Name: This magnet can invert your brain, and it’s saving lives
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T10:31:58.000Z
Duration: 2 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide.

And millions of people have something known as treatment resistant depression, meaning they have failed at least one oral antidepressant.

and end up in emergency settings where physicians have started to have success using large magnets known as transcranial magnetic stimulation to pulse a person's brain, change their circuitry, and in real time decrease these depressive episodes.

The reason this works is because our brain and nervous system is actually an electrical system.

Faraday's law states that if you pulse a magnet, you can generate a current in electrically conductive substances like the brain.

Since your hair and skull are not electrically conductive, this is why the magnet can get put on the outside of your head.

and actually change the brain past the hair and skull. new scientific breakthroughs in the technology make it so the magnets can target very specific regions of the brain.

In the brains of people having a depressive episode, the subgenual anterior cingulate is overactive, and another region known as the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it is down regulated or has lower activity in people who are depressed.

The magnet is then targeted to a region like for example, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

and pulses in order to activate and increase synaptic currents within this brain region.

It increases activity and increases growth in the brain and decreases the symptoms of depression.

What's also so fascinating if you take the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it actually grows in people who are experiencing psychotherapy.

So they study the brains of people going through psychotherapy and over long periods of time that part of the brain actually has more activity and increases in size, but these magnets are changing the brain quickly and in some cases in 2.6 days.

The concept of transcranial magnetic stimulation has technically been around since the mid nineties, but only FDA approved in 2008.

Known as Saint, Stanford accelerated intelligent neuromodulation therapy, this new type of transcranial magnetic stimulation happens much faster.

This is a fascinating growing field of research to me, but these therapies don't work for everyone and specific people will benefit more than others.

Studies show it works better in people who have higher brain connections between the subgenual anterior cingulate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it's meant for people with severe depression who again have failed at least one oral antidepressant.

and due to its quick effects, it could be used more easily in hospital settings for people having severe depressive episodes.

The reason I'm obsessed with this science.

When I first started learning about it, I was like, okay, what is going on here?

But as I've gotten to understand it more, I realized that this could be really groundbreaking and in the future we might all be getting used to magnets helping with depression.

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