptibility genes now that help us understand what what your risk factors are but still it seems like a lot of society still believes that a person who's mentally ill still needs to have their own willpower that they have to be able to pull themselves out of it so I the way I think about this it's like telling a person because amputated legs to run across the room this is equivalent for a person with a mental health issue that they have a broken brain as indicated by this cartoon so hopefully the so there are treatments out there with the right combination of medications and/or therapy we know that we can help alleviate a lot of the symptoms we can't cure schizophrenia we don't have any cures for mental illnesses yet but I'm very hopeful with the signs that we're coming out with today that in the next decade or two we shall have some cures I'd like to end with just saying that one in five people will be diagnosed with a mental health problem this year on these individuals will come from all walks of life and that my main concern today is that there's this information and so that you can share it with your family and friends so that when your own brother or sister or your friend is suffering from one of these mental illnesses you can learn to recognize some of these symptoms you can diagnose with bioinformatics technology now to help people get this treatment that they need and that they can seek the outcomes that will benefit their life and they can have a happy productive and successful life and so that's what I'll leave you with today

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 246,935

Rating: 4.7321315 out of 5

Keywords: Neuroscience, bipolar, tedx talk, value of intelligence, tedx, genius, schizophrenia, Community, University of California, Lamont Tang, musician, tedx talks, ted talk, Biology (Field Of Study), english, Stanford University, ted talks, Education, creativity, TEDxHongKongED, Brandeis University, society, hong kong, stigma, ted, overestimate, brain, intelligence, mental illness, ted x, orchestra, overemphasize, violin, Social Change, biological

Id: jjzFmR5lai0

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2013