The brain

Having worked too much and fighting another depression attack produced by stress from home and work, I started thinking about the brain and depression.

When you go by what we know about the brain scientifically. There are neurons which are connecting to other neurons through their axons. It is the fact that many neurons connect to one neuron through dendrites that turns this mass of cells into a neural network.

And in the last 20 years, we developed pretty good models for neural networks. But that's not what I want to talk about. What is interesting, in this neural network that our brain is, is that repetition seems to reinforce. Duuh, when you a learning you need to do things over and over, before you get them right (repetition). When you are learning to shoot the perfect 3 pointer or how to hit a baseball, you have to do things over and over. What you are doing there, is configure (or train) your neural network (the brain and the nerves that communicate to the muscle, the nerves at the muscle) to adapt to the physical realities of your body and control that physical apparatus (not a real simple one) to perform the task.

That's all easy to understand. Then it should not be very hard to understand, that you will do the same thing on an emotional and intellectual level. So if you think the same thoughts over and over again, they will leave a reinforcing trace in your brain, and thought often enough, reconfigure your neural network, so that it will function along those lines.

In other words, if you are depressed (as I often am), and you think those depressing thoughts, have that negative outlook, then that will reinforce the depression, and the negative outlook. So, one thing that should help, is trying to adapt a different attitude, think different (positive) thoughts.

Mind you, I am not just saying, ignore reality, everything is rosy. No, I don't want you to go to that river in Egypt. I just want you to consider thinking differently now and then. Realize the importance of changing your thought patterns. Get distracted. Humour really helps here. When you hear a good joke, see a good comedian, or a good movie, it distracts you. It let's that record player in your head jump to a different groove. Just don't play the same thing over and over in your head. It won't help, it will make things harder.

Enough said now. Tell me what you think about this by sending me an e-mail to mightypeo at gmail.com.