Ever wonder if there was some kind of switch in your brain that would cause you to feel sad or emotional? Well, researchers think that there may be a part of your brain greatly connected to having the blues.
Scientists may have caught a glimpse of what sadness looks like in the brain.
A study of 21 people found that for most, feeling down was associated with greater communication between brain areas involved in emotion and memory, a team from the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday in the journal Cell.
"There was one network that over and over would tell us whether they were feeling happy or sad," says Vikaas Sohal, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF.
With this discovery, it may be possible for scientists to better understand mood disorders and hopefully, find a more direct treatment that could ease their condition.
Read more over at NPR | The original research paper over at Cell
Image: Andrew Mason/Flickr
Image: Kirkby LA, et al., An Amygdala-Hippocampus Subnetwork that Encodes Variation in Human Mood, Cell, 2018.