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.

Hiya!

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 over time in a single person. This makes sense, as each person is unique and changes over time, but this simple Truth makes it challenging for scientists studying conditions like depression.

In an article by The Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom about new research I’ll tell you about soon, Conor Liston, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and a professor of neuroscience at Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, explained:

“Depression is, by definition, an episodic psychiatric syndrome, it’s chacterized by periods of low mood mixed in with periods of wellness.”

Lison grew curious about how these dynamics appear in the brain and wondered:

What are the mechanisms that control those transitions over time?”

Lison decided to follow his curiosity and teamed up with Charles Lynch, assistant professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, to conduct what turned into an extensive study involving a large team of international collaborators and institutions, which was published by Nature on September 04, 2024.

The Study