Posts Tagged ‘Marcus E. Raichle’
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Images of the brain from various angles show the default mode network (in blue). All of the other colors within that default network show brain regions that are overactive in people with depression.
WASHINGTON-ST. LOUIS (US)—People with depression may not be able to “lose themselves” in work, music, exercises, or other activities that enable most healthy people to get “outside” of themselves.
A study by neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis demonstrates that brain regions, collectively known as the default mode network, behave differently in depressed people. The default network typically is active when the mind wanders. It shuts down when an individual focuses on the job at hand. But the researchers found the network stays active in people who are depressed, even when they are concentrating on specific tasks.
“When healthy people engage in a very focused activity, they in a sense, lose themselves,” says senior investigator Marcus E. Raichle, whose research group in 2001 first identified the default mode network. “If you really are engaged in something, you kind of forget yourself, and that loss of self corresponds to the deactivation we observe in brain scans of the default network. But that doesn’t seem to happen in the brains of people with depression.” Continue…
