Hi and in this episode general partner Vijay Pandey and I talk with

Sergio Pashka Professor of Behavioral Science at Stanford all about a new technology

we have for understanding brain disorders, the wild and very sci-fi new frontier of brain organoids.

So what are brain organoids? How were they developed and how can we use them? The conversation

starts with the essential problem that we've never had real access to the tissue

and actions of the developing brain or even a living normal, and the problems with all of our

existing models for understanding it, from genetic studies to autopsies to primates.

We look at those models we've relied on in the past and what this new model of brain organoids now brings us,

allowing us to study the human brain both how it develops and what goes wrong in certain disorders

with living human brain cells in a dish for the very first time.

We talk about what these organoids can do and can't, what they're good for understanding

and where that understanding becomes limited and why calling these mini-brains or brains in a dish isn't the right terminology at all

And finally how far this new tool and model might be taken now and in the future, and how it will lead us closer towards one day even perhaps understanding psychology itself on a molecular level.

We're here today to talk about

understanding brain disorders and some of the new tools we're developing for how to do so.

So let's start where we actually are in that. Are we actually anywhere

significantly more advanced than we were in the days of like hysteria? You know, thinking about things like

like labeling these sort of conditions, societal conditions that we had no clue.

Like where are we actually right now?

psychiatric disorders are still behaviorally defined and there are very few

biomarkers that are considered reliable for diagnosis. The truth is that our

understanding of psychiatric disorder is actually quite limited. I often like to

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