Dr. Casey Halpern: Biology & Treatments for Compulsive Behaviors & Binge Eating
Huberman Lab
Scicomm Media
4.8 • 26.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2022
⏱️ 133 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Uberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. |
| 0:08.8 | I'm Andrew Uberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and |
| 0:12.4 | Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Casey Halpern. |
| 0:17.4 | Dr. Halpern is the chief of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on bulimia, |
| 0:24.7 | binge eating disorder and other forms of obsessive compulsive behaviors. Normally when we hear about eating disorders or obsessive compulsive disorders of other kinds, |
| 0:33.5 | the conversation quickly migrates to pharmacologic interventions and |
| 0:37.9 | serotonin or dopamine or |
| 0:39.6 | talk therapy interventions, many of which can be effective. |
| 0:42.9 | Halpern laboratory, however, takes an entirely different approach. While they embrace |
| 0:47.4 | pharmacologic and behavioral and talk therapy interventions, their main focus is the development and application of |
| 0:53.0 | engineer devices to go directly into the brain and stimulate the neurons, the nerve cells that generate compulsions that |
| 1:00.5 | cause people to want to eat more even when their stomach is full. In other words, they do brain surgery of |
| 1:07.0 | various kinds, sometimes removing small bits of brain, sometimes stimulating small bits of brain with electrical current, and even |
| 1:14.0 | stimulating the brain through the intact skull. That is without having to drill down beneath the skull in order to alleviate and indeed |
| 1:20.0 | sometimes cure these conditions. Today's discussion with Dr. Halpern was an absolutely fascinating one for me because it represents the leading edge of what's happening in |
| 1:29.3 | modification of brain circuits and the treatment of neurologic and psychiatric disease. For instance, they just recently published a paper in |
| 1:36.4 | Nature Medicine, one of the premier journals out there |
| 1:40.0 | entitled pilot study of responsive nucleus accumbens deep brain stimulation for loss of control eating. The nucleus accumbens |
| 1:46.8 | is an area of our brains that we all have. In fact, we have two of them one on each side of the brain that is |
| 1:53.0 | intimately involved in the release of dopamine for particular motivated behaviors. And while most often we think about dopamine for the release of behaviors that we want to engage in, in this context, |
| 2:02.7 | they are using stimulation and control of neuronal activity in nucleus accumbens to control loss of control eating. |
| 2:09.7 | Something that when people suffer from it despite knowing they shouldn't eat despite not even wanting to eat, they find themselves eating. So again, this represents really the leading edge of where neuroscience is going, and certainly is going to be an area of neuroscience that's going to expand in the years to come. |
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