The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time

by Alex Korb

When was the last time you were truly happy? People with depression often have trouble remembering happier times but have no problem recalling sad events. This memory bias can be blamed on the hippocampus, which sits deep in the brain, adjacent to the amygdala; it also has strong connections to the hypothalamus. The primary job of the hippocampus is turning short-term memories into long-term ones, like hitting “Save” on a new document to store it on your computer’s hard drive. The hippocampus is the “save” button; without it, you couldn’t form new memories. It particularly likes to save emotional memories (like building your first snowman, the embarrassing thing you said to your crush in middle school, that great ski trip you took last year). That’s somewhat problematic in depression, because the new memories your hippocampus forms will skew to the negative.