VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area 94
An anonymous reader writes "Science Daily is reporting that scientists are using a VR videogame that challenges spatial memory as a new tool to map out depression in the brain. 'Spatial memory' is how you orient yourself in space and remember how to get to places in the outside world. Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared, suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."
The other way round. (Score:4, Funny)
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It's not so much that it's news but confirmation or correlation that when one feels/is lost in their orrientation to life that depression is not far off.
But, if they'll just find and follow the Roman Road [romansroad.com] they can get the help they need.
Re:The other way round. (Score:4, Funny)
j00 h4v3 n0 r16h7 2 1iv3 n3m0r3 c0z u 5ux0rz. P1z b3 r37urn1n6 2 ur 5p4wn p01n7 s0 1 c4n fr4g ur 5ry 455 s0m3 m0r3. lol, 1uz3r th0u6h7 h3 w4s 1337! pwn3d!
Now I'm not sure which is more depressing -- the dude who gets spawncamped or the fact that I just went 1337speak for a few lines. If you need me, I'll be sulking in the corner with Marvin. If I can FIND the corner. I'm SO depressed.
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Translation to english for those that do not speak "1337":
Now I'm not sure which is more depressing -- the dude who speaks leet in 2007 or the fact t
Depression = Play Video Games! (Score:1, Offtopic)
"Teacher, I'm feeling depressed! Can I go play video games?"
Clueless = Post on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
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I would read the article, but I found the summary too depressing... sigh
Here I am, brain the size of a planet (Score:4, Funny)
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Frankly, I think the whole thing's off. I'm constantly depressed and frequently drink myself into a stupor, only to wake up the next day having miraculously made it back to my apartment/hotel/whatever with absolutely no memory of how I got there. Kidneys intact, no less.
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Then I guess that makes three of us?
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The summary, hell, the title of the entry is "VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area," he obviously didn't even read that.
Anecdotal Evidence to the contrary. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Anecdotal Evidence to the contrary. (Score:4, Funny)
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depression as in "I've been depressed for the past 4 months..."
it takes more than a day for hippocampal volume to reduce, and thus to reduce spatial memory.. also, it is very likely the two have different underlying mechanisms (occasional sadness vs. clinical depression)
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The solution? Just forget all about yourself for a while, and make it a goal to never end a day before all that should be done is done.
Now I' more or less always one hour ahead of my schedule. I try to fill much of my spare time with creativity, and I feel better than i have in a long time.
You could to, it just comes down to realizing that the only way to be happy is to stop caring about beeing happy for a while, and inst
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I must be the odd one out here. Procrastination for me does not result in me getting down. If I dwell on the idea that I "should" be doing something (like whitening my teeth, buying an iPod, or watching TV), well then of course I will get depressed. Actually, now that I think about it, if I were to be concerned with filling my time by watching TV, buying an iPod, and whitening my teeth I would be depressed.
Ahh, it's Friday. I'm looking
Re:Anecdotal Evidence to the contrary. (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you were wasted all the time, but you know nothing about depression. Depression is a disease, not a choice. Do you tell people with diabetes "just forget all about yourself for a while"? No, you tell them to watch what they eat and take their medicine. That is the same thing you should tell people with depression. It is ignorant blather like this that makes depressed people turn suicidal.
So pretend you have your shit together, as you claim, and only offer your opinions on matters you actually know something about. That way, you won't be killing people with your ignorance.
Could it be.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they just don't give a shit!
"Oh, why bother."
That's what I was wondering too (Score:5, Insightful)
And here's why:
1. I'm guessing they didn't take experienced FPS players, but people who had to get past a learning curve. Some probably not even interested in that game, or that kind of game in the first place. I.e., people for whom it was basically work, and who had to learn for that work. I can tell you first hand that being depressed and/or demotivated can impact both work and learning _majorly_.
Sorry, every game has a learning curve, even some you'd think are the most intuitive things and made by the greatest designers. Yet get a non-gamer at the keyboard and you might get an enlightening experience. We've had decades of getting the basic notions and reflexes hammered into our heads, they didn't. Someone else once compared it to a "game grammar". We know it, and even tutorials assume that we already know it. Non-gamers have to learn it from scratch.
I'd expect the problems to be worse in some game designed by psychologists with zero game design background.
So, at any rate, they're asking those people not only to play a game, but likely for most of them it's asking them to learn how to play an experimental game. And it'll be a lot of learning, and a lot of concentration and learning involved. In some cases it will take a lot of willpower to get past that learning curve, if it gets into the frustrating range.
Do I expect someone in their darkest depression to make that effort and muster the concentration? Nope. "Oh, why bother." is pretty much the attitude I'd expect there.
2. It's also worth mentioning that depression isn't just some abstract mood, but brings with it a lot of bad thoughts. It's not just some abstract mood indicator, but a shit-coloured set of glasses that tints (and taints) all perceptions, experiences and expectations. (Including those about the games, but also RL stuff.) So those people are not just abstractly "depressed", but people who've had a heck of a lot of bad and depressing experiences lately, and got disappointed a lot lately, by sheer virtue of that depression tainting their perceptions of it all. They'll tend to think about it a lot.
So if the spatial orientation game requires lots of memorizing routes and such, there'll be inherently less mental power available for that. Where a "normal" person might think "ah-ha, I have to go through the corridor on the left to get back", the depressed one may well be thinking "what a piece of crap, I bet I'll get passed for promotion again, and I bet everyone is gossipping about me behind my back too. Why the heck do I even bother? I might as well kill myself now."
Even if they might take refuge in gaming, they'll require a game that can basically turn off those thoughts, or thinking completely. Something which is simple and captivating, and doesn't require much thinking. Definitely not something which requires complex thought on its own.
3. Or, if you will, 2b: motivation. Remember that we're talking people which are already depressed and tend to perceive everything as worse than it already is, including any goals and rewards in the game, and including the payoff of any long term plan. So if the game isn't immediately rewarding and fun, their motivation will sink much faster than everyone else's. If you make them do something as boring and pointless as just jumping and running through a maze, it will just be perceived as even more boring and pointless. If it requires long term memorizing and planning, the distant reward for it better be extremely worth it, or since it'll be perceived as (A) less of a reward, and (B) as a plan likely to fail anyway. And if that perception drops below a certain point, they'll be too demotivated to try h
Just finished reading the paper.. (Score:4, Insightful)
(all quotes are from the paper)
1. Correct, no experienced FPS players: "Given a likely relationship between familiarity with video games and the outcome measure, individuals reporting high expertise in video games were excluded"
I am probably not free to copy the whole paragraph about the program, but here's the gist: The program was a virtual reality town. On day 1 subjects got 20 minutes of orientation then 30 minutes navigating around the town to destinations selected by the computer. Their ability to find specific locations was then tested, and if they didn't perform well they got 30 more minutes of practice.
Three days later they got 20 minutes to get used to the program again. Two to four hours later their memory of locations in the town was tested (they were tasked to navigate to a new set of locations, different from the specific destinations used on day 1).
Keep in mind this is not a game (despite
2. They didn't have to memorize many routes. The whole virtual city (from the figure they show) is basically a big, curved X shape with maybe 2-3 other side roads in total. They just had to learn the basic set up of the town so they could go back to a location when asked to.
Regarding the "less mental power", the depressed subjects performed just as well as healthy controls on a spatial working memory task. The distinction is important: the game task tests navigation memory learned over more or less 2-3 days (plus the short refresher on the day of testing), working memory involves manipulating things online. If anything, the latter is probably more challenging (I could be wrong, though, I haven't done the two tasks myself).
3. I dunno, 30 minutes of testing doesn't seem like long enough to really reduce motivation. They must be somewhat motivated in the first place, though, to even show up for the two days of testing.
Still... (Score:2)
Regarding "less mental power", that was maybe the wrong word, but
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When I am at my worst, besides the constant bad thoughts kicking in, even when I am trying to focus on an actual task, it's like there's this fog clouding over my thinking. It's like my IQ has dropped a few dozen points or something.
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Dude, you're on the internet, you can do anything. Just make sure to tick the 'post anonymously' box.
(Perhaps what I should have done right now, but whatever)
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People who perform poorly in spatial tests may have a problem with the hippocampus.
People who suffer from depression* have problems with the hippocampus.
*not being depressed about something, but suffering from depression.
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Or they don't get out much... (Score:2)
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Depression causes a general, progressive decline in cognitive and (later) psychomotor function.
This decline slowly starts to reverse after remission has been achieved.
My therapist did research on this, and the results are pretty conclusive.
Trying to link depression to a hippocampal function phenotype might go places, but I seriously doubt it. And their study appears to essentially not be properly equipped to differentiate general decline in CNS function from anything related
Here's the abstract (Score:5, Informative)
The actual research was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Here's the abstract:
yep (Score:4, Funny)
That's because in space, nobody can hear you scream.
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Thanks to time travel, am now 37 times older than the Universe itself. Thanks to having a brain the size of the planet, I remember every place I've been in space. Spatial awareness hasn't helped me one bit.
Would you like to hear about how long I spent in the car park at Milliway's? (The first ten million years were the wo
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But look on the bright side: In space, you can't hear anybody scream...
Well, duh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the opposite works for me as well - if I'm feeling positive and happy, my perception is that I'm doing better than usual. It's been a while now since I don't play games that often anymore, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just my perception, and that I really would do better. Better reaction times, faster decisions, and better outcomes.
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And why not? We humans have to think of something before it can happen, you know.
Maybe depressed and drunk people just aren't very good at thinking, and everyone else who was previously depressed or drunk at one point have already convinced themselves that they weren't inflicted by these prob
forward implication (Score:2, Insightful)
Objective test for depression? (Score:3, Interesting)
Emphasis mine.
I'd like to see an objective rather than subjective test for depression.
If nothing else, an objective test would be useful in convincing potential patients ( and those who care about them ) that the potential patient has depression, rather than just "feels bad" [1]. The results of, say, a blood test vs. the responses on a questionnaire.
This seems like a step in the right direction, but also still seems subjective.
[1] Yes, I know severe depression looks a lot worse than someone who just "feels bad", but if someone is spending hours/days in the fetal position crying, that's kind of a hint. Thinking of detecting depression before it gets that bad.
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Well the problem here is that we are talking about a condition that is defined by subjective feelings. If I have some objective measure that you are depressed, but you say that you feel great, how could I be right? Also, it's much cheaper and faster to ask you how you feel rather than to perform an MRI .
Also, while depression appears to be associated with hippocampal deficit, hippocampal problems could occur for a variety of reason
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Oh I agree, and as you point out a hippocampal deficit does not necessarily indicate depression.
However, perhaps you might agree that a survey isn't the most precise tool for diagnosing an illness?
After all, as others have pointed out, a person with depression might not answer the survey honestly ( ex: meh... I don't care, so I'll tell them what they want to hear so they'll leave me alone ).
Something like a blood test wo
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Psychotherapy, with the exception of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is generally not particularly effective in dealing with "true" depression (which excludes stuff like bereavement, etc), and a "good listener" will do as well as anything but CBT. This has been verified via extensive testing.
MRI is not a very effective tool, compared to PET and SPECT.
Inclusion/exclusion criteria for drug trials leave you with patients you will
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http://amenclinics.com/bp/atlas/ch7.php [amenclinics.com]
That's SPECT, not MRI, but it shows this stuff pretty clearly. Compare with some of the other stuff there if you like.
You will not see structural changes. You will, however, see differences in metabolic activity, etc.
And, yes, these can be used as a diagnostic tool, as well as an aid in selecting proper medication to deal with the problem, which will often be necessary by the time you get such a scan.
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Subjective feelings are frequently employed in making a diagnosis, however.
There are specific alterations in neurotransmission patterns, glucose metabolism, and other objective, measurable features of central nervous system function. And there are measurable psychomotor and cognitive deficits that develop over time.
Also, the animal models generally reflect a set of fairly objective behavioural features that we
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Indeed, this is one of the major problems with all mental disorders. It results in a combination of over-diagnosis by incompetent or greedy doctors, self-diagnosis by internet hypochondriacs, parents that want "stable" children, and legitimately ill people that are told to "snap out of it" by family and friends. In all it makes a mess of the mental
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Oh, I'm quite familiar with them
I think the DSM, as the basis of diagnosis is illustrative of the problem I was talking about. It's accurate in proportion to the skill of the observer; the most objective criteria tend to be the least indicative, and the most indicative are most subjective. The latter especially means that they can easily be denied, ignored, or even faked by a patient, and easily overlooked by family and friends.
It's not really a knock against the DSM as a
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Have a look at the Amen Clinic pages. They show SPECT images of patients with various mental problems, including depression. Also, they identify several characteristic types of depression, based on the SPECT findings, that respond to different classes of drugs.
The most visible depressions to someone "on the outside", are light depressions (when the mood features are dominant, and there is still energy to bitch about it) and severe depressions with psychotic fea
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http://www.quackwatch.org/06ResearchProjects/amen
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In fact, a lot of stuff in psychiatry is controversial.
Oddly enough, low-efficacy drugs (SSRIs), zero-efficacy therapy (non-CBT psychology), etc. isn't.
As for the site you quoted, they seem to be missing a few vital points.
For instance, they are criticizing the technology as being experimental. No-one is arguing against that. Call him an "early adopter". Field use in clinical practice is the only way to get research done that is targeted at clini
Method of discovery (Score:1, Redundant)
"Redundant"? (Score:2)
Depressed? (Score:2)
<whine>I wanna plaaaaaay!</whine>
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Great science (Score:2)
Hello??? People with depression perform poorly at JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING. I call BS...
Great post (Score:2)
"Earlier studies showed that people with mood disorders tend to have smaller hippocampi than nondepressed people. Other studies showed that depressed people have memory problems. This study strengthened the evidence of a link between the hippocampus and depression by showing that people with hippocampus dysfunction -- as revealed by spatial memory problems detected by the new video game -- are more likely to be depressed."
the video game helps determine if they have a problem with spatial me
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Hippocampus & Depression (Score:3, Informative)
Although it might explain why eye movement can be used in therapy to reprogram people's responses to trauma.
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This calms me much, as I was beggining to think that it could be something more agresive.
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Says the Devil's advocate: Ahh, but just think how good you would be if you weren't depressed!
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I'm firing up ktorrent (Score:1)
The spiders (Score:1)
Or maybe depressed people just hasn't tried hard enough to play the game? Or maybe depressed people are under influence of some drug that makes the game harder to them? Or...
This type of conclusion remembers me the joke of the scientist that put an spider on the table and knocks on the table. The spider runs away. Then, he
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The research paper this press release is based on also makes clear that all the subjects had been off medication for 4 weeks (give or take, I don't recall exactly).
Slashdotters seem to have very little respect for the research and pe
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I'd say that this behavior isn't limited to slashdotters. I've seen this type of behavior in the american population at large. (haven't had experience in other cultures)
Wow... (Score:2)
Damn, I missed.
additional experimental questions (Score:1)
2 did you get a sense of accomplishment from achieving the game tasks?
3 would you rather have just stayed in bed?
I kind of doubt spatial awareness problems are linked with depression, like alot of people here my instinctual reaction was, "perhaps the depressed people would rather not be doing this?"
I suffer from clinical depression and I know that when I'm having a bad day. I can barely get it together to read a book. let alone be bothered playing video games.
My experiences with depression. (Score:2)
More likely (Score:2)
Hippocampal-related? (Score:1)
Moo (Score:1)
I have found that depressed people perform poorly, period.
or.. (Score:2)
The more logical answer... (Score:2)
>suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."
I think it suggests they were so depressed they didn't give a shit about playing the game.
Steve