A single session of brain training temporarily boosted the mood of individuals with depression during a small clinical trial. Laurel Morris at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and her colleagues conducted a randomised-controlled trial on non-wearable neurofeedback for depression.
The research team recruited 32 people diagnosed with major depressive disorder and 30 others who had no history of mental health issues. Every participant remained free from brain-affecting medications, including antidepressants, for at least one week before the study.
Subjects lay in a scanner measuring activity in their ventral tegmental area while thinking about motivating topics. Approximately half of the participants received live feedback on their brain activity, while the remaining group unknowingly viewed prerecorded signals from another person as a sham.
Depressed individuals who received genuine feedback scored higher on two mood questionnaires than those in the sham group. Morris stated, "We would not call these changes clinically meaningful yet."
The mood improvements vanished during a follow-up assessment conducted one week later. No significant differences in brain activity were found between the genuine and sham feedback groups.
Kymberly Young at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania suggested that thinking about motivating things might be the primary driver of improvement rather than the neurofeedback itself. Participants who demonstrated a better ability to regulate their ventral tegmental area reported larger mood gains.
Morris is now leading a follow-up trial at the University of Oxford to evaluate the effects of two neurofeedback sessions instead of one. This new study commenced in September.
