Neurological Foundation of New Zealand

Depression is a debilitating mental illness with high emotional, physical, and financial costs to patients, their families, and society. Some individuals are predisposed to developing depression, and can be identified through recordings of the brain's electrical activity. Most people have greater activity over the left than the right frontal areas of the brain; those who are vulnerable to depression have a reversed pattern. The goal of this research is to determine what thought processes are affected by this pattern of asymmetry, to develop an understanding of how neural activity can give rise to depression.