At times in my life, I’ve been distracted. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been angry. The down side of feeling like I can do anything means feeling like my failings are choices, the results of personal failures. This week’s research looks at how mental health is much more than feeling bad or being weak. It leaves lasting biological changes on us, from the span of hours to entire lives and more.

This week's newsletter dives into fascinating new research that challenges our assumptions about mental health and self-control. We'll explore the surprising link between ADHD and reduced lifespan, uncover the neurological basis of depression, and discover how even short bursts of self-control can make us more aggressive.

Plus, a "SciFriday" muses on why we're so obsessed with second chances and recurring lives.

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Research Roundup

It's Not Just an Attention Deficit

I was once diagnosed with “nonhyperactive attention deficit disorder”. Despite explaining many things from earlier in my life, I’ll admit to feeling it wasn’t a “real” condition. I was wrong. New research shows that ADD causes deficits in more than attention.

Relative to the general population, life expectancy for adults with an ADHD diagnosis is reduced by “6.78 years…for males, and 8.64 years…for females”. That is a huge mortality effect for something that isn’t “real”.

What drives that increased mortality? There certainly are some known correlates: lower education attainment, lower wealth, risky behavior… What interventions can save these lost years of life?

Brain Change, Game Change

Depression touches most of us as some part of our life. Experiences like postpartum depression change the epigenetics not just of that child but their children and their grandchildren. These effects “aren’t just in your head”.

New research using “precision functional mapping” reveals that individuals with depression show dramatic brain changes, including a “frontostriatal salience network…expanded nearly twofold” compared to those without depression. More importantly, these “connectivity changes in frontostriatal circuits…track fluctuations in specific symptoms and predicted future anhedonia symptoms”.

It’s not just in your head—it’s in our brains and our epigenetics. We’re studying how combining CBT and noninvasive neuromodulation can counteract these connectivity changes by actively shifting functional connectivity away from these depression-related patterns.

The Id, the Ego, and the Superego walk into a bar…

Aggression is lazy. Apparently it’s also sleepy.

Some rather cool new research showed that “exertion of self-control for as little as 45 min can lead to an increased propensity for engaging in aggressive acts in the context of socially relevant choices”. Curiously, this self-control exhaustion looks a lot like sleep, including “increased sleep-like (delta) activity within frontal brain areas related to decision-making and impulse control.”

In Small Sacrifices I am exploring how (literally) practicing courage reduces the later cognitive effort of doing the right thing in moments of high emotional and social load.

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SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

With a movie version of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue in development, I’m thinking of a reread. It also makes me wonder about Life After Life and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and maybe even some of David Mictchel’s books. There’s a whole genre of recurring or extended lives that makes a reliable story in modern fantasy.

Stage & Screen

• February 18, Dublin: Maximizing collective intelligence, plus a radio interview!
• February 21, Athens: Medical school education
• March 21, Diablo Valley: Entrepreneur Day
• May 7, Chicago: Innovation * Collective Intelligence
• May 8, Porto: Talking about entrepreneurship at the SIM conference in Portugal
• May 14, London: UCL
• June 12, SF: Golden Angels
• June 9, Philadelphia: "How to Robot-Proof Your Kids"
• June 18, Cannes: Cannes Lyons
• Late June, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• October, UK: More med school education

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming