It may be possible to stave off depression before it even appears using brain-scanning software so simplistic in its design that even the psychologist testing it once bet it wouldn’t work. Ian Gotlib’s group at Stanford University, California, studies girls aged 10 to 14 years whose mothers suffer from depression. Such girls are thought to be at higher-than-normal risk of developing the condition themselves, in part because they may inherit their mothers’ tendency to “amplify” unpleasant information.
