The changes that occur in the brain as soon as an individual feels sad are almost instantaneous. As we mentioned yesterday, from MRI scans, it was determined that when a person suffers a bout of depression, parts of the brain actually shut off so that that those centers that process the emotion of sadness are in full control. It’s no wonder people can’t function while upset or depressed.
It’s even more unnerving to presume that other parts of the brain which could be used to distract one from being upset don’t function either during the down state, making it difficult to get out of the situation.
Essentially it’s a matter of reprogramming one’s own brain to distract themselves from their own upset thoughts, perhaps by convincing themselves that their thoughts are actually happy ones.
Popular psychology and mainstream psychology often talks about cognitive behavioral therapy as a method of restructuring one’s own thought’s into productive ones through a process called re-framing. Personally having dealt with situations where I was told the most positive things in the world that one could do to improve their emotional state lay in CBT, I actually found it hard to believe my own re-framed perceptions of myself and thoughts until I realized the actual benefit it was having for me and it was easier to put it into effect.
Studies of depression in individuals have shown that people who were depressed and remained depressed after a certain time period, had shown more activity in their frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain associated with logical thought and rational processing where as people who had escaped their depressive episodes from the same study group had shown more activity in the rear part of their brain, which is more associated with processing visual information and immediate environmental stimulus.
This observation somewhat lends itself to the idea that one can possibly get involved with the outside world more actively, perhaps by watching movies that appeal to their senses or interacting with people or immersing themselves in rich experiences, may help alleviate the depressive symptoms. So it’s been determined that sadness exists in particular regions of the brain and physiologically through the disease of depression it can actually become a debilitating condition.
Perhaps this a part of the reason why babies can detect and are sensitive to sadness in people, because even more so than any other mental condition at least, it can prevent an adult from being an effective care-taker.
Next time a more interesting look into emotional processing and the physical description of it.
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