What Suicidal Thoughts Look Like in the Brain
Imagine being able to know who has suicidal thoughts by looking at brain images.
Marcel Just, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, tries to take pictures of human thoughts. He was giving a talk about the way concepts are physically represented in the brain, when his colleague, David Brent, a psychiatrist, asked him: Did he think he could detect changes in the thoughts of people who are suicidal?
Just decided it was worth a shot. The two teamed up, and the inNature Human Behaviour, their team investigated whether concepts like “death” and “life” were represented differently in the brains of people who had suicidal thoughts than in the brains of those who did not.
