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Welcome to Cool Stuff Daily. I'm Reggie Rizzu. Today we're looking at something that's basically

like a brain pacemaker. It can help with the mood and might be a new era for treating depression.

That's coming up on Cool Stuff Daily. If you ever wished your brain had essentially a restart

button, scientists are actually shockingly close to that.

A new clinical trial out of the UK and China suggests that deep brain stimulation, or DBS, tiny implanted electrodes, acting like a neural pacemaker, can dramatically ease severe treatment-resistant depression.

And here's the plot twist. Researchers say they found a brainwave signature

that predicts who benefits most. Researchers targeted two power players here. The BNST,

the bed nucleus of the striat terminus, which is a stress and anxiety command center tucked near the amygdala.

And then there's the nucleus occupants, the brain's reward and motivation hub, basically where

dopamine goes to throw its party. These regions have been implicated in everything from fear

responses to pleasure. So if you want to dial depression up or down, they're basically the prime real estate here.

So this treatment, DBS, involves threading tiny wires into the brain, then delivering mild

pulses to nudge malfunctioning circuits back into balance. It's already a blockbuster treatment

for Parkinson's disease. Can it work for depression?

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