THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON STRESS

This is Your Brain on Stress - Can Your Brain Chemistry Make You Smarter?

The question I am fascinated by lately: do antidepressants work by promoting neurogenesis? From everything I have read, I was confident I understood how anti-depressents worked—they just got the brain to produce and absorb more of the chemical serotonin and “voila”. Or as Lehrer describes the theory “sadness is simply a shortage of chemical happiness”.

Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of “neurogenesis” before. I also held the following beliefs: first, I remember learning that we don’t grow new brain cells (but that we do have zillions more than we’d ever need); second, I thought it was kind of obvious that drinking and drugs “killed” brain cells; third, you don’t have to read medical journals to figure that stress isn’t good for you.

However, I never put any of these concepts/questions/ assumptions into a context. That is, until I read Jonah Lehrer’s article “The Reinvention of the Self”. The article, although nine dense pages, blew me away. Until reading this article I was not familiar with the work of Professor Elizabeth Gould.

In this article I learned that my first (incorrect) assumption above was the dominant medical paradigm (so I don’t feel so dumb for thinking that). That “brain cells—unlike every other cell in our body—don’t divide. They don’t die, and they are never reborn.” was what was taught in medical schools.

If I hadn’t read this article I probably would have continued to believe that. When I read about neurogenesis (the process of creating new brain cells) I thought I had found a physiological answer to the question I posed in "Pushing the Envelope"…is depression really carving a deep channel in my brain that gets deeper and deeper with each bout OR is that just metaphor? But the answer held a twist.

Her research focuses on the effect of stress on the brain, which was not exactly in line with what I’m curious about, however…there it was: a hypothesis which would explain one of the blank spots in depression research. On Prozac, brains grow more cells. Under the influence of untreated depression, brains actually shrink.

I found some incredible pictures of this effect on another web site, Psycheducation.org. It is true afterall, a picture does say a thousand words!