Summary: New research has discovered that dopaminergic has a previously unexplored function: reshaping our thoughts of satisfying experiences. Dopamine, according to a study using animals, helps alter how people perceive thoughts that are related to benefits and how they act in the future.
Dopamine constantly devalued these memories in mice when they were recalled eating sweet food even though the food itself not made them sick. This finding broadens our knowing of dopamine beyond conventional theories, pointing to novel therapeutic options for treating addiction, depression, and various disorders caused by unnecessary reward-related memories.
Important Information:
- Novel Role: Dopamine positively influences how potential actions are affected by the value of reward-associated thoughts.
- Behavioral Shift: Yet without immediate negative experiences, devaluing memories alone was sufficient to alter mice’s future eating habits.
- Medical Potential: These findings may provide new treatments for overcoming damaging memories that underlie mental illness and addiction.
Origin: Michigan State University
New research from Michigan State University expands on the current knowledge of the brain’s chemical serotonin, finding that it contributes to lowering the value of thoughts associated with benefits.
The study, which was published in the open access , journal , Communications Biology , opens new avenues for understanding dopamine’s position in the mind.
The research team discovered that serotonin is a key component in the changing of memories of previous enjoyable experiences, a surprising finding that difficulties established theories of serotonin function.
Dopamine, an associate professor in the MS U’s Department of Psychology, and lead researcher of the study, said,” We discovered that dopamine plays a role in modulating how a reward-related memory is perceived over time.”
In the study, mice were given an audio stimulus that had previously been linked to a sweet foods. This resulted in the recall of the food-related memories. Similar to how you feel if you’ve eaten everything that upset your stomach, mice were made to feel briefly unwell at this time.
When the animals were entirely recovered, they behaved as if the sweet-tasting meal had caused them to become ill. This occurred despite the fact that animals just remembered the food when they were made to feel ill, not the meal itself. This original finding suggests that reducing food’s memory can prevent people from eating that food in the future.
The research team then turned their attention to the potential mental factors that might be in charge of this phenomenon. The researchers discovered that cells producing the chemical serotonin appeared to play a particularly important role by using an approach that was brand and restore head cells that were engaged when the food storage was recovered. This was confirmed by actions that altered and observed serotonin neuron activity during the workout.
Based on our previous knowledge of dopamine’s work, our results were amazing. According to Johnson,” we usually don’t tend to think that dopamine is involved in the level of extensive informational and storage processing that our study showed.”
It goes against what we anticipated, demonstrating how complicated dopamine’s part is.
The group also analyzed the effects of mathematical modeling on how dopamine signals would be used to reshape reward memories.
Understanding dopamine’s wider mental functions could lead to new insights into how to treat conditions like addiction, depression, and other psychiatric disorders, according to Johnson.
These findings have broad-ranging implications because serotonin is implicated in so many different aspects of mental work. We might be able to use these techniques in the future to lower the value of dangerous memories and, as a result, lower their ability to control undesirable behaviors.
About this information about storage and dopamine research
Author: Jack Harrison
Source: Michigan State University
Contact: Jack Harrison – Michigan State University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Open access to original analysis
Alexander Johnson et albert.,” Devaluing recollections of prize: a case for serotonin.” Biology of communication
Abstract
Dopamine and thoughts of prize: a case study
Dopamine-derived serotonin cells have different forecast and expected values that help learning because of reward-prediction error.
Recent research has questioned whether serotonin work can be fully accounted for by reward prediction error, suggesting a more intricate role does dopamine play in encoding specific characteristics of the reward environment.
We present a fascinating part for dopamine in the devaluation of praise sensory characteristics in this series of studies.
Mesencephalic dopamine cells that were activated during a controlled devaluation stage were eventually chemogenetically reactivated. The hedonic analysis of sugar reward was reduced as a result of this retrieval of the undervalued reward memory.
We demonstrate that serotonin cells are necessary and sufficient for controlled devaluation through cholinergic and chemogenetic manipulations, and that retrieval of these memories reflected dopamine release in the centre accumbens.
Our findings support our understanding of the crucial role dopamine plays in encoding predicted representations of reinforcement’s visual characteristics, in line with our computational modeling results.
Nevertheless, we discover a novel role for the dopamine function in controlled devaluation and provide a more sophisticated framework for the encoded reinforcement signals.
