Neuron Doctrine Debunked: INTRO

[00:00] Welcome to Renegade Psych, a nuanced podcast dedicated to informing the American public about the flagrant shortcomings of our healthcare system. I'm a board certified psychiatrist, and along with my guests, break down interesting and important topics into several segments to appeal to both the general public, as well as medical and psychiatric students, residents and practitioners. My primary motivations are to appreciate nuance in major medical and psychiatric discussions, educate listeners on the undue and widespread influence of big business in healthcare, and provide accurate and reliable information on relevant mental and medical health topics. While I'm still young and have a lot to learn in my career, I cannot continue to stand idly by while so many in my field repeatedly fall victim to pharmaceutical interests, misinformation, and [01:00] manipulation of existing data at the expense of Americans’ health. Whether you struggle with your mental health, work in behavioral health or the health care system, or want to better understand our healthcare systems’ over-promise and under-deliver status quo, my guests and I hope to provide public education on some of the most pertinent, under-reported and controversial issues in psychiatry, mental health, and healthcare in general.

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Ethan Intro Monologue: We've all wondered at some point in our lives, what is my mind? We've referenced it daily in our lives, especially when discussing our own internal struggles. We have a hard time scientifically explaining what and where it is, how it processes information, and how it relates to our experience of consciousness. Oftentimes, we neglect its constant [03:00] impact on our moment-by-moment conscious experience. With depression, we ruminate about past events and the bleakness of our futures. With anxiety, we worry about what has yet to come, or the consequences of our previous actions. We are not trying to have many of these thoughts, they just seem to spontaneously come into existence or into our consciousness. With schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, our minds impulses go unchecked to our conscious centers of action, and hallucinations and delusions emerge in severe cases. With neurodegenerative conditions like dementia, we lose our ability to process information slowly and gradually over time and sometimes lose our ability to restrain our knee-jerk reactions to external events. With Parkinson's, our motor centers are affected, leading to poor transmission of motor impulses and an impaired [04:00] dopamine-controlled motor system.

What if I told you the last 150 years of brain research on these conditions has mostly been studying the wrong brain cells. Have you ever heard the saying you only use 10% of your brain? Well, that's a myth, which was propagated by a theory of brain and nervous system function that emerged towards the end of the 1800s called The Neuron Doctrine, or the idea that neurons, which represent only 10% of our brain cells, play the most prominent role in how our brains and minds function. The neuron doctrine has dominated research over the last 150 years and stunted investigations into the other 90% of brain cells, collectively termed glial cells. Hence, we've revealed very few additional insights into how the human brain and mind process information over that [05:00] time span. While neurons certainly play an important role in our nervous system and brain function, glial cells deserve to be studied more extensively. Our medications target neuronal structure and function, neglecting the role or impact of glial cells, including astrocytes, microglia and more. Through glial cell research in the last 50 years, we know they play a very prominent role, and oftentimes are the cells setting into motion the actions of the neurons. Our hubris and desire for scientific certainty+academic accolades have set the field back nearly a century.

Today, we're going to talk about GLIA, Latin for glue, and re-examine their role in certain neurologic and psychiatric illnesses. We'll start out with a basic anatomy lesson, then give a historical background on the Neuron Doctrine and the individuals involved, talk about some basic tenants and [06:00] fundamental research findings that promote the role of glial cells as more than just supportive and wrap up with re-examining the roles of glial cells on several different neurologic and psychiatric diagnoses, including autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, epilepsy, Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, and more. We'll finish with a discussion on consciousness and how glial cells provide a better explanation for the concept of individual thoughts or innovative ideas. This series was prompted by my reading of a 2009 book by Andrew Kolb, a neuroscience researcher who studies neurobiology. His book is titled The Root of Thought, unlocking Glia, the brain cell that will help us sharpen our wits, heal injury, and treat brain disease. [07:00] According to a quick Google search. Mr. Kolb is currently serving as an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Hartford, and according to his book, he previously worked researching brain disease at the University of Munich in Germany, as a postdoctoral research fellow in pediatric Neurosurgery at Dartmouth and in Parkinson's Disease at University of California-San Diego. I want to thank Mr. Kolb for opening my eyes to this research, broadening my understanding of brain dysfunction and how it relates to psychiatric and neurological illnesses.