Member-only story
Scientists Identify a Significantly Larger Brain Network in People Who Are Depressed
A new deep scanning technique allowed researchers to observe distinct, long-term, brain activity that could help identify people predisposed to developing depression.
Over the last few centuries, our species has focused on understanding our shared external world, partly because science wasn’t advanced enough to study our unique, internal, subjective worlds. But that’s changing as science and technology advance.
For instance, we’re learning more about how mental conditions like depression affect us, who is more likely to experience them, and creating medications and lifestyle changes to treat them. Yet, how depression appears in the brain over time and the mechanisms behind it remained unknown — until now.
The Challenge
The invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 1990, which reveals brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow, revolutionized neuroscience and psychology and has proven invaluable for studying brain organization on an individual level.
Thanks to fMRI, we know that individual brain activity varies from person to person but that it also varies…