There have been many discussions over the years that tell you, you are what you eat. Well, new research now has discovered that you are what you think.
In a study conducted by the Enigma MDD working group research has actually been able to demonstrate that persistent depression causes psychological and physical damage to the brain. In other words, if you are feeling persistently depressed it actually changes the physical make up of the brain. So there is one very important reason to maintain a positive outlook on life.
Published in the respected Molecular Psychology the study looked at 9000 patients a huge sample compared to most previous studies.
The test demonstrated that memories and the creation of new memories are located in the medial temporal lobe or in layman’s terms the lower middle part of the brain. The hippocampus is present in both halves of the brain. The amygdala which research has shown in the past has a connection with depression is housed within the hippocampus. The real key to this is that not only does the hippocampus form and maintain memories, effectively a library of your history, but it is directly linked to and is critical in controlling your emotions.
This is the interesting part. ENIGMA took MRI scans and compared the results of 1728 patients who had been diagnosed with chronic depression, and then compared that with the scans of 7199 individuals deemed healthy. The hippocampal volume was up to 1.24 percent smaller in those that suffered from the chronic depression.
According to Professor Iain Hickie, the coordinator of the study and a man much more qualified than me, he explains
“Your whole sense of self, depends on continuously understanding who you are in the world – your state of memory is not about just knowing how to do Sudoku or remembering your password – it’s the whole concept we hold of ourselves… We’ve seen in a lot of other animal experiments that when you shrink the hippocampus, you don’t just change memory, you change all sorts of other behaviors associated with that so shrinkage is associated with a loss of function.”
So the more depressed you are, the more likelihood it is that your hippocampus will shrink. With shrinkage, your memories can become more negative, which then causes further depression, more bad memories and so the cycle continues. Effectively you then are thinking yourself further into depression.
This also tends to prove the theory that positive exercise and thinking such as yoga can help to change your mood and start to increase the good memories, so all is not lost. I think the important thing to learn here is that positive thinking is more important than we ever realised. Whilst before people believed it had an effect purely on the brain and psychological aspects of your body, this study would tend to demonstrate that it actually can have an effect on the physical as well. So whilst I accept that everyone is different it would appear that it is more important than ever to try and maintain a positive happy outlook on life.