The Promise of Cognitive Neuroscience for Advancing Depression Research

Excerpt

How are the mind and the brain interconnected? What do the intricate workings of neural tissue have to do with the rich array of thoughts, feelings, and aspirations that make up our mental lives? For many centuries, such questions framed an impenetrable mystery, one more apt to be taken up by poets and philosophers than by practicing scientists. But the past several decades have witnessed a remarkable development on this front, as researchers from numerous distinct scientific disciplines—including neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry, computer science, cognitive science, neurology, and genetics—have begun working together to elucidate in ever-increasing detail the nature of the mind-brain relationship: specifically, how brain events give rise to mental events, and how the latter are reflected in the former (Wilson, 1998). This new interdisciplinary collaboration, most commonly referred to as cognitive neuroscience, has already witnessed a remarkable pace of scientific discovery during the few short decades of its existence (Albright, Kandel, & Posner, 2000). …