One important clue to depression has come from the work of Ronald Duman at Yale and Rene Hen at Columbia. They have found that antidepressant drugs also increase the ability of a small region of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, to generate new nerve cells. Although the vast majority of nerve cells do not divide, this small nest of stem cells does divide and gives rise to differentiated nerve cells. Over a period of two to three weeks, the time it takes antidepressant drugs to work, a few of the cells are incorporated into the neural networks of the dentate gyrus. The function of these stem
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