Why do brains become depressed?

What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today’s episode with David Eagleman and his guest — psychiatrist Jonathan Downar — for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression and what new solutions are on the horizon.

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"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

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