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The story
A new study has found that part of the hippocampus — the brain region tied to memory and learning — is shrunk in people with depression. On 5ch’s Science News+ board, the reaction was largely unimpressed (“didn’t we already know this?”), though the thread also drew personal accounts from people living with bipolar disorder, along with comments describing the difference between auditory hallucinations and sounds you actually hear through your ears.
Study finds regions related to memory and learning are reduced in the brains of depression patients
Depression has long been known to be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, but exactly how depression and cognitive decline interact with each other has remained poorly understood.
A new study of middle-aged and older adults with depression found that the volume of specific hippocampal regions involved in memory and learning was reduced in patients’ brains.
Source: nature.com / Original article here
What people said
Though with depression, getting slandered/abused enough does make you stop moving and turn into a shut-in.
For someone with bipolar disorder —
in the manic phase, the body gets physically active,
in the depressive phase, it's a shut-in state.
Pretty sure you could read it online for free.
The author goes by EMI.
"Paradigm Shift: Bokunchi" (パラダイムシフト ぼくんち)
just google that and it'll come up.
I think it got published as an actual book too.
normal sound travels through the air and reaches your ears, right?
But with the auditory hallucinations that come with schizophrenia, there's no sound traveling through the air.
It's a sound your own head is generating and echoing inside your own head.
If you're ever unsure whether something's a hallucination, it might help to listen closely and compare it against how real sound reaches you through your ears.
Background and Key Points
The finding centers on the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped brain structure central to forming memories and learning, which researchers already regarded as a likely link between depression and later Alzheimer’s risk. The new work, published via Nature and discussed on 5ch’s Science News+ board — one of the site’s dedicated science-discussion forums, where threads gather anonymous, rapid-fire reactions rather than moderated debate — reportedly narrows the finding to specific hippocampal subregions rather than the structure as a whole, in a study of middle-aged and older adults with depression. For readers unfamiliar with Japan’s online culture, 5ch (formerly 2channel) is the country’s largest anonymous forum, and posts are numbered rather than attributed to named users.
The thread didn’t really split over the science — the dominant reaction was that this merely confirmed a long-suspected link. What actually diverged was tone: clinical shrug versus posters sharing lived experience of bipolar disorder’s manic/depressive cycling, and a tangent into distinguishing auditory hallucinations from real sound. One poster (60) explicitly objected that a schizophrenia discussion had drifted into a depression thread, treating the two as unrelated conditions — a distinction the posters made but never explained.
What’s easy to miss: the study establishes a correlation between depression and reduced volume in specific memory-related hippocampal areas, not that depression causes irreversible brain damage or that shrinkage predicts dementia in any individual. The thread never mentions sample size, whether volume changes track with treatment or remission, or how “shrinkage” was measured — details that would matter for judging how strong this evidence actually is.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “[Neuroscience] Study finds regions related to memory and learning are reduced in the brains of depression patients.”
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