clair073

It’s normal to get depressed. Let’s face it, a lot of life experience IS depressing. Depression that is severe enough to be considered a clinical malady is a state that persists for long periods. It’s not the initial depression that is the problem, but rather its sustained nature. So, the issue is what sustains the depression. I contend that continual rehearsal of negative emotions, which can be done explicitly or implicitly, is the driver of clinical depression. I don’t know if psychologists agree or not, but as a neuroscientist I know that rehearsal of thoughts and feelings strengthens the mediating synapses and circuits. Obviously, consciously rehearsing bad events and our depressive response will help to cement depression in neural circuitry. But even implicit rehearsal can have the same effect. This being the case, it seems important to focus on the triggers that activate recall, explicit or implicit, of stored representations of depressed feelings. Bad events and their associated...

The more a woman weighs, the worse her memory. No, I am not a chauvinist pig. This claim comes from actual research—by a woman, no less. Diana Kerwin and her colleagues at Northwestern University studied 8,745 women ages 65 to 79 and found that for every one-point increase in female body mass index, the score on a 100 point memory test dropped by one point. The problem was greatest in women who had put the weight on around the hips, which is fairly typical for weight gain in women. Nobody knows why this is so. Fat deposits may increase the amount of cytokines, which are hormones that can cause inflammation. In a couple of earlier columns I explained how body inflammation, from sore joints or sore throat, for example, can trigger inflammation in the brain. I explained that brains can get inflamed too, irritated from the release of cytokines and other toxins from the brain’s immune cells in response to inflammation. In both genders, these toxins diminish mental capabilities, especially m...