Scienceblogtwo

While being close to nature is regarded to be excellent for the brain and mental health, living in a city is a well-known risk factor for acquiring mental problems. According to research, people who live in rural areas experience less amygdala activation under stressful situations than people who live in cities. This finding points to a new benefit of nature. According to Sonja Sudimac, a predoctoral fellow in the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience and the study's lead author, "but so far the hen-and-egg problem could not be disentangled, namely whether nature actually caused the effects in the brain or whether the particular individuals chose to live in rural or urban regions." In order to establish a causal relationship, the researchers from the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of 63 healthy volunteers before and after either a one-hour walk through Grunewald fo...

According to a study, depression may be treated by deep brain stimulation of the parts of the brain connected to motivation and rewards. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) to the superolateral branch of the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), which is connected to motivation and reward, revealed metabolic changes in the brain over a 12-month period following DBS implantation, according to researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. This makes it an effective prospective therapy for depression that is resistant to treatment. The results of the study, which involved 10 patients, were released in the Molecular Psychiatry journal. The first author, Christopher Conner, MD, remarked, "This is something that people have been trying to achieve for a long time, but we have not always been very successful with using DBS for mental diseases. Conner served as a neurosurgery resident in the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston's Vivian L. Smith Department of Neuros...