Life, Death & the Neuroscience of Your Unique Experience Dr. David Linden
October 2, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 1860, the German neuroanatomist Krause sliced thin sections of tissue from the penis and clitoris and saw a particular kind of nerve ending under the microscope—now called the Krause corpuscle. For more than 160 years, nobody could prove these structures were actually responsible for sexual sensation. That changed recently, when David Ginty’s lab at Harvard, working in mice, found a way to label, record from, and artificially turn these corpuscles on and off. When they activated the Krause corpuscles in male mice with blue light, the mice got erections. When they turned them off, the males were still interested in females but would not mount, thrust, or ejaculate as much. Female mice with the corpuscles inactivated became far less receptive to mating. This is the first clear identification of the nerve endings that convey sexual sensation, and it raises immediate questions about individual variation in sensitivity, why sexual sensation diminishes with age, and whether the density of these corpuscles changes with experience.
The biological roots of individuality
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Huberman Lab
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (01:35) **Welcome and Topic Overview** - Andrew Huberman introduces Dr. David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, and outlines the wide-ranging conversation to come.
- 2 (15:39) **New Discovery: The Neural Basis of Sexual Sensation** - Dr. Linden explains a recent preprint from David Ginty’s lab identifying the Krause corpuscles as the nerve endings responsible for sexual sensation.
- 3 (25:58) **The Neuroscience of Human Individuality** - Dr. Linden discusses his book *Unique* and the underappreciated fact that neuroscience largely ignores individual variation, instead focusing on general principles.
- 4 (34:38) **Olfactory Perception is Learned and Suggestible** - Dr. Linden explains that most odor preferences are not innate but are culturally and experientially learned.
- 5 (43:01) **Visual and Auditory Uniqueness** - The conversation explores specific examples of individual variation in vision and hearing.
- 6 (48:28) **Early Life Experience Shapes Physiology** - Dr. Linden presents a powerful example of how early-life environment, not genetics, can determine physiological traits, using the case of Japanese soldiers in WWII.
- 7 (58:53) **Heritability vs. Environment: The Real Story** - Dr. Linden explains that most human traits fall on a spectrum between 100% heritable (like earwax type) and 0% heritable (like speech accent).
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Life, Death & the Neuroscience of Your Unique Experience Dr. David Linden