Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
Reports that online cognitive behavioral treatment can be as effective as in-person psychotherapy suggest that technology will expand access, extend the impact of a… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
What do we know about autism in 2013? Autism symptoms generally emerge before age three and usually much earlier, often as language delays or… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown. — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
A National Database on Autism Research is fostering sharing of data and collaborations. Scientists are also making great strides at the interface of biology… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
For bipolar in adults, I think there's pretty good agreement about what this looks like. For bipolar in children, there is some considerable debate… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
Unlike the heart or kidney, which have a small, defined set of cell types, we still do not have a taxonomy of neurons, and… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
From wearable sensors to video game treatments, everyone seems to be looking to technology as the next wave of innovation for mental health care. — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
What causes autism? As far as we know in 2013, there is no single gene or single environmental factor that accounts for the more… — Thomas R. Insel Copy Share Image
