内容来源：https://www.quantamagazine.org/martin-picards-mitochondrial-theory-of-mind-20260717/

内容总结：

独家报道：线粒体——意识与健康的“能量密码”？哥伦比亚大学科学家提出颠覆性理论

（纽约讯） 2021年7月的一个周四清晨，哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心研究员马丁·皮卡德（Martin Picard）正坐在一间狭小的代谢研究舱内，任由一根导管将他手臂的血液引向隔壁的实验室。每隔一小时，护士会抽取他的血液样本，同时采集他的唾液并记录其情绪状态。这间仅比单人床略大的房间，仿佛一间牢房，却是全球仅有的50个同类精密代谢研究设施之一。它的设计旨在严格限制受试者的能量消耗，以研究人体在维持基础生存时所需要的最少能量。

作为该研究的首位志愿者，皮卡德体验到的并非不适，而是兴奋。因为他领导的哥伦比亚线粒体心理生物学实验室，正试图打开一扇全新的大门：探索线粒体——这个被大多数中学生仅视为“细胞能量工厂”的细胞器——如何成为连接分子、身体乃至人类意识与情感的关键枢纽。

皮卡德的理论核心在于，线粒体远不止是生产能量货币ATP（三磷酸腺苷）的简单工厂。过去十年的研究表明，它们还负责处理神经递质、激素和代谢物，直接影响人的情绪、压力、性唤起和睡眠需求。“它们是我们已知的多种意识基础过程的汇聚点，”皮卡德博士说。他提出一种“生命的能量观”，认为健康与疾病对应着不同的能量状态，而线粒体正是这些状态的微型变压器。食物中的电子通过线粒体代谢转化为能量流，这构成了生命体验的最基本层面。“如果能量流停止，你就不再存在，”皮卡德说，“基因或许编码了生命所需的蛋白质，但没有能量流，就没有意识，没有情感，没有生命。”

这一观点正在获得越来越多的关注。尽管基因和蛋白质的重要性不容忽视，但圣路易斯华盛顿大学免疫学家乔恩·布雷斯特夫（Jon Brestoff）指出，线粒体及其控制的代谢通路“其对大脑的即时影响可能比我们想象的要重要得多”。皮卡德则试图将线粒体能量科学正式确立为一个独立的研究领域。

从母亲诊所的好奇到科学前沿的探索

皮卡德对生命能量差异的困惑源于童年。他的母亲是加拿大蒙特利尔郊区的一名护士，常带着他去探望病人。他注意到，有些人在患病后每况愈下，而另一些人却能“奇迹般地”从重伤中恢复。这促使他进入麦吉尔大学学习生理学和神经免疫学，并开始思考：分子、细胞和身体过程如何转化为情感、行为和蓬勃生长的能力？

在学术研究之外，他接触了整体健康理念，并意识到疾病具有个体性。而在他更正式的学术生涯中，他总是不自觉地被线粒体吸引。他发现，线粒体不仅能转化能量，还能产生多种化学信号，影响感觉和行为。它们为制造谷氨酸和乙酰胆碱（管理大脑、神经和肌肉的神经递质）提供原料；是合成皮质醇、雌激素、睾酮等所有类固醇激素的第一步，因此是调节睡眠、性和压力的关键；它们还缓冲钙离子（参与肌肉收缩和基因转录）和释放活性氧（用于免疫细胞激活和细胞生长信号传递）；甚至在检测压力和触发受损细胞自毁中也扮演核心角色。

这一不断扩展的功能列表——从免疫活动、癌症生长到肠道健康和衰老——强烈暗示线粒体功能障碍与多种疾病相关，引发了研究领域的范式转变。杰克逊实验室的A·菲利普·韦斯特（A. Phillip West）表示：“现在是研究线粒体最激动人心的时代之一。”更引人入胜的是，线粒体还制造小分子，用于开启或关闭基因，使其成为“惰性基因组与动态环境之间的门户”。

能量消耗的代价：心理状态与健康的桥梁

皮卡德发现，人体的能量预算是有限的。当一种生物过程（如疾病、受伤或慢性压力）消耗过多能量时，就会出现权衡，不仅表现为健康不佳，还可能表现为焦虑、脑雾和疲惫等负面心理体验。反之，健康、良好感觉与充沛精力常常相伴。

在一项早期的实验中，皮卡德将小鼠置于束缚管中制造心理压力，发现线粒体缺陷程度不同的小鼠，其分子信号和对压力的反应截然不同。“如果你改变了线粒体，你就改变了有机体感知和应对心理压力的方式。”随后，他又发现即使线粒体转化能量的能力不变，仅仅扰动它们也能改变宿主细胞的基因表达和生长，证明了线粒体是身体与外部世界之间的“动态界面”。

2018年，皮卡德团队发布了“线粒体健康指数”，这是一种通过提取组织样本中线粒体并量化其内容物来测量其能量转化能力的分子尺度。该技术使大规模、高精度的线粒体活性测量成为可能。

线粒体地图与意识之谜

2021年，瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院行为与系统神经科学家卡门·桑迪（Carmen Sandi）的实验室首次明确证明线粒体影响精神状态，且可通过治疗干预进行调整。她发现天生焦虑或抑郁的大鼠脑细胞中的线粒体功能失调，而通过实验性提升线粒体输出，神经元得以恢复，大鼠的焦虑迹象减少。

皮卡德则于2025年参与绘制了人类大脑的线粒体地图，揭示了线粒体不仅在不同脑区之间不同，甚至在脑内不同细胞类型之间也存在差异。这为探索“分子能量景观”如何构成大脑结构、过程和功能（包括意识）铺平了道路。

皮卡德更大胆地推测，线粒体可能是心身谜题中缺失的一块——那些在微观层面将思想从物质中冶炼出来的炼金术士，负责“将意识具象化为生命”。尽管这一观点在学界引发争议，西班牙国家心血管研究中心的何塞·安东尼奥·恩里克斯（José Antonio Enríquez）评价其“有趣但远未得到证实”，并提醒需要审慎的科学评估。

初步验证：线粒体疾病患者的“能量税”

在2025年的一次研讨会上，皮卡德实验室公布了初步的代谢舱研究结果。这项研究对比了健康人与两种罕见线粒体疾病患者。结果发现，即使是睡眠时，患者每天也比健康人多燃烧180卡路里，能量消耗高出15%。“他们每天都要支付一张‘披萨能量税’，”研究生埃文·肖尔森（Evan Shaulson）说。这些患者报告称感到更疲劳和压力更大。血液检测显示，他们体内乳酸等代谢物水平升高，这与线粒体功能不佳和焦虑相关。

不过，当研究转向9天的“自由生活”环境时，两组人的热量差距几乎消失。这是因为健康人在自由生活中的能量消耗比在舱内高出16%，而患者仅高出5%。这表明，对于线粒体疾病患者来说，代谢舱的受限环境反而是他们的“典型一天”——他们因常感能量不足而活动更少。

肖尔森指出，尽管研究样本较小，但这些发现展示了线粒体过程如何“向外扩散并影响整个有机体”。未来，团队计划进行一项涉及约100人的更大规模研究，结合穿戴设备、唾液样本和六个月的生活体验报告，进一步探索线粒体如何成为连接“行为、生物学与心理”的桥梁。

未来愿景：创立新的疗愈科学

皮卡德计划于2027年创立一家非营利机构，将线粒体、新陈代谢和能量研究的实验室发现转化为现实应用，旨在建立一门“支持人类繁荣”的疗愈科学。尽管有同行认为他的理论有些“玄乎”，但皮卡德坚信，科学一直是由那些经过严谨检验的大胆想法所驱动的。“很多事情在被理解之前，都曾被视作‘玄学’。”

中文翻译：

马丁·皮卡德的线粒体心智理论
引言
那是一个周四的早晨九点，马丁·皮卡德正注视着自己的血液从手臂上的静脉输液管中流出，穿过墙壁上的一个孔洞。他坐在一张狭窄的床上，身处一间幽闭的隔间里，距离不锈钢水槽和陶瓷马桶不到一肩之宽。在24小时里，每隔一小时——就连他睡觉时也不例外——一名护士就会从他手臂抽血，送到隔壁的研究团队那里；在每个时间点，如果他还醒着，他还要提供一份唾液样本，并填写一份关于自己情绪的调查问卷。
这个房间看起来像一间牢房，或者一间极为狭小的酒店房间，但事实上，它是一间代谢研究隔间，全球仅有50间这样的设施。它特意设计得极其狭小，以防止皮卡德消耗超过维持生命所需最低限度的额外能量。白天不允许打盹，除严格按他热量需求定时的餐食外，也不能吃任何其他东西。就寝时间严格定在晚上11点。熄灯前，皮卡德戴上了一个装置，用于监测他睡眠时的生命体征和大脑活动。
尽管没什么可做的——他大多时间坐在床上看书或用笔记本电脑工作——但在2021年7月的那个日子里，皮卡德感受到的主要情绪却是兴奋。那是因为他是线粒体心理生物学实验室开展的一项实验的首位志愿者，该实验室由他主导，隶属于纽约哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心。通过研究维持基础生存需要多少能量，他的实验室旨在探索他认为在健康和疾病中被忽视的一个因素——从分子层面一直到心智层面：线粒体。
大多数中学生都知道线粒体是细胞的能量工厂。这些细胞器通过一连串化学反应，分解食物中的葡萄糖和脂肪，生成三磷酸腺苷（ATP），即生命的能量货币。但线粒体远不止是能量工厂。过去十年的研究表明，它们处理各种分子，包括神经递质、激素和代谢物，这意味着它们直接影响我们所体验的情绪、压力、性唤起和睡眠需求。这使得它们成为“许多已知的、被证明是意识基础的过程的汇合点”，皮卡德说。
更广泛地说，在他所谓的“生命的能量观”中，皮卡德假设健康与疾病各自存在不同的能量状态，而线粒体正是负责这些状态的微小转换器。根据这一观点，在代谢过程中，电子从食物流向氧气，经线粒体处理，这是生命体验的最基本层面。
“如果能量停止流动，你就不复存在了，”皮卡德说。基因组或许编码了支持生命的蛋白质，但如果它们各自调控和生成所需的能量流被中断或缺失，他说，“就没有意识了，没有情绪了，也没有生命了。”
皮卡德将线粒体生物学与能量、健康甚至意识联系起来的观点正逐渐获得关注。但这些观点太过新颖，尚未形成正式的研究领域。皮卡德旨在改变这一现状，其他人也开始加入进来。
尽管基因和蛋白质的重要性不应被忽视，但线粒体及其控制的代谢通路“比我们给予它们的认可更为重要，并且可能实际上对大脑有更重要的即时影响，”圣路易斯华盛顿大学的免疫学家乔恩·布雷斯特夫说。
线粒体影响大脑活动的观点“其实一点也不牵强，”他补充道。“马丁只是为此带来了一个新鲜的视角。”
活着
就像地球上其他每一种动物一样，皮卡德的线粒体遗传自他的母亲。她是一名护士，在蒙特利尔郊外一个法语城镇经营着自己的家庭护理服务。有时，在她接他打完冰球训练后，他们会在回家的路上顺道拜访一两位病人。有些病人正在术后恢复；另一些则是四肢瘫痪或处于姑息治疗中。皮卡德开始注意到，有些人从一个病发展到下一个病，从未完全好转，而另一些人则从重伤或重病中恢复过来，“几乎是奇迹般地”，他回忆道。他对此深感困惑。
他带着这份好奇心进入了麦吉尔大学，在那里学习了生理学和神经免疫学。随着学习的深入，一个疑问开始在他脑海中成形：分子、细胞和身体的进程如何转化为感觉、行为和茁壮成长的能力？他的课程并没有提供他寻找的答案，于是他悄悄开始自学整体健康学。他对所学部分内容感受复杂，但他学会了从整体视角看待健康的价值，并开始认识到疾病的个体性。最重要的是，他说，“我学会了与另一个人建立联结。”
与此同时，在他更正式的研究中，他不断被线粒体所吸引。皮卡德了解到，能量转化虽然对我们体内几乎每个过程都至关重要，但这只是这些细胞器功能的一部分。它们还产生大量化学信号，影响我们的感受、行为和机能。线粒体为制造神经递质谷氨酸和乙酰胆碱提供原材料，这两种物质管理着我们的大脑、神经和肌肉。所有类固醇激素（包括皮质醇、雌激素、睾酮和孕酮）合成的第一步都发生在线粒体中，使其成为睡眠、性和压力的关键调节器。它们还在细胞内和细胞间的信号传导中高度活跃：线粒体缓冲并释放钙离子——钙离子参与从肌肉收缩到基因转录的方方面面，还释放活性氧——活性氧能激活免疫细胞并传递参与细胞生长的信息。线粒体在检测和应对压力方面也扮演核心角色，甚至在损伤被认为过大时触发细胞自毁。
线粒体影响的核心过程清单不断增长——免疫活动、生殖、代谢、癌症生长与抑制、肠道健康、衰老与长寿等等——这强烈表明了线粒体功能障碍可能与许多不同疾病和失调有关。这引发了研究人员看待和理解这些细胞器的范式转变。“这可能是研究线粒体有史以来最激动人心的时期之一，”A. 菲利普·韦斯特说，他在缅因州巴尔港的非营利研究机构杰克逊实验室研究线粒体如何塑造免疫反应。“我们还有很多要学，但我认为我们真的正在进入一个了不起的时期。”
有趣的是，线粒体还产生小分子，细胞在生长、发育和响应环境时利用这些小分子来开启或关闭基因。这使得线粒体成为“惰性基因组与动态环境之间的门户，”皮卡德说。到研究生毕业时，他怀疑这些细胞器可能为他一些更深层次的问题提供了答案。他凭直觉接受了宾夕法尼亚大学科学家道格拉斯·华莱士的博士后研究职位，华莱士被认为是线粒体遗传学领域的创始人之一。
自那以后，皮卡德领导了多项研究并开发了工具，探索线粒体、能量、情绪和健康之间的联系，逐步构建起他最终的假设：线粒体是医学中缺失的一个维度，可以解释为什么一个人会挣扎或茁壮成长——正如他最初随母亲探访病人时所目睹的那样。如果人体有一个有限的能量预算，那么当一个生物过程消耗超出其典型份额时，自然会产生产生权衡。相互竞争的需求——例如来自疾病、损伤或慢性压力——不仅可能表现为健康不佳，还可能表现为焦虑、脑雾和疲惫等负面意识体验。另一方面，良好的健康、良好的感觉和良好的能量常常相伴而生。“人们体验到好的事情，然后主观上感觉更有能量，”皮卡德说。
如今，他更倾向于将线粒体视为“细胞功能的 orchestrators（协调者）”。他将身体比作一个电路，线粒体扮演电阻的角色。他解释说，在电路中，电阻将电流塑造成可用的形式，而不是让其不受控制地流动。线粒体同样将身体的能量流维持在一个狭窄的电阻带内——既不太少，也不太多——这与健康状态相兼容。
因此，这些细胞器远非只是被动通道，而是“电路中的模式生成单元，”皮卡德说，它们将原始电流转化为有意义的信号。他假设，这些模式的差异可能有助于解释为什么有些人容易陷入某些心理状态和状况，或患上慢性疾病。
“（皮卡德）提出的假设非常令人兴奋，”韦斯特说。“他试图拓宽视野，帮助我们理解能量流的总体原则。”
在此过程中，他也在挑战医学和生物学中长期存在的假设，即基因和蛋白质是健康和疾病的主要驱动因素。皮卡德问道，如果线粒体转化的能量的数量和性质实际上是人类体验的核心呢？
能量的追寻
2025年12月一个寒冷晴朗的早晨，皮卡德走上讲台，穿着一件绣有俏皮线粒体卡通图案的毛衣。他身后，窗户框出了哈德逊河的壮丽景色。他面前，大约100名科学家、学生、企业家、投资者和患者，加上一名记者，围坐在房间的桌子旁。
“我站在你们面前，给你们做这个演讲——自我受到了威胁，”皮卡德说，他的蓝眼睛闪烁着热情。身体对这种威胁的神经反应——心跳加速、腋窝出汗、毛发竖起——提供了一个教训。“一切都要消耗能量，”他说，即使是主观的心理体验也是如此。
皮卡德组织了一场为期一天的研讨会，让线粒体爱好者们有机会讨论他们这个快速发展的领域的最新发现，从免疫细胞生物能量学到时间感知。“当我听说马丁要举办研讨会时，我就必须得来，”阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校的健康行为学家罗宾·盖恩斯·兰齐说，她专程飞来做了报告。
压力是皮卡德发言的合适主题，因为自他做博士后研究员以来，他就一直对压力的能量消耗着迷。在2015年发表的一项早期实验中，他有意将老鼠放在一个它们无法移动的管子里来给它们施加压力。其中一些老鼠有线粒体正常，而另一些则线粒体有病或有其他缺陷。他发现，根据其线粒体的具体缺陷，老鼠的生物学机制对幽闭不适产生了非常不同的反应，导致了不同的分子信号。“如果你改变线粒体，你就改变了生物体感知或应对精神压力的方式，”皮卡德说。
在差不多同一时间进行的另一项研究中，皮卡德发现，扰乱线粒体会改变其宿主细胞的基因表达和生长，即使这些细胞器转化能量的能力没有改变。皮卡德说，这些结果使一个想法变得生动起来：线粒体可以充当身体与外部世界之间的动态界面。
自那以后，皮卡德和其他人建立的新方法扩展了线粒体研究者可以开展的研究类型。其中一些最有用的是“线粒体分型”技术，它允许科学家根据其功能和活动（表型）、底层DNA序列（基因型）和基因表达来分析和分类不同类型的线粒体。2018年，皮卡德和他的同事发布了线粒体健康指数——一种衡量线粒体转化能量能力的分子指标，通过从组织样本中提取线粒体并量化其含量来计算。该指数使研究人员能够以前所未有的规模和精度测量线粒体活动，并处理数千个样本，而几年前只能处理几十个。
在多年被边缘化之后，线粒体研究现在正在爆发，瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院的行为与系统神经科学家卡门·桑迪说。一些研究揭示，令研究人员震惊的是，线粒体会分化。线粒体亚群在不同器官之间，甚至在不同细胞之间都可能存在差异，负责不同数量的能量或不同类型的生物化学过程。各个研究小组开始发表论文，将线粒体生物学与从记忆形成、抑郁症到阿尔茨海默病和心脏病等一切联系起来。总的来说，这些研究提高了线粒体作为一个广泛而动态研究领域的可信度。“七年前人们还真的嘲笑我，而现在人们在寻求帮助，”布雷斯特夫谈到他的线粒体研究时说。“他们现在开明多了。”
一些最早明确显示线粒体影响精神状态的——并且这种状态可以通过治疗干预来调整——的研究来自桑迪的实验室。2021年，她表明，她的一些天生具有焦虑或抑郁行为的老鼠，其脑细胞中的线粒体功能失调。当她和同事通过实验提高老鼠的线粒体输出时，神经元得到了恢复，动物表现出的焦虑迹象也减少了。在随后的一项研究中，她和同事表明，一种市售的补充剂也产生了同样的积极结果。“它恢复了一切，”桑迪说。
与此同时，皮卡德贡献了一系列将线粒体与大脑功能联系起来的发现。值得注意的是，2025年，他共同撰写了一份人类大脑线粒体图谱，揭示了这些细胞器不仅在不同脑区之间存在差异，而且在器官内的不同细胞类型之间也存在差异。研究人员写道，这份图谱是对其他科学家开始探索构成大脑结构、过程和功能——包括意识——基础的“分子能量景观”的邀请。这是呼吁其他人加入他们，共同创建一个新的研究领域。
模式生成
随着新发现的积累，皮卡德开始将大脑功能视为不仅由分子、神经元和回路塑造，也由能量如何被转化和模式化所塑造。在他看来，我们的认知、情绪和意识体验反映了更深层的能量过程——直达亚细胞层面。他甚至大胆猜测，线粒体可能是身心难题中缺失的一块拼图——那些从物质中催生出思维的微观炼金术士，它们负责的正是“意识在生命中的物质化体现”。
并非所有人都认同这一点。西班牙国家心血管研究中心的分子生物学家何塞·安东尼奥·恩里克斯告诫说，皮卡德关于线粒体和意识的观点很有趣，但“绝不是”得到证实的。“马丁是个很好的思考者，有时有点天马行空，”恩里克斯说。“他的主张确实必须经过深思熟虑和科学评估。”
皮卡德知道，他的一些想法对于他的一些生物医学同事来说可能难以接受。“我想要将线粒体内部的生物能量过程与人类体验联系起来，这有点异端，”他说。“但我的感觉是，如果我们不这样做，我们就错过了最大的机遇。”
代谢隔间研究的结果目前正在接受评审，它通过探索线粒体如何影响主观体验，朝着这个方向迈出了一步。在2025年会议的下午，皮卡德实验室的研究生埃文·肖尔森展示了一些初步结果。
患有两种罕见线粒体疾病之一的参与者，即使是在睡觉时，每天也会多消耗180卡路里，能量消耗高出15%。“他们一生中每天都要支付180卡路里的税，”肖尔森说，大约相当于一片披萨的热量。这些受试者报告说，与健康对照组相比，他们感到更加疲劳和紧张。他们血液中的生物标志物显示，代谢分子如乳酸盐水平升高，这表明线粒体功能异常，并与焦虑相关。
在研究的第二部分，研究人员追踪了参与者在正常生活中为期九天的“自由生活”中的能量消耗。他们不再使用静脉输液管，而是饮用带有同位素标记的特殊水，皮卡德的实验室成员则测量这些同位素在尿液样本中消除的速度（这是代谢率的一个公认替代指标）。
出乎意料的是，在现实世界中，两组之间的热量缺口几乎消失了。这是因为健康受试者在隔间外消耗的能量比在隔间内多16%，而患有线粒体疾病的受试者只多消耗了5%。换句话说，肖尔森说，隔间内的限制对于患有线粒体疾病的人来说代表了“更典型的一天”，这些人因感觉能量不足而活动较少。
这些发现是初步的，且基于少量受试者；到目前为止只有20人（不包括皮卡德）提供了数据。然而，它们表明了线粒体过程如何能够“涟漪般扩散并影响整个生物体，”肖尔森说。研究这些变化如何在分子和细胞层面起源，并表现为情绪和行为，可能为线粒体疾病带来新的理解和治疗方法，他说，同时也揭示了更多关于线粒体如何保持身体健康和功能的信息。
杜克大学的进化人类学家赫尔曼·庞策尔专门研究人类生物能量学，他未参与此项研究但对其有所了解，他说，隔间研究揭示了“我们体内调节每天燃烧卡路里的控制系统——这些系统我们尚未完全理解。”
“皮卡德和他的团队帮助打开了这些系统的大门，并为未来在代谢和健康领域的工作奠定了基础，”他补充道。
皮卡德说，下一步将是由肖尔森领导的一项更大规模的研究，涉及约100人。除了在隔间里待几个小时外，新研究的参与者还将通过可穿戴设备、一个应用程序、唾液样本以及对他们生活体验的报告进行为期六个月的监测。这些发现可能“提供一种视角，成为行为、生物学和心智之间的桥梁”，肖尔森说。
皮卡德将继续在他正在创立的一个新的非营利组织中探索这些问题及更多问题，该组织旨在将实验室发现转化为现实世界中的应用。他设想这个研究所——他计划在2027年靠慈善支持启动——将线粒体、代谢和能量的见解与人类体验相整合，建立一个新的治愈科学领域，“旨在支持人类繁荣”，他说。
肖尔森承认，像皮卡德这样在高水平研究期刊上发表论文的终身教授，谈论能量流和整体疗愈——这些往往属于瑜伽士、传统医学从业者和自称灵性疗愈者的话题——是不同寻常的。但他说，一旦同行科学家们看到了数据，他们通常就会克服怀疑，这些数据证明了这种非传统方法的合理性。
皮卡德同意，实验室的一些假设最初会让一些学术研究人员听起来有点像“玄学”。但科学一直是由大胆、具有挑战性的想法驱动的，这些想法随后会经过严格的测试和完善。正如皮卡德所说，“在我们理解它们之前，有很多东西曾经被认为是‘玄学’。”

英文来源：

Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind
Introduction
It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point, if he was awake, he also provided a saliva sample and filled out a survey about his mood.
The room looked like a cell, or perhaps a very cramped hotel room, but in fact it was a metabolic research chamber, one of only 50 of its kind in the world. Its conspicuously small size prevented Picard from burning extra energy beyond the bare minimum needed to keep him alive. Napping during the day was prohibited, as was eating anything but the strictly scheduled meals tailored to his caloric needs. Bedtime was at 11 p.m. sharp. Before lights-out, Picard put on a device to monitor his vitals and brain activity while he slept.
Though there wasn’t much to do — mostly he sat in bed reading or working on his laptop — excitement was the primary emotion Picard felt that day in July 2021. That’s because he was the first volunteer in an experiment run by the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab, which he directs at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. By studying how much energy is required to sustain baseline existence, his lab aims to explore what he considers an overlooked factor in health and disease, from the level of molecules all the way up to the mind: mitochondria.
Most middle school students learn that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. These organelles make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, through a cascade of chemical reactions that breaks down glucose and fat from food. But mitochondria are much more than energy factories. Studies over the past decade have shown that they process all sorts of molecules, including neurotransmitters, hormones, and metabolites, which means they directly impact what we experience as mood, stress, sexual arousal, and the need to sleep. This makes them “the consilience point for many known processes demonstrated to underlie consciousness,” Picard said.
More broadly, in what he calls his “energetic view of life,” Picard posits that distinct energetic states exist for health and disease, and that mitochondria are the tiny transformers responsible for them. According to this view, the flow of electrons from food to oxygen in metabolism, as processed by mitochondria, is the most basic level of the experience of being alive.
“If the energy stops flowing, there’s no more you,” Picard said. The genome may encode the proteins that support life, but if the energy flow required for their respective regulation and production is disrupted or absent, he said, “there’s no more consciousness, there’s no more emotion, there’s no more life.”
Picard’s ideas connecting mitochondrial biology and energy to health and even consciousness are gaining momentum. But they are so new that they do not yet have a formal field of study. Picard aims to change that, and others are getting on board.
While the importance of genes and proteins should not be dismissed, mitochondria and the metabolic pathways they control “are more important than we give them credit for, and may actually have a more important instantaneous effect on the brain,” said Jon Brestoff, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
The idea that mitochondria influence what’s happening in the brain “really isn’t far-fetched at all,” he added. “Martin just brings a fresh perspective on it.”
Being Alive
Like every other animal on the planet, Picard inherited his mitochondria from his mother. She was a nurse who ran her own home care service in a French-speaking town outside Montreal. Sometimes after she picked him up from hockey practice, they would drop in on a patient or two on the way home. Some were recovering from surgery; others were quadriplegic or in palliative care. Picard began to notice that some people progressed from one sickness to the next, never fully getting better, while others bounced back from serious injuries or illnesses “almost miraculously,” he recalled. He found this deeply perplexing.
He followed this curiosity to McGill University, where he studied physiology and neuroimmunology. As he progressed through his studies, a question began to take shape in his mind: How do molecular, cellular, and bodily processes translate into feelings, behaviors, and the ability to thrive? His coursework was not providing the answers he was looking for, so he quietly began studies in holistic health on the side. He had mixed feelings about some of what he was taught, but he learned the value of a whole-person approach to wellness and began to recognize the individual nature of disease. Most of all, he said, “I learned to connect with another human being.”
In his more formal studies, meanwhile, he kept being drawn to mitochondria. Picard learned that energy transformation, vital as it is for nearly every process in our bodies, is only part of the organelles’ repertoire. They also produce a bevy of chemical signals that influence the way we feel, behave, and function. Mitochondria supply the raw materials for creating the neurotransmitters glutamate and acetylcholine, which manage our brain, nerves, and muscles. The first step in synthesizing all steroid hormones, including cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, occurs in the organelles, making them key regulators of sleep, sex, and stress. They’re also highly active in signaling within and between cells: Mitochondria buffer and release calcium, which is involved in everything from muscle contraction to gene transcription, as well as reactive oxygen species, which activate immune cells and relay messages involved in cell growth. Mitochondria also play central roles in detecting and reacting to stress, and even in triggering cells to self-destruct if damage is deemed too great.
The ever-expanding list of core processes that mitochondria influence — immune activity, reproduction, metabolism, cancer growth and suppression, gut health, aging and longevity, and more — strongly suggests how mitochondrial dysfunction could relate to many different diseases and disorders. And this has set off a paradigm shift in how researchers see and understand the organelles. “This is probably one of the most exciting times to be studying mitochondria ever,” said A. Phillip West, who studies how the organelles shape immune response at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit research institution in Bar Harbor, Maine. “We’ve got a lot to learn, but I think we’re really entering an amazing period.”
Intriguingly, mitochondria also create the small molecules that cells use to switch genes on and off as they grow, develop, and respond to their environment. This makes mitochondria “the portal between the inert genome and the dynamic environment,” Picard said. By the end of graduate school, he suspected that the organelles might hold answers to some of his deeper questions. He leaned into that hunch by taking on a postdoctoral research position with Douglas Wallace, a University of Pennsylvania scientist credited as one of the founders of the field of mitochondrial genetics.
Since then, Picard has led studies and developed tools to explore the connections among mitochondria, energy, mood, and health, building toward his ultimate hypothesis that the organelles are a missing dimension of medicine that could explain why a person might flounder or thrive, as he first witnessed on patient visits with his mother. If the human body has a limited energy budget, trade-offs will naturally arise when one biological process consumes more than its typical share. Competing demands — for example, from illness, injury, or chronic stress — can appear not only as poor health, but also as negative conscious experiences such as anxiety, brain fog, and exhaustion. On the other hand, good health, good feeling, and good energy are frequent partners. “People experience something good and then subjectively feel there’s more energy,” Picard said.
Today he prefers to think of mitochondria as “orchestrators of cell function.” He likens the body to a circuit, with mitochondria playing the part of resistors. In an electric circuit, he explained, resistance shapes a current into something usable rather than letting it run unchecked. Mitochondria likewise hold the body’s energy flow within a narrow band of resistance — not too little, not too much — that’s compatible with a healthy state.
Far from being just passive channels, then, the organelles are “pattern-generating units in the circuit,” Picard said, that convert raw current into meaningful signals. He hypothesizes that differences in these patterns may help to explain why some people are prone to certain mental states and conditions, or chronic disease.
“It’s a very exciting hypothesis that [Picard is] promoting,” West said. “He’s trying to widen the lens and help us all to understand overarching principles of energy flow.”
In doing so, he is also challenging long-held assumptions in medicine and biology that genes and proteins are the main drivers of health and disease. What if, Picard asks, the amount and nature of energy transformed by mitochondria is in fact at the center of the human experience?
Energetic Pursuit
On a frigid, sunny morning in December 2025, Picard stepped up to a podium wearing a sweater embroidered with a squiggly cartoon of a mitochondrion. Behind him, windows framed sweeping views of the Hudson River. In front of him, about 100 scientists, students, entrepreneurs, investors, and patients, plus one journalist, were seated at tables around the room.
“Me standing in front of you, giving you this speech — the ego is threatened,” Picard said, his blue eyes alight with enthusiasm. The body’s nervous response to that threat — the racing heart, sweaty armpits, and hair follicles on end — offered a lesson. “Everything costs energy,” he said, even subjective psychological experiences.
Picard had organized a daylong symposium to give fellow mitochondria enthusiasts a chance to discuss the latest findings in their rapidly growing field, from immune cell bioenergetics to time perception. “When I heard Martin was having a symposium, I just had to go,” said Robin Gaines Lanzi, a health behaviorist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who flew in to present.
Stress was a fitting topic for Picard’s remarks, since he’d been fascinated with its energetic costs since he was a postdoctoral researcher. In one early experiment, published in 2015, he intentionally stressed mice by placing them in a tube in which they could not move. Some of them had normal mitochondria, while others had diseased or otherwise defective ones. He found that the animals’ biology produced very different reactions to the discomfort of containment, depending on the specific defects in their mitochondria, resulting in different molecular signals. “If you change mitochondria, you change how the organism perceives or responds to mental stress,” Picard said.
In another study conducted around the same time, Picard found that perturbing mitochondria changed their host cell’s gene expression and growth, even when the organelles’ ability to transform energy was unchanged. Those results brought to life the idea, Picard said, that mitochondria could function as a dynamic interface between the body and the outside world.
Since then, new methods established by Picard and others have expanded the types of studies that mitochondrial researchers can conduct. Some of the most useful are “mitotyping” technologies that allow scientists to profile and classify different types of mitochondria by their function and activity (phenotype), underlying DNA sequence (genotype), and gene expression. In 2018, Picard and his colleagues released the mitochondrial health index — a molecular measure of mitochondria’s capacity to transform energy, calculated by extracting the organelles from a tissue sample and quantifying their contents. The index allows researchers to measure mitochondrial activity at a scale and with a degree of precision previously unseen, and to process thousands of samples, compared to dozens just a few years before.
After years of being sidelined, research on mitochondria is now exploding, said Carmen Sandi, a behavioral and systems neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. Some studies have revealed, to researchers’ shock, that mitochondria differentiate. Subpopulations of mitochondria can vary from organ or organ, or even from cell to cell, and are responsible for different amounts of energy or kinds of biochemistry. Various research groups began publishing papers linking mitochondrial biology to everything from memory formation and depression to Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Taken together, the studies have increased the respectability of mitochondria as a wide-ranging, dynamic area of study. “People literally laughed at me seven years ago, and now people are asking for help,” Brestoff said of his mitochondria research. “They are much more open-minded.”
Some of the first studies explicitly showing that mitochondria influence mental state in particular — and that such states can be adjusted with therapeutic intervention — came from Sandi’s lab. In 2021, she showed that some of her rats with naturally anxious or depressed behavior suffered from malfunctioning mitochondria in their brain cells. When she and her colleagues experimentally boosted mitochondrial output in the rats, the neurons recovered, and the animals showed fewer signs of anxiety. In a subsequent study, she and her colleagues showed that a commercially available supplement produced the same positive results. “It restored everything,” Sandi said.
Picard, meanwhile, has contributed a string of discoveries linking mitochondria to brain function. Notably, in 2025 he co-authored a mitochondrial map of the human brain that revealed that the organelles vary not only across brain regions but also between cell types within the organ. The map is an invitation, the researchers wrote, for other scientists to begin exploring the “molecular energetic landscape” that underlies brain structure, process, and function — including consciousness. It was a call for others to join them in creating a new field of study.
Pattern Generation
As new findings accrued, Picard came to see brain function as shaped not only by molecules, neurons, and circuits, but also by how energy is transformed and patterned. In his view, our cognition, mood, and conscious experience reflect deeper energetic processes — down to the subcellular level. He even ventures that mitochondria could turn out to be a missing piece of the mind-body puzzle — the microscopic alchemists that coax thought out of matter, responsible for nothing less than “the materialization of consciousness into life.”
Not everyone is on board. José Antonio Enríquez, a molecular biologist at the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research, cautioned that Picard’s ideas about mitochondria and consciousness are interesting but “by no means” demonstrated. “Martin is a good thinker, sometimes a little wild,” Enríquez said. “His claims really have to be evaluated thoughtfully and scientifically.”
Picard knows that his ideas can be a challenging for some of his biomedical colleagues to accept. “I’m a little heretical for wanting to bridge the bioenergetic processes inside mitochondria to the human experience,” he said. “But my sense is, if we don’t do that, we’re failing at the biggest opportunity around.”
The metabolic-chamber study, the results of which are now under review, takes a step in that direction by exploring how mitochondria affect subjective experience. In the afternoon at the 2025 conference, Evan Shaulson, a graduate student in Picard’s lab, presented some initial results.
Participants who had one of two types of rare mitochondrial disease burned 180 more calories per day and expended 15% more energy, even when they were sleeping. “They have to pay a 180-calorie tax every day of life,” Shaulson said, about the equivalent of a slice of pizza. Those subjects reported feeling more fatigued and stressed compared to healthy controls. Biomarkers from their blood showed elevated levels of metabolic molecules such as lactate, which indicate faulty mitochondrial performance and correlate with anxiety.
In a second part of the study, the researchers tracked participants’ energy expenditure during nine days of “free living” in their normal lives. In lieu of an IV line, they drank special water labeled with isotopes, and Picard’s lab members measured how quickly those isotopes were eliminated in urine samples (a well-established proxy for metabolic rate).
Unexpectedly, in the real world the caloric gap between the two groups nearly closed. This was because healthy subjects expended 16% more energy than they had in the chamber, compared to just 5% for the subjects with mitochondrial disease. In other words, Shaulson said, the chamber’s restrictions represented “a more typical day” for people with a mitochondrial disease, who move less because they feel low in energy.
The findings are preliminary and based on a small number of subjects; only 20 people (excluding Picard) have provided data so far. Yet they suggest how mitochondrial processes can “ripple out and affect the organism,” Shaulson said. Studying how those changes originate at the level of molecules and cells and manifest as mood and behavior can potentially lead to a new understanding of and treatments for mitochondrial diseases, he said, while also revealing more about how mitochondria keep the body healthy and functioning.
Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who specializes in human bioenergetics and was not involved in the research but is familiar with it, said that the chamber study shines a light on the “control systems in our bodies regulating the calories we burn each day — systems we have yet to fully understand.”
“Picard and his team have helped open the door on these systems and set the stage for future work in metabolism and health,” he added.
The next step, Picard said, will be a bigger study, with around 100 people, led by Shaulson. In addition to spending a few hours in a chamber, participants in the new study will be monitored for six months with wearable devices, an app, saliva samples, and reports of their lived experiences. The findings could “offer a lens and a bridge between behavior, biology, and the mind,” Shaulson said.
Picard will continue exploring these questions and more at a new nonprofit he is founding to translate laboratory discoveries into real-world applications. He envisions the institute, which he plans to launch in 2027 with philanthropic support, as integrating insights about mitochondria, metabolism, and energy with the human experience, establishing a new field of healing science “that will aim to support human flourishing,” he said.
Shaulson acknowledged that it is unusual for a tenured professor like Picard, who publishes in top research journals, to talk about energy flow and holistic healing — topics that tend to fall to yogis, traditional-medicine practitioners, and self-declared spiritual healers. But skepticism among fellow scientists is usually overcome, he said, once they see the data, which justifies the unconventional approach.
Picard agreed that some of the lab’s hypotheses at first strike some academic researchers as sounding a little “woo.” But science has always been driven by bold, challenging ideas that are then rigorously tested and refined. As Picard put it, “There’s a lot of things that used to be considered ‘woo’ until we understood them.”