Neurons, synapses, glutamate, and AMPA receptors

24:00Our nervous system is built out of neurons. Neurons are the single unit of the unit nervous system. They're cells and they talk to each other using synapses. So, when one cell fires or turns on, what it's going to do is talk to its post-synaptic cells, the cells that it is synapsing onto, the cells that it can talk to using these structures called synapses where one cell comes in kind of like a hand and the other cell that is downstream comes over it like a uh like a like a open palm around it, okay? But there's a gap in between. They're not actually tied together. They're separate cells and they have a tiny gap called a synaptic junction. Now, through that

24:41synaptic junction, the way you talk is you ex- you release the the pre-synaptic cell releases chemicals into that synaptic cleft, that gap, and then the post-synaptic cell senses those chemicals and then turns on. Okay? That's effectively most like 99% of neuroscience is just a cell talking to another cell using these chemicals. Most of the time that chemical is glutamate. It's not, you know, serotonin, dopamine, all this other stuff. We talked about this on the Dave Chang podcast. Yeah, MSG is effectively just glutamate with a little bit of sodium. Um so

25:22glutamate is the bread and butter. It is how It is like the cash money of how neurons talk to one another and transact information. And the receptors that sense the glutamate to trigger a response in the postsynaptic cell, in the downstream cell, those receptors, one of them is the AMPA R receptor. Okay? And what we've what we've seen in previous studies is that ketamine has something to do with these AMPA R receptors. Okay? We just don't know