Dr. Goldstein on Neuroscience, Play, and Mood States
Something caught my attention a while back: play had quietly dropped out of most adult lives. By play I mean doing something that might have no obvious point, an activity you take up simply for its own sake. Ask grown adults what that even looks like for them and many go blank. The capacity seems to have gone missing for years. When I noticed how much curiosity there was around this gap, I started digging. And I'll admit I'm a bit of a neuroscience obsessive.
So I went to the brain. The questions I kept circling were basic but stubborn. What is it in us that locks people into particular mood states and keeps them there? What might we be doing, maybe without realizing it, that props those states up? And the things I was finding that seemed to lift people and build a kind of resilience, did any of that have support in the research?
I didn't examine actual brains. I read the studies, and I started with brains belonging to people who had been chronically stressed or depressed over stretches of time. Three regions kept coming up as affected by that sort of long-running or on-and-off depression.
The prefrontal area, the part sitting just behind the forehead, is one of them. The right side of it, specifically, runs heavily overactive in a brain carrying a lot of anxiety or depression. That right side handles something useful, though. It fires when we avoid things, and some avoidance is exactly what you want to happen fast. Picture walking past a dark alley and catching the glint of a blade. You don't want to pause and weigh the pros and cons of continuing down that alley. You just know to steer clear, instantly.
The trouble is the same region also fires with negative emotional states. Avoidance and negative emotion both run through it, and in these brains it stays switched on far too much. Some studies of women with postpartum depression show heavy activity in that right prefrontal area. Follow the thread and you find that, before long, their babies tend to show a lot of activity in that same region too. It gets handed down to some degree.
What I kept seeing on the other side was this: when people were in more positive mood states, the left prefrontal area lit up instead, and that region ties to resilience. Which raises the obvious follow-up. How do we actually know positive mood states track with resilience, and why would this particular slice of the brain be the one carrying it?