Name: Dr. David Linden | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #595
Uploaded: 2025-07-08T13:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. David Linden | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #595' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. David Linden | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #595' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-08. Transcript available.

Dr. David Linden | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #595

we're getting into the final shows for the return of the rat tour gosh this red
is almost fully
returned um july 9th will be in philadelphia rochester uh new york on july 10th
then we're
in detroit after that uh moving on we're in los angeles anaheim uh at the honda
center in
oceanside california uh you can get all your tickets at theovahn.com slash t-o-u-r
and uh just
thank you so much uh for your support today's guest is a neuroscientist he's an
author and a professor
at johns hopkins university in baltimore uh he's written books about addiction
love death and uh
and what it means to be human i'm really grateful for his time today's guest is
david
david are you physically comfortable in here yeah sure is it too hot or cold
for you no it's just
fine it is yeah okay and i'm happy to see that my actual name is there it's not
just brain researcher
or something generic no no we only do that sometimes we'll do that if it's uh
every now and then we try
to get like regular folks out of society in and sometimes we try to keep that
kind of gin a little
bit generic well you know my wife was teasing me of course she said oh yeah
like uh so you're going
on there and there's been like president trump and and bernie sanders and david
spade and then some
scientists nobody's ever heard of like you know like who doesn't fit in this
picture
well i and so i had imagined you know brain guy
well look all right we're happy to have you man we're happy to have you um
neuroscientist david
linden right that's me okay and so as a neuroscientist how do you practice that
like
in everyday life these days i know you are a professor that's right so i'm a
professor johns
hopkins medical school and so until very recently what i did every day was to
run a lab where i did
research with mice working on brain diseases but the other things i do involve
teaching medical students
teaching graduate students and then very recently also teaching undergraduates
well thank you for your
service i think i think being a teacher and instructor is a service in a lot of
ways and i think it kind of
maybe gets overlooked sometimes i'm not sure if that's true but uh yeah thank
you for your service when
you're when you're testing these mice with for neurological diseases well yeah
so for example one of the
things that uh we're interested in is recovery of function after brain injury
okay so you probably
have heard that if you get injured in your spinal cord or your brain your
ability to recover is
minimal like if you cut a nerve you get injured you cut a nerve in your arm it'll
grow back and you'll be
fine but people get injured in their spinal cord typically paralyzed for life
you get injured in your
brain you can recover a bit but particularly when you're an adult or old like
me your ability to
recover is very limited and some of that is because the long thin information
sending part of the
neuron which is called the axon can't grow after it's damaged at all uh in the
brain in the spinal cord it
can like in your arm or your leg and that is some of the reason why it's so
hard to recover from
brain or spinal cord injuries and so what we're trying to do is develop
therapies to allow that
to happen so people can recover better from a stroke or a traumatic brain
injury like a soldier
might get or someone might get an accident like a car crash and so with with an
actual mouse how would
you what are kind of the processes of doing that how do they cause the injuries
well you know we're from
baltimore yeah so uh we do a very baltimore thing which is we stab them in the
head
is that is that true or not well that's one way we do it so so well we also do
another baltimore
thing which was we get them we get them really high on amphetamines uh so yeah
there's a kind of
amphetamine which fortunately isn't actually a drug of abuse we just use it in
the lab called
perichloroamphetamine and that fries out a particular kind of neuron that uses
the neurotransmitter
called serotonin and so it turns out these neurons that use serotonin counter
to the belief that
everyone's had in science for years and years actually can regrow after they're
injured and there's another
kind of neuron that uses a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine they can regrow
too but they're just a
tiny fraction of the kinds of neurons in the brain and so the goal is to try to
figure out well what's
special about them why can they regrow when the other neurons can't and then
use that as a clue to
try to develop therapies so that the other neurons could regrow too and people
recover from their brain
injuries or their strokes wow it's exciting it is exciting it's been lots of
fun you know hopefully
it'll lead to some cures i like your attitude man um that has been kind of
thinking so i know that i
take antidepressants right i think that's popular you just mentioned um ssris
you just mentioned those
i mentioned serotonin which is the f first s is an ssri yeah okay does taking ssris
damage our brain
well taking sri ssris doesn't damage the serotonin neurons but taking sr sris
has all kinds of bad
side effects i'm sure you know about some of them one of the ones that is most
common is reducing your
libido your sexual desire yeah and so yeah the other big problem with ssris is
they only work so so
right you know actually if you look at people who try ssris for depression
about a third of people will
say oh yeah that works pretty good i feel i feel you know maybe not totally
better but enough that i can
notice it about a third of the people will say oh very minimal just a little
bit better and about
a third of people say it didn't do a thing for me at all so you know it's
better than nothing but ssris
are not that great and they're not as good as exercise they're not as good as
cognitive behavioral
therapy and whereas exercise has side effects that are good for you ssris has
side effects that are bad
for you i well it's you know it's funny you say some of this because for myself
i noticed with i've been
on my thing for 20 years or something uh-huh um if i am really feeling
sometimes overwhelmed i almost need
to get off of them or i will lower my own dose really because sometimes i can't
get feelings out of me it
feels like because they're kind of stopping it somehow i don't know the science
behind it and
i don't know if that's true but that's how it feels to me does that make any
sense if it feels to you
then it's true right you know i mean everyone responds a little differently to
these things some
people that work some people makes them feel this way or that way but you know
your experience is the
truth yeah you know we're talking about a drug that's supposed to change how
you feel so how you feel
is real it's not like anyone could say to you well that's not true that's
bullshit no that's true that's
that's what's happening for you and i'm sure for for for certain other people
um as well does that
heightened serotonin does it make it so you can't have certain feelings well
you know it does it does
damp people down a bit uh for some people it kind of sedates them like some
people uh i know people on
ssris who will take a little ritalin too because they have a hard time
concentrating enough to work
while they're on their ssris uh some people will take drugs like yohimbine to
try to get back the
sexual desire if that's been dampened out by the ssris but you know this i mean
you got ssris
they're a stopgap solution they're not nearly as good as they should be it's
embarrassing
for the field of neuroscience that after all these years working on depression
we don't have
something better that our understanding of depression is so bad that we can't
offer you
a better therapy than ssris well it's kind of fascinating to hear you say that
do you think
that is because of there's not enough science there's not enough information is
that because um
pharmaceutical companies are so happy with the sales that they adjust where
they put their funds
i'm just or is it just uh just a research issue or or what do you think there
yeah so i think it is
a research issue and i think part of it is that in neuropsychiatric disease
sometimes when we make a
bucket and we throw lots of things into that bucket we say oh depression that's
the bucket well depression
can manifest in all kinds of different ways there's a depression where you just
feel low and unmotivated
and nothing makes you happy and there's another kind of like agitated
depression where you're like
really on edge and anxious and we call those both depression but are they
really the same well probably
not they're probably i mean we know they're not an experience and they're
probably not in your brain
as well but let me give you an example of a way in which there's some hope for
moving this forward
so uh the serotonin neurons in the brain are in a part of the brain that's
called the raphe
the raphe the raphe yeah r-a-p-h-e it sounds nice i know it sounds cool like
you'd name your kid that
right yeah it sounds like a nice place to take a vacation like a honeymoon that's
right that's right
we're going to raphe on here so uh so uh yeah so the raphe uh nuclei have serotonin
neurons in them
and they go all over the brain and when we go in with an electrode to record
the electrical activity
we would say oh maybe there's two or three different kinds of neurons that use
serotonin
in the raphe well it turns out now we've got techniques where we can take these
neurons
one by one and analyze the genes that are turned on in each of those in in each
individual cell so
there's like 20 000 genes in the genome a typical cell might express 12 000
genes have those turned on
and that varies a bit from neuron to neuron so you can say how many flavors of
serotonin neurons are
there in the raphe turns out there's 14 flavors wow in the raphe well probably
only some of those
have to do with depression and some of them have to do with other things maybe
some of the bad
side effects that you don't want from your ssris so what this means is that
this kind of knowledge
knowing all these different subtypes means that maybe that can be the basis of
knowledge to develop
therapies that are more specific that will work on the mood altering serotonin
neurons leave the other
ones alone and be able to have us make a better drug or a better therapy
interesting yeah i wanted
yeah i've loved a lot of your work i've saw i saw you had a great conversation
with andrew huberman and
he was just on recently he's very fascinating guy a lot of information and he's
great at um sharing
information out into the world i believe he's a great conduit for information
um i wanted to talk to you
about love i guess right oh yeah i think it might be a neat place to start kind
of um did human beings
always love or was that something that we learned over time well you know
that's a hard thing to know we can't look at the fossils and know whether
people loved what we do know
about humans is that our mating system is really really really unusual all
right so humans have a system
where uh in one uh a woman's cycle she usually is only mating with one guy uh
paternity is usually
pretty accurate like if you go all around the world and you do genetic testing
on kids and you say
is the is the is the is the father really the long-term partner spouse whatever
of of the mom
about 90 95 percent of the time paternity is accurate it doesn't matter where
you go in the world some
some jungle village in in malaysia new york city it's the same paternity is
accurate um human dads for
the most part tend to stick around and help either they help you know by
changing diapers and actually
taking care of the baby or they provide resources but one way or another they
help uh humans have most of
their sex recreationally they go all through the cycle whereas most animals are
only interested in sex
when the female is in heat right these things make mating behavior in humans
like extremely rare
that's very rare across if we look at