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Depression Is Linked to Hyperconnectivity of Brain Regions, a New Study Shows

By Casey Schwartz

A new study reveals that people suffering from depression are characterized by an extreme synchronicity of brain regions that could indicate stymied, inflexible brains. Plus, Sharon Begley and Richard J. Davidson on the new science of feelings.

A study published today in PLoS provides surprising new insight into what happens in depressed brains.

In people with depression, brain regions appear to be overly connected to one another, says the study, which comes out of UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. In turn, this excessive connectivity reduces the flexibility the brain needs to function properly.

“Depression is a whole brain disease,” says Dr. Andrew Leuchter, the Semel Institute neuroscientist who led the team that produced the study. “It’s not something that affects just one brain region, but that the entire organ doesn’t appear to be functioning very well.”

Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist at Columbia who was not involved in this research, remarked on the usefulness of its finding. “Measures of connectivity between remote brain regions is an emerging metric to assess the strength of interactions between remote regions within the brain,” she told The Daily Beast. “The discovery that these patterns are affected in depression is important because it says that information may be distributed differently. This is a novel insight.”

Read more: Depression Is Linked to Hyperconnectivity of Brain Regions, a New Study Shows – The Daily Beast

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Cleverest Are Often Quickest to Cheat

VOA News

It seems for the past few years, the news has been filled with stories of people who cheat: bankers bilking investors out of millions of dollars, politicians who cheat on their wives and constituents.

The cheaters were always smart, creative people—who got caught. This prompted several psychological researchers to examine the relationship between cheating and creativity.

Francesca Gino, a behavioral economist who teaches at Harvard Business School, uses ideas from psychology to study how people make economic choices.

Gino finds the behavior of many notable cheaters fascinating, and it got her wondering why so many creative people seem to take the low road.

“Interestingly, there are actually a lot of examples in the literature, novels, movies, comic books about this idea of the evil genius, but really no empirical evidence for this relationship,” she says.

So Gino spent several years testing volunteers to see how creative they were. Then, she put them in situations where they could profit from cheating—where just bending the rules a little bit put a few extra dollars in their pockets.

“What we find is that creativity leads people to be more morally flexible,” she says, “so they are much more able to come up with justification for the behavior that they’re about to engage in, and as a result, they are more likely to cheat.”

But where cheating really matters is in the workplace. And in a competitive, global economy, innovation and creativity are particularly prized.

After studying people at work, Gino found that fostering creativity in workers also opens up opportunities for that moral flexibility where people are tempted to bend the rules in their favor.

“We think that the creativity really helps people resolve this conflict between something that is more longer-term, which is the idea of being good and moral and then, something that is more short-term and that is the idea of advancing your own self-interest,” Gino says.

“And that does not necessarily mean getting money out of cheating, but it could also be getting other types of pleasures or utilities.”

Such as cheating on your spouse.

In short, Gino says her study is a warning that creativity has a dark side.

“It’s not that we are trying to say that people shouldn’t be creative, we are trying to say that they should be creative but they should be thinking about the fact that their creativity can be used for the wrong reasons.”

via Cleverest Are Often Quickest to Cheat | Western Medicine | Health | Epoch Times

Lonely Days Can Fragment Sleep at Night

By Evelyn So
Epoch Times Staff

Feelings of loneliness may interfere with a good night’s rest and can negatively influence health, according to a new study from the United States.

“Loneliness has been associated with adverse effects on health,” said study lead author Lianne Kurina from University of Chicago in a press release.

“We wanted to explore one potential pathway for this, the theory that sleep–a key behavior to staying healthy–could be compromised by feelings of loneliness.”

The researchers studied 95 adults, aged 19 to 84 years old, in a rural South Dakota community. Despite not being socially isolated, some people had higher ratings of perceived loneliness and were more likely to report having fragmented sleep.

“What we found was that loneliness does not appear to change the total amount of sleep in individuals, but awakens them more times during the night,” Kurina explained.

The degree of daytime sleepiness and total amount of sleep were not affected. The researchers believe there is a distinct difference between social isolation and loneliness.

“It’s not just a product of very lonely individuals having poor sleep,” Kurina said. “The relationship between loneliness and restless sleep appears to operate across the range of perceived connectedness.”

Social isolation is an objective measure of social interactions and relationships, whereas loneliness is a painful perception of social isolation or feelings of being an outcast.

“Accordingly, loneliness is more closely associated with the quality rather than the number of relationships,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

These results are similar to a 2002 U.S. study that compared loneliness in college students with sleep quality. The lonelier they felt, the more their night-time sleep was fragmented.

“Whether you’re a young student at a major university or an older adult living in a rural community, we may all be dependent on feeling secure in our social environment in order to sleep soundly,” Kurina concluded.

“The results from these studies could further our understanding of how social and psychological factors ‘get under the skin’ and affect health.”

The findings were published in the journal Sleep on Nov. 1.

via Lonely Days Can Fragment Sleep at Night | Inspiring Discoveries | Science | Epoch Times

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Dreaming Can Ease Painful Memories

By David Skoumbourdis
Epoch Times Staff

Dreaming, also known as REM sleep, suppresses stress chemicals while the brain processes emotional experiences, reducing the burden of painful memories, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

This could also explain why war veterans and other sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have recurring nightmares, and difficulties overcoming painful memories.

“The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day’s emotional experiences,” said study author Matthew Walker in a press release.

PTSD sufferers may not be receiving the therapeutic benefits of REM sleep, Walker said, explaining that events like a car backfiring can trigger a flashback that makes them “relive the whole visceral experience once again because the emotion has not been properly stripped away from the memory during sleep.”

Humans spend about one third of their lives asleep, with REM sleep comprising about 20 percent of a healthy person’s sleep time. Past brain studies have revealed that mood disorders like depression and PTSD are associated with broken sleep patterns. The new findings offer new insights into the importance of REM sleep on emotional function.

“During REM sleep, memories are being reactivated, put in perspective and connected and integrated, but in a state where stress neurochemicals are beneficially suppressed,” said study lead author Els van der Helm in the release.

The researchers studied 35 healthy young adults in two groups. Each group viewed 150 emotionally stimulating images twice, 12 hours apart. One group stayed awake between viewings while the other slept. Brain activity was measured with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), whilst viewing the images and during sleep.

Participants who slept between viewings demonstrated a decreased emotional response to the images with reduced activity in the brain’s emotional processing center (the amygdala) during viewing, and a reduction in stress chemical release in the brain.

“We know that during REM sleep there is a sharp decrease in levels of norepinephrine, a brain chemical associated with stress,” Walker said.

“By reprocessing previous emotional experiences in this neuro-chemically safe environment of low norepinephrine during REM sleep, we wake up the next day, and those experiences have been softened in their emotional strength,” he continued. “We feel better about them, we feel we can cope.”

These findings may lead to new treatment options for sufferers of PTSD, sleep disorders, and mental illness.

The study was published in the online journal Current Biology on Nov. 23.

via Dreaming Can Ease Painful Memories | Beyond Science | Science | Epoch Times

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