FMRI Fights Depression

Using fMRI brain imaging and a video game, Stanford University researchers teach girls at risk of depression how to train their brains away from negative situations. The results show a promising new strategy to prevent the onset of depression – one that researchers hope to eventually apply to anyone at risk of suffering the debilitating disease.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] stanford University if you're doing okay and ready to get started go ahead and squeeze the ball okay great here we go fmri is really a procedure that allows us non-invasively to see what parts of the brain are working more than other parts at any point in time we know from our work with depressed

00:00:29 adults that there's a part of the brain that seems to be overactive we're among the first labs to show that that's also true of girls before they ever experience a depressive episode right anterior insula Megan everybody activates at least a little bit in the amygdala when they see a negative picture it's just that depressed adults and children at risk for depression

00:00:52 activate a whole lot more for these next few scans uh you're going to be seeing u more negative pictures if we show a child sad pictures negative pictures and we do our fMRI magic we can pinpoint that part of the brain that keeps activating in response to the negative pictures and from that part of the brain we can feed the signal back to the child and we get them to learn how to dampen

00:01:19 it we think if we can train them to turn down their excitation activation in that part of the brain that we're going to be able to help them prevent the onset of an episode of depression this is the cerebellum so that controls things like balance they think of positive things they think of playing with puppies they think of lying in the sand once they start to think those thoughts and they

00:01:42 see that line go down they can continue to do that and the important thing is that they can continue to do that even when we turn the line off go ahead and lift your arms up for one second and the cool thing is a week later we bring them back to our lab we stress them and they are less reactive to stress their heartbeats are lower their skin response is less they've learned by doing this to

00:02:08 be less aroused in the face of a stressor all of us would think it's impossible how can we change the level of activation in a particular part of our brain without affecting activation in other parts and the bottom line is we can all learn to do this for more please visit us at stanford.edu