How Mitochondria Shape Your Mind, Mood, & Mental Health with Dr. Martin Picard

Martin: 
With using brain imaging, we might be able to actually quantify in a non-invasive way the quality and the content of mitochondria in someone’s brain, which I think would be revolutionary.

Bret: 
Welcome to the Metabolic Mind Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bret Scher. Metabolic Mind is a nonprofit initiative of Baszucki Group where we’re providing information about the intersection of metabolic health and mental health and metabolic therapies such as nutritional ketosis as therapies for mental illness.

Thank you for joining us. Although our podcast is for informational purposes only and we aren’t giving medical advice, we hope you will learn from our content and it will help facilitate discussions with your healthcare providers to see if you could benefit from exploring the connection between metabolic and mental health.

Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, but oh, so much more. And nobody knows this better than Dr. Martin Picard, one of the leading researchers in the field of mitochondria and how mitochondria influence wellness and sickness and disease. And now he has a new groundbreaking study published in Nature that tells us about the mitochondria in our brain with some surprising findings, and how that might relate to brain energy and brain energy dysfunction, and how that leads to brain-based disorder. So here’s this fascinating interview with Dr. Martin Picard.

All right, Dr. Martin Picard, thank you so much for joining me again here on Metabolic Mind. 

Martin: 
Thank you. I’m delighted. 

Bret: 
Yeah, so anybody who hasn’t listened to our first interview back in August of 2023, which has almost 500,000 views on YouTube, people were very interested in what you had to say, which I think is amazing because your what? Your enthusiasm for mitochondria and your knowledge from mitochondria are so great and I think that’s why that episode resonated. But for those who haven’t seen that, bring us up to date. Who’s Dr. Martin Picard. 

Martin: 
I am a mitochondrial psychobiologist, and I care to understand the mind-body connection, but, in particular, the mind-mitochondria connection. And I think it’s clear that what makes us tick and what allows us to be alive and to feel and experience the world around us is the energy that flows through our body or minds or brains and then creates a human experience.

This is a big gap in knowledge, in science. We don’t know how the biology of our cells, of our mitochondria, actually relate to how we feel and how we experience the world around us. What we’re doing is, with my team, is focusing on mitochondria as a transducer and kind of the portal that changes the food we eat, the oxygen we breathe into energy that actually brings us to life.

So that’s what we do. 

Bret: 
Yeah. And I think we have a very, we meaning like the general public or even the medical community tends, to have a very simplistic understanding of mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. They’re the little part in the cell that take in nutrients and turn, and create it to ATP or to energy.

So they’re the energy producers of the cells. But your research and your work is showing it so much more than that. Mitochondria are so much more than just the energy producers of our cells. And that energy and that ability to produce energy has so many permutations. I know it’s impossible to sum up in a minute, but like, how crucial, how important, what big of a role do mitochondria play in our mental and physical health? 

Martin: 
Yes. That’s a big question. First thing, you know, from first principles in physics, energy is neither transformed, nor destroyed. I think a lot of people will have heard this energy cannot materialize or be destroyed.

It’s only transformed. 

Bret: 
So it’s not created or destroyed, it’s transformed. 

Martin: 
Correct. Yes. Yeah. So mitochondria don’t produce energy, per se. What they do is they transform energy from one form, which is biochemistry. The energy of the sun trapped into molecules of food, right? And then mitochondria are able to dematerialize this to turn material energy and biochemistry into electrochemical energy, just like charging a little battery.

And then once mitochondria are charged, now they can bring the rest of the cell to life. And they do this by producing ATP. Which is maybe the producing energy that we hear sometimes and the powerhouse analogy, which is expired now. But then they do all sorts of other things, dozens of other functions and behaviors that if you look at mitochondria inside of living cell, you see them do all of these things, and it’s remarkable.

For example, they make hormones like cortisol that allows us to have resilience and to respond to challenges. Cortisol is made in the mitochondria, and even the hormones that allow new life, new human life reproduction, right? What allows women, the woman body, to become pregnant and to grow a whole other human being that requires estrogen and progesterone.

Those hormones are made in your mitochondria. So there’s some really deep connection between what mitochondria do, and the movement of life through the human organism. And then through the movement of the human mind. And fundamentally, I think the human mind is an energy pattern.

It is energy that we eat. And then we breathe oxygen, and then mitochondria transformed that energy into something that feels like something. So as energy fluxes through mitochondria, we have good reasons to believe this is, that’s where the magic happens and where maybe consciousness arises in the depth of mitochondria as energy is transformed from one form to another.

so we think that. The way we evolved, right? And 1.5 to 2 billion years ago is when there was a, like a really magical event that happened when mitochondria were like free living bacteria. And then you have other types of, unicellular organisms, like single cell things that didn’t do very much other than eat and reproduce a bit like cancer cells.

And then at some point these two came together and, The aerobic, the oxygen consuming bacterium was either colonized the bigger cell or was engulfed by the bigger cell, like the, debates about this. But regardless, this union, this was like the vital union. It’s called endo symbiosis, which means working together from the inside.

Those symbiosis and endo symbiosis of mitochondria is what allowed multicellular life to happen. And then, you had organisms that came out of this, and then brains evolved and then minds and, then what we know about life now. So this was a really critical event. And then all of these important functions like making stress hormones, making sex hormones, somehow evolve to be located in the same part of the cell.

That transforms the energy that keeps us alive. 

Bret: 
Yeah, it’s fascinating to hear you talk about it, and I always just get so inspired by your enthusiasm about talking about it as well. But you mentioned the brain, that’s amazing, you mentioned the brain and consciousness and brain function and, of course, here at Metabolic Mind we talk a lot about brain energy.

Dr. Chris Palmer has the whole book, Brain Energy, and there’s been this, rightfully, this focus on how energy is transformed in the brain. But what you did, you published a patient paper just recently in Nature that’s been referred to as groundbreaking and all these just really, a lot of, what’s the word I’m looking for?

A lot bestowed upon this paper about how important it is, where you took a brain and sectioned it into over 700 sections to look at the mitochondria, not only in the different sections, but in the different cell types, and to see how it would relate to imaging. it seems like a huge effort to have this many sections of brain.

But tell us about what made you want to do this study, and then we can get into sort of what you found from it. 

Martin: 
Yeah. yeah, this paper, this project was a huge endeavor and I wasn’t sure initially how we would go about doing this because the, if you want a major barrier and why nobody had done this before, is because there’s a massive scale gap between the way cell biologists measure mitochondria and the biology of the cellular level.

There’s a resolution issue biologists focus on, the really tiny and then you know, single cells or mitochondria, but then we know that experiences and what actually matters. A human life doesn’t happen like at the single cell level.

It happens at the whole brain level. As far as we understand, we form memories, retrieve memories, we experience things not because there’s like this one brain region that stores the memory of your grandmother. It’s because there’s patterns of activity, patterns of energy, that the brain generates that allows to, it gives rise to those cognitive, capabilities and those emotional states and experiences.

The brain kind of operates as a unit, as a whole unit, but then our methods in biology to look at mitochondria require like really small pieces. And so what we wanted to do was create a tool for the community, for the scientific community, where we have mapped systematically, not just in our favorite brain region.

This is how neuroscience progresses very often. If you love the hippocampus, then you do everything hippocampus. If you love the putamen, then you do this. And then if you like the cortex, then you know you do this. And we wanted to be agnostic and say, energy flow through the whole brain is what matters.

How do we develop a map that actually shows us the machinery, right? The hardware, the mitochondrial hardware, that allows the brain to flex this energy? And part of the motivation behind this was the fact that the brain is a pretty small piece of your body. If you weigh the brain and you weigh the whole body, the brain weighs about 2% of your whole body weight.

Two percent, that’s not that big. But then if you actually measure the energy that is consumed by different parts of the body, and then you find that the brain consumes about 20%, 20 to 25% of the whole body’s energy budget, so 2%, but consumes this much energy. So there is a clear disconnect there. The brain is tremendously energetically expensive and, and this, all of this energy flexes needs to happen to mitochondria. So it’s, it’s amazing. We, until now we hadn’t had a map of like how many mitochondria are there in different parts of the cortex and the subcortical region and the hippocampus and the white matter.

So that was a motivation to establish the hardware that allows the brain to run. Its amazing, malleable software and that we call the mind and the human experience. And then technically this was really challenging. So we find, we found a way to voxelize, basically turn a frozen piece of brain into small little cubes, that are consistent with the scale at which we can do mitochondrial assays.

So this was the real challenge and the technical tour de force in this project. My colleague, Eugene Mosharov, who thinks like an engineer, he’s a chemist by training, but he works in a neuroscience lab. And then we came up with this idea of using a machine that, it’s used for engraving things like woodworkers use this to engrave a heart and a piece of wood, for your mom’s birthday, for example.

So you can program the machine so you can engrave in three dimension, whatever shape you want. And then we, Eugene, program the machine so that it would engrave a grid of little cubes that are the same size as the MRI, the Magnetic Resonance imaging, techniques use. So what MRIs do when you put someone in a scanner, you get these beautiful pictures of brain activity.

The machine actually sections the brain into virtual cubes, which are called voxels. Pixel is two dimensions. Voxel is the volume, a pixel in volume. So we created physical voxels instead of just a virtual voxels that an MRI would do. And then that was the key step in making this possible.

And like you said, we ended up with 703 voxels, which was by far the largest kind of study of this kind we did. And then we had two courageous students who teamed up to do the assays with those hundreds of samples. 

Bret: 
Yeah, I think it’s great that you did it to correlate with the MRI because that’s living human beings. We can’t. Section their brains, but we can get MRIs. So any information that’s going to be able to be relatable to those exams is pretty key. But, I love the story about the engraving tool, and using that because when the science doesn’t exist, the techniques don’t exist, you’ve gotta be creative, you’ve gotta figure out a way to do it.

And I think that’s fantastic that you really were thinking outside the box for this project. So, with that as the setup, I mean it is so interesting what you found about the more recent, the more evolved or less evolved, parts of the brain. The white matter, the gray matter, how the density of mitochondria were different and the types of cells where the mitochondria were different. What was the main conclusions? 

Martin: 
The main conclusion is that there the number of mitochondria or very specifically distributed across the brain. Some brain areas have more mitochondria than others, and that is not totally unexpected, if we look at the rest of the body, because there are other parts of the body, there are organs in our bodies that have many more mitochondrial than others. The heart, for example, has a lot of mitochondria. The heart is, by volume, is about almost 30% mitochondria, 20 to 30%. And the muscle, for example, which is another kind of muscle, similar to the heart in some ways, has only two and at most 5% of its volume that are mitochondria.

So there are different amounts of mitochondria in different parts of the body. And if you train, if you exercise, you can actually make more mitochondria in different parts of the body. So now we found the brain, also, and there are different parts of the brain that have more or less mitochondria.

And then when we ask, which part of the brain have more mitochondria? What’s unique between those that have more, those that have less? And then my colleague, Michel Thiebaut de Schotten, who’s a neuroanatomist but also a neuropsychologist, and he’s an expert of brain imaging in Bordeaux in France.

He found that the brain regions that have most mitochondria are those regions that have more recently evolved. And also those regions, if you look at the monkey brain versus the human brain, there are parts of the brain that expanded significantly. You, as in on the, or transitioned from monkeys to humans.

And those parts of the brain that recently expended have mitochondria that not only they have more mitochondria, but their mitochondria were specialized for energy transformation. Suggesting that, and this kind of put the idea in our minds that mitochondria specialize and even in the brain, and we also, we know this, the heart mitochondria, the muscle mitochondria, the liver mitochondria, are all different, and their qualities and the types of mitochondria, we call those mitotypes. And then, I think at the beginning of this project I thought, there’s going to be one type of brain mitochondria, there’s going to be more or less in different places. We actually found there are different kinds of mitochondria across the brain.

and then we, Anna Monzel, computational scientist, in her lab analyzed single cells in four different brain areas. And then she was able to ask, are the mitochondria different in between excitatory neurons or inhibitory neurons to different populations of cells in the brain or microglia or astrocytes or oligodendrocytes?

Also, different types of cells that make the brain work, those cell types have different kinds of mitochondria. So there are different mitotypes in this beautiful organ that is the brain. And then there are different parts of the brain that have more, and parts of the brain that have less.

So this is just revealing the complexity, the diversity, and just further showing the beauty of mitochondria in the human brain. Just amazing. 

Bret: 
Yeah, and work that’s really never been done before. So really groundbreaking work to show this type of specialization and differentiation.

So then, and to bring it back to clinical implications, a lot of the times people will, I guess, push back against the brain energy theory or the role mitochondria play and say, if it’s all about energy in mitochondria, why do some people present as depression? Or some people present as bipolar disorder, some schizophrenia or, whatever the case may be, right?

Or some don’t present as all at all. Like why would there be that different? So I guess you could hypothesize, it depends on which cells, which part of the brain, which mitochondria. it’s not just one thing. So is that sort of a clinical jump you could potentially make from your research?

Martin: 
it’s certainly a valid hypothesis, I think, and there are two things that I think lend the support to that the basis for inter-individual differences. Why I might be vulnerable to one mental health disorder and someone else might be vulnerable to another one even though we both experience this, quote unquote, the same kind of metabolic dysfunction.

Those differences we think could be, could lie and maybe I have, based on how I’ve developed and the food I ate and the kind of things I do in my life and the kind of psychosocial factors that I’ve been exposed to, this could all shape how many mitochondria there are in different parts of my brain.

And we just did a study where we analyzed in about a thousand individuals, post-mortem so after they pass away. this large scale national project went and sampled up to 50 different organs and tissues, five zero. and then in sampling all of those organs, gene expression was measured.

And then from the gene expression, we can ask in different tissues and the same person how much resources are being invested into making mitochondria, which is how many mitochondrias does this person’s liver have, and this person’s heart and this person’s brain and this person’s kidney, and this person’s adrenal glands that make hormones and ovaries and testes and 50 different organs and tissues.

And what we found was that there was very large differences between people. And the person, for example, that had lots of mitochondria in one part of the brain was not the person that also had lots of mitochondria in their heart or in the muscle. And there are people that had lots of mitochondria in their liver and their kidneys, but not so many in their muscles and their brain.

And some other people had lots of mitochondria on the skin and and the gut and the digestive system, but not so many in the brain or the heart. So there are, there seem to be unique distribution patterns of mitochondria, mitochondrial content maybe mitochondrial qualities.

And one hypothesis is maybe this actually drives some of our kind of, what we call innate abilities and or skills and our gifts and our talents. If you develop somehow when you end up with more mitochondria and one part of the brain or one organ, then maybe you’re going to be like a really good athlete or a really good emotional listener or a really good social, mother like. Some of, we think some of those inter individual differences and phenotypes, which then interact with exposures and metabolic states, could drive individual susceptibilities or individual resiliency against potential disorders or disease states. So I think that would explain why metabolic dysfunction can affect different people in different ways. 

Bret: 
Yeah. So much of the body, and especially the brain, is based on redundancy and the support if something goes wrong. What can take over and, it seems like density and type of mitochondria really fits into that sort of framework and that hypothesis for sure. 

Martin: 
Yeah. There’s remarkable findings where some people lose a part of the brain because of an accident or because of a surgery to remove, for example, a site of epilepsy and then the whole lobe or a whole region of the brain can be removed.

And then sometimes there are deficits, but then those deficits eventually can be recovered. So there’s tremendous plasticity even in an organ that most people think doesn’t regenerate. There’s tremendous plasticity, and what seems to matter is not so much the structure of the brain and which neuron you have, where and how, but the energy patterns that the brain are able to, the brain is able to generate.

And that can be achieved, you can achieve the same energy pattern i.e., the same experience through different specific pathways. That’s the concept of equifinality. You end up at the same final point, at quick finality, but through different pathways. So you know, many roads and many different, you can build a car in many different ways, but it’s still going to drive you around, even if it has three wheels or six wheels or whatever. 

Bret: 
Yeah, very interesting. Now one of the points we already mentioned was how there were, you made these cuts and these samples to correlate with the MRI cuts. One of the questions that comes up a lot is how do we measure mitochondrial function in real time?

Like how do I know how my brain mitochondria are? And it seems like there’s still a ways to go to do that, but are, is there progress happening with certain scanners? Tell us about that, the clinical utility of that. 

Martin: 
Yeah, so that would be the ultimate goal, and where we hope MitoBrainMap becomes useful, is that you can put someone on a scanner, perform and different sequences, they’re just different ways of scanning the brain. And then take that data, project it onto MitoBrainMap, use the algorithm that we developed and then you can predict in this person’s brain, you can see how many mitochondria are there in different parts.

And we can even predict it seems, we need to validate this and confirm this in further studies, different properties or qualities of mitochondria with standard neuroimaging data. So if that’s the case, and now we’re planning the follow up study to look into this, if that’s the case, we might be able to know how many, how healthy the mitochondria are in this person’s brain, and then do this again a month later, right?

And then maybe another month later and then, or next year, and then actually follow and track people over time and then ask, this new job that you started, is this hurting your brain mitochondria or is this actually helping and inspiring you this new relationship or this new diet? It’s clear that for some people there are specific diets, be it keto or carnivore or Mediterranean, or like different people respond differently to different diets.

And I think we need to be clear about the fact that there’s not going to be a one diet that is good for everyone. And different people have different needs, even at different times of their life. And intermittent fasting can be amazing for some individuals. I don’t in the summer when they’re like really active, but then winter comes and things change.

And so even at different times of year or different, phases of life, the nutritional needs of the brain of the organism can be quite different. And children have very high energy expenditure between ages, one and 12, versus older adults, beyond age of 70, 80, very different.

And those, the data, if you look at the system energetically, it’s telling you these people should probably not eat the same thing or not eat the same way or not eat at the same frequency. And yet, my father still thinks that three meals a day is the way to go and the breakfast is the most important meal.

Even though I think a little bit of intermittent fasting or, could probably do very well. 

Bret: 
Yeah, it’s funny to hear people, it seems especially people who are, I don’t know, you want to come old school or even like old school military, even three squares, they call it three squares, three square meals a day.

That’s the way you do, you can’t skip a meal. It’s it’s funny how these concepts get ingrained into our being and our, and what we think is right. 

Martin: 
Yeah, so we hope that with MitoBrainMap, sorry, with using brain imaging, we might be able to actually quantify in a non-invasive way the quality and the content of mitochondria in someone’s brain, which I think would be revolutionary.

So we’re doing a study now in 500 brains to see if that’s the case and how good this might work. And then we’re also developing blood and saliva tests where we’re trying to identify circulating markers that you can just take a saliva sample and then you have some measure of what’s the state of your, of energetic, we call energy resistance, right?

How easily can energy flow through your organism or how much resistance do you have in your mitochondria? And they’re circulating proteins and markers that might get us at this systemically. So I think the field is evolving very quickly, and I’m hopeful in a few years, we might have some decent ways to quantify and even maybe to intervene at the energetic level and not just with molecules that people need to take every month or every day or kind of on a, in a repeated basis.

Bret: 
Yeah, and I think that’s such an important future to look towards because a lot of people say, it’s this mentality of, if mitochondria health’s important, what can I take to improve it? Methylene blue or, red light therapy or N-acetylcysteine or whatever supplement that has been shown to have some incremental benefit.

How do I know if those supplements are helping my mitochondria and if they need the help, right? Like that level of transition isn’t there yet, but that’s what people are looking for. But we know, eat a healthy diet for you, maintain metabolic health, stay physically active, have good circadian rhythm, get your sleep, have good social connections, right?

All these things which don’t sound so groundbreaking can help your mitochondria, but how do we measure that? That’s what I think. I don’t know. I think that’s what a lot of people say, I’m not going to worry about mitochondria because I can’t test it. I can’t measure it. But that’s what you’re, that’s what you’re marching towards with this revolutionary research, isn’t it?

Martin: 
Yeah, I think, yes, we’re marching towards developing quantifiable metrics of mitochondrial health. So I think that’s one piece, and that’s, I think, extremely valuable in this current context where in our modern culture, like if you can’t measure it, it just ain’t real. That’s part of our culture.

And I think once you start to think about yourself as an energetic process, like we have a physical body, right? And there’s the molecular structure and the anatomy and different parts of the brain and all of this. But so that’s one dimension of you like, which is like the physical thing, dimension that you see in the mirror, but then there’s the flow of energy through you is actually another dimension, right?

That is a little harder to grasp and we can’t sequence it. You can’t run it on a gel or look at it under the microscope. It’s not a thing. It’s energy flowing through you is actually fundamentally what you are. Because if energy stops flowing through you and through your brain, just you’re, gone, right?

Your body’s still there. The cells are still the same, your brain is still going to be intact and is still going to be as beautiful, but without the constant flow of energy through the brain and through the body, there’s, you’re dead. You don’t exist. It gets a little philosophical.

You ask what are you like a molecular machine? Or are you an energetic process? I think the truest answer, the answer is you’re both, right? But if you ask what is most fundamental? What is most fundamental is not your physical existence. It is actually you as an energetic process.

It’s the flow of energy and you can lose part of an anatomy, part of your anatomy, right? Like we said earlier, you can lose a lobe of your brain. You can lose an arm, you can lose an organ. You can lose a kidney, and as long as energy keeps flowing to you will still be, relatively the you part will still, remain intact.

But if you lose energy flow or if energy becomes mis patterned, right? The anatomical structures are all fine, but the energy is mispatterned or your enter the total amount of energy that flows through you goes down by just 10%. Now, I suspect this might be sufficient to cause depression or to cause long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome.

And if your energy flow goes down by 20%, then you’re dead. So I think this tells us how critical and how fundamental energy flow is to our existence and ultimately to our mental health as well.

So I think once you start to think about yourself as an energetic process, then some of the behaviors we know, of course you need to do this, just make so much more sense. Why do you need to sleep? You need to sleep so that your organism can go into a lower energy state and then it can rejuvenate, it can recover and consolidate memories and heal, right?

That the healing process just is naturally an energetic process happens when we sleep and when we rest. And why would you want to fast? Because energetically it stimulates a lot of important processes, like you make new mitochondria, you degrade old ones. And why would you want to foster social connections and hang out with people who bring you energy?

Who you feel energized by? There might literally be an energetic process in your organism, in your mitochondria, that is triggered when you enter in resonance with another human being. And then if you are an energetic process and you know this other person is an energetic process, now you’re broadcasting energetic signals through your voice, through your gestures, right?

And through your touch, and then this energetically affect the other person, this other energetic process. So then you enter into this dance and maybe the best analogy there is, you know that of two strings, right, that are tuned similarly. If one vibrates, there’s waves that hit the other one and then that both vibrate together.

And then this resonance might be what we experience as feeling energized by another person, by an idea, by a movement or whatever you feel passionate about. So thinking about yourself, about these things and human experiences energetically, I think brings a whole other dimension to behaviors.

And why would you do these things that are supposed to be good for you? And maybe it, the places are focused not so much on just things you can measure on the outside objectively with a lab test, but also on your own experience. And then you real, if you’re an energetic process more than a molecular machine, what you feel and what you experience on a daily basis or maybe on a minute by minute basis, these are teachings from meditation, for example, and ancient tradition.

You are the most sensitive instrument for knowing how you’re doing energetically. So I think this, it opens up a lot of possibilities for self-monitoring and knowing, is this diet good for me? Or is this diet, if you eat mindlessly, it’s really hard to know how this food affects you.

But once you start to pay attention and you wear maybe a CKM, a CGM, continuous ketone or glucose monitor. Then as additional help for your introspection or interoception, then maybe you actually can train yourself to become more in tune with your energetic state and how that affects your mental health, your physical health.

And so I see a lot of potential for improving your health and helping each other and our patients to be, to live more sustainable and healthier lives. 

Bret: 
Wow. That’s fascinating. To go from the microscopic subcellular level of research to the, to what makes us who we are and our human experience and to go from the smallest to the biggest. Basically, I think drawing that connection is so fascinating and that’s why I’m always fascinated by the research you’re doing. And I know you’re working on so many projects concurrently, and you have so much in the hopper. So if there’s any projects you want to tell us about, please do. And then, also, where can people go to learn about all your work and read about it? 

Martin: 
Yeah, thank you. What we’ve discussed today and a lot of what we do now, I’m intergrating into a book, called Energy, and it’s about understanding ourselves as from an energetic perspective and then what this means for behaviors, for relationship, for, purpose and then what it means for your place in the world and the universe and where the mind comes from and where consciousness might arise from. So there’s been an exciting process and I hope the book comes out next year in 2026.

And we’re developing other projects that I think we need to shift the way we do science. We need to shift scientific culture. And we need to shift also popular culture where, I think very deeply ingrained in how we think about what is worth studying as scientist and what is possible to do as a citizen that want to improve their your own health.

The longer we think about ourselves as molecular machines, I think the longer we will be led astray and we’ll be tempted to over-diagnose and put labels on dynamic energetic processes and then fix experiences into disorders and then want to molecularly intervene, extremely aggressively.

I think we need to ship that discourse. So we’re in the process of developing an institute to help make this possible for scientists to study those important questions that bring together the science of energy and the human experience, right? The fundamental engine of our lives and mitochondria and the fundamental nature of what it means to be human, which is your experience, and those things have not been bridged. So that’s what we’re getting ready to do. 

Bret: 
Great, and so I know you’re on Twitter and X, so people can follow you there. And is there any particular website people can go to or is that in transition? 

Martin: 
Yes. So people can go to, picardlab.org. And then we have publications there and a few videos and some lectures that are available. But probably X is the most, the platform where I’m most dynamically shared about our recent work. 

Bret: 
Great. Thank you so much again for joining me.

It’s always a pleasure and really inspiring to talk to you and hear about the work that you’re doing. So thank you so much. 

Martin: 
Thank you. I’m inspired. Thanks for your work. 

Bret: 
I want to take a brief moment to let our practitioners know about a couple of fantastic free CME courses developed in partnership with Baszucki Group by Dr. Georgia Ede and Dr. Chris Palmer. Both of these free CME sessions provide excellent insight on incorporating metabolic therapies for mental illness into your practice. They’re approved for a MA category one credits, CNE nursing credit hours, and continuing education credits for psychologists, and they’re completely free of charge on mycme.com.

There’s a link in the description. I highly recommend you check them both out. Thanks for listening to the Metabolic Mind Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a rating and comment as we’d love to hear from you. And please click the subscribe button so you won’t miss any of our future episodes.

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