Jessamyn Fairfield

speaker

401 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Did we find evidence of life on Mars in the 1970’s? · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

You can change the connections between them.

So the synapses, you can make new patterns.

That's how of course we keep learning things, we keep forming memories.

But one of the only places in the brain that forms new neurons when you're an adult is the hippocampus.

So the hippocampus, this little kind of piece in the middle of the brain that's involved in memory, involved in emotion.

Um, this new research from Columbia has shown that actually in people with major depressive disorder, one of the pieces of how that turns up at a at a cellular level in their brain is that new neurons are not being made as readily in the hippocampus.

So what's called neurogenesis, the creation of these new neurons is not happening at as high a rate.

The way that they figured this out was pretty interesting.

They basically took people who had recently died.

Um, they extracted the hippocampus in their brain, and they were looking, you know, you can't just look for which neurons are new, which ones aren't.

They also looked for the stem cells that kind of come before you get these new neurons, and they looked for neuroblasts, kind of like protoneurons.

And they found that even though these brains had plenty of neural stem cells, they weren't converting into new neurons as much.

as would be expected from people without a major depressive disorders.

So it's really interesting because, you know, the hippocampus has been looked at for depression for a long time again, because it's so important to memory, so important to emotion.

Yeah.

And the theory that these researchers had has to do with pattern separation, which the hippocampus is known to be really important.

And it's basically where you look at past and present events and also like your past and present emotional states.

And are you able to separate those out from each other?

You know, if you go to a restaurant one day, have a great experience, go to a restaurant another day, have a terrible experience.

Are you storing those things separately as they're encoded into memories in your brain?

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