Huberman Podcast - Hearing Voices - Alzheimer's Test - Rapoport Obit

[Breedlove, S]

Dear Subscribers,

I was interviewed on the Andrew Huberman Lab podcast a few weeks ago, and it dropped yesterday. We talked about a lot of things, including sexual orientation. If you are interested, you can listen or watch on all the major platforms, including YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-mEiwe2NhE&t=3356s

Cheers,
Marc
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/health/a-secret-history-of-psychosis.html

A Secret History of Psychosis

By Ellen Barry

When Cohen Miles-Rath walks into his father’s house, the history of his psychosis is right there in front of him.

There is the place where he was standing when he received a cryptic message on his phone: The devil had entered his father’s body. There is the drawer where he spotted a knife whose handle was white — the color of God!

There is the floor where, as they grappled over the knife, Cohen bit off part of his father’s earlobe, and blood spattered over both of them. There is the spot where, pinned to the floor, Cohen reached up with the knife and slashed wildly at his father’s throat.

The violence lasted seconds but changed his whole life. With voices still racketing in his head, Cohen found himself in jail, facing charges of second-degree assault and criminal mischief, felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Stunned and bleeding, his father had pressed charges, and taken out a restraining order against him.

But Cohen hadn’t killed him. In the years that followed, he had the feeling that he had walked right up to the edge of a chasm. About 300 times a year in the United States, a child kills a parent, making up around 2 percent of all homicides.

A large portion of these cases involve people like Cohen: young men with severe mental illness who are living at home. When mounting symptoms of psychosis make school or work impossible, parents are the support system of last resort. Paranoid delusions can cruelly invert that logic, turning people against the figure closest to them.

    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.science.org/content/article/alzheimer-s-blood-test-getting-popular-who-really-needs-it

Alzheimer’s blood test is getting popular. But who really needs it?

By Jennie Erin Smith 

For a person who may be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, getting a clear diagnosis is simpler than ever. Blood tests that detect biological changes linked to the disease are now considered reliable alternatives to brain imaging and invasive spinal fluid tests. And one biomarker, called phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217), has risen to the top. More accurate than other blood-based measures, p-tau217 is widely used in research, and the first commercial test was approved in the United States last year. Guidance from the influential Alzheimer’s Association says a positive result in a patient with cognitive symptoms can justify starting therapy with antibody drugs recently approved for the disease.

“P-tau217 is the biomarker of the day,” says Alzheimer’s researcher Lon Schneider of the University of Southern California. But its success has sparked worries among some researchers and clinicians about inappropriate use of the test. Some doctors have begun to use it in people without confirmed symptoms, and telehealth companies peddle p-tau217 testing, for as little as a few hundred dollars, to anyone concerned about their memory. A positive result doesn’t mean a person will develop cognitive impairment or dementia, Schneider and other researchers warn. And some fear the tests will be used to push people without symptoms toward pricey infusion drugs that they may not need.

At the Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease (AD/PD) meeting last month in Copenhagen, Denmark, scientists seemed to agree that for better or for worse, p-tau217 is poised to become a widespread screening tool for healthy people. That assumption is driving an ongoing trial called TRAILBLAZER-3, in which people with positive p-tau217 but no symptoms are taking the antiamyloid drug donanemab to see whether it delays the onset of cognitive impairment. “People keep thinking or talking about early treatment,” says neurologist Richard Mayeux of Columbia University, who is not involved with that study. “What you want to do is get to that fine area just before cognitive impairment starts to occur.”

© 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

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https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-hypercuriosity-of-adhd-may-have-helped-humans-thrive

The hypercurious mind

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

It’s Monday morning at the lab and I have a team presentation due in two hours. I open my laptop intending to tweak a figure, then notice a paper I’d bookmarked. That paper cites another, which leads me to one of the authors’ new preprints. Soon I find myself with 27 tabs open, three half-formed ideas scribbled in my notebook, and a new app downloaded to prototype something that has nothing to do with my presentation.

I know I should stop and I can feel the time pressure building, but the pull to wander is too strong – almost physical. Just five more minutes, I promise to myself, and I’ll return my attention to the ‘real’ work. Only when my anxiety becomes impossible to ignore do I force myself to come back to the slides.

This little dance isn’t unusual for me and the millions of other people who can spend hours in deep, almost joyful focus when a question grabs our attention, but who can also derail ourselves completely when we hear about a shiny new idea. For a long time, I thought this was a personal failure of discipline, a quirk I needed to manage better. It’s only when I started working at the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London that I came to believe it might be something else entirely.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist using behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and EEG to examine how attention is drawn toward some signals and away from others. In retrospect, the irony isn’t lost on me that I spent years studying attention without applying the same analytic lens to myself. To understand why I’d dismissed my own experience for so long, it helps to look at how ADHD is officially defined. ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is characterised in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) as ‘a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development.’ The emphasis is on impairment: something is not working as it should.

© Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026. 
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/science/judith-rapoport-dead.html

Judith L. Rapoport, Pioneer in Understanding O.C.D., Dies at 92

By Trip Gabriel

Dr. Judith L. Rapoport, a child psychiatrist who brought public awareness to obsessive-compulsive disorder with her best-selling 1989 book, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing,” based on her groundbreaking research into the condition’s causes and treatment, died on March 7 in Washington, D.C. She was 92.

Her death, at a retirement home, was from lung cancer, her husband, Stanley Rapoport, said.

Dr. Rapoport’s book about obsessive-compulsive disorder, written in an engaging style for nonscientific readers, clarified that the condition was far more common than generally thought, affecting some 1 to 3 percent of the population.

The disorder had long remained in the shadows because of the shame that surrounded its symptoms, which could include habits like checking and rechecking that appliances were off, performing counting rituals before doing something as simple as walking through a doorway, or scrubbing hands with soap and water until the skin was raw — any of which, uncontrollably repeated, might waste hours of the day.

Dr. Rapoport showed that there was a neurological basis for obsessions, or intrusive repetitive thoughts, and also for their linked compulsions, or pointless rituals of behavior.

Along with other researchers in the 1980s, she upended the received psychiatric wisdom that the disorder could be traced to emotional traumas like overly strict toilet training. Dr. Rapoport showed that obsessive-compulsive disorder is not a neurosis, but a neurological disease.

She demonstrated that it ran in families, suggesting a biological origin, and she oversaw double-blind drug trials that in 1989 led the Food and Drug Administration to approve the first medication to treat the disorder, Anafranil.

“People would stop her on the street and say how much she helped them,” Dr. Francisco X. Castellanos, a child psychiatrist who worked under her, said in an interview. “Her book alerted people that they could get help, that it was not their fault. It was a gigantic leap in science and also in public health.”
    © 2026 The New York Times Company
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