ventral

Alcohol's effects on gene expression in the central nervous system

...g in the nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and ventral tegmental areas show that distinct biological path... self-administration of ethanol into the posterior ventral tegmental area (VTA) of alcohol-preferring rats produced results suggesting that the reinforcing eff...

Love's all in the brain: fMRI study shows strong, lateralized reward, not sex, drive

...beloved, specific activation occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal caudate body. Thes...voles. The fMRI images showed more activity in the ventral pallidum portion of the basal ganglia in people with longer romantic relationships. It's in this reg...

After a time-shift, mixed signals from the circadian clock

... while another part of the clock, represented by a ventral (lower) group of cells, exhibited a distinct patte... of the dorsal SCN while inhibiting neurons in the ventral SCN. Because GABA transmits information between the ventral and dorsal SCN, such differences in effe...

How exactly does the brain control breathing?

...t proposes that these nerve cells are located in a ventral area of the brainstem (the retrofacial region) and...nce called glutamate. Their close proximity to the ventral surface of the brain allows them to sense and react to changes in the pH of the cerebrospinal fluid;...

New understanding of jet lag

...logy. The investigators found that the dorsal and ventral sections of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the...everal time zones. The researchers found that the ventral part of the SCN, which is directly connected by a nerve to the light-sensing retina, synchronizes ra...

Female butterflies go for sparkle -- not size -- when choosing to mate

... carefully controlled tests on both the dorsal and ventral sides of wings, Robertson induced a dozen subtle v...d Monteiro. None of the variations induced on the ventral side appeared to have any affect on the females' mating decisions, leading the researchers to conclu...

Grabbing addiction by the tail

...f the brain involved in reward and motivation, the ventral tegmental area. The peptide reduced the rats' drug-seeking behavior only when injected into the nucleus accumbens, evidence that the structure is critical for the expression of some of the devastating behaviors of addiction....

Scientists crack code for motor neuron wiring

... motor neurons project to muscles in the dorsal or ventral halves of the limb; and finally, the motor neuron pool identity that governs the muscle target of each set of motor neurons. In a key set of experiments, Dasen showed that alterations in Hox expression patterns in specific neurons resulted in changes...

How the brain learns to become addicted

... tend to activate circuitry in a region called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), known to be a critical site of neural adaptation, or plasticity, induced by addictive drugs. However, it wasn't known whether orexin actually induced such plasticity. In experiments with rat brain slices, the researchers demon...

How 'hot' emotional brain interferes with 'cool' processing

...t the emotional distracters not only activated the ventral system, but also deactivated the dorsal regions. ...motional images produced greater activation of the ventral system and deactivation of the dorsal system than did the neutral or scrambled images, they found. ...

'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

...al regional selectivity for word perception in the ventral cortex," they wrote. Importantly, the researchers observed that before the surgery, the patient could recognize long words as quickly as short ones; but after the surgery, the recognition time increased linearly as a function of word length. Such fi...

Team discovers possible 'universal strategy' to combat addiction

...drugs of abuse exert their rewarding effects - the ventral tegmental area (VTA). "Our results suggest a potential universal strategy for treating drug addiction," Zhang says. "Most drugs of abuse act on the neurons in this area." He cautions that much work remains to be done before a treatment based on the...

Brain differences could explain why males and females experience pain relief differently

...egarding pain to another brain region, the rostral ventral medulla (RVM). This PAG-RVM circuit is the main pain circuit in the brain, and is responsible for the sensation of pain. Both narcotics and analgesics work by acting on these brain regions. Interestingly, while thousands of studies have been conduct...

Dissecting the machinery of nicotine's reward

...ntroduction in a specific region of the brain (the ventral tegmental area; VTA) was sufficient to restore the normal neuronal nicotine response. A prior study also showed that mice lacking the ß2 subunit also showed reduced exploratory behavior, which was also restored when the researchers added the subunit ...

Leptin has powerful effect on reward center in the brain

...ding that metabolic hormones directly regulate the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the mid-brain has profound implications for how researchers view the integration of metabolic signals in the brain," said the senior author, Ralph DiLeone, assistant professor of psychiatry. In this study the researchers de...

Tastes great! Study shows brain's response to pleasing -- and changing -- tastes

...ct monitoring of an area of the brain known as the ventral pallidum. Located deep in the brain, it's a kind o...ution, compared to the water or sugar water. Their ventral pallidum brain activity was also much lower in response to the salt water. But when the researche...

High dopamine transporter levels not correlated with ADHD

... subjects in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the ventral striatum that is one of the main reward centers in the brain. In a dorsal striatum region known as the putamen, which plays an important role in habits and is also involved with attention, dopamine transporter levels did not differ between the two gr...

Pleasure and pain: Study shows brain's 'pleasure chemical' is involved in response to pain too

...ved in the assessment of pain itself, while in the ventral area, or nucleus accumbens, it was related to the ...duate student at MBNI. "The dopamine system in the ventral basal ganglia may represent an important point of interaction between the neurobiologies of emotion,...

Hormone linked to brain's cravings for food and other energy sources

...Horvath, components of the reward circuitry of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), may be responsible for overeating and addiction. "Targeting this region pharmacologically is an interesting tool to explore," said Horvath, chair of the Section of Comparative Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and professor of...

UCLA: How does your brain respond when you think about gambling or taking risks?

...n the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum, Poldrack said. The researchers also found that reward centers in the brain respond not only when we actually receive rewards but also when we make decisions about potential rewards, and that when we make decisions, the reward circuitry i...

The influence of the menstrual cycle on the female brain

...tter/neuromodulator. 2. Structures including the ventral striatum, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the o... involved in motivation for obtaining rewards, the ventral striatum, whereas in women, it is a region dealing with emotions, the amygdalo-hippocampal region, w...

Morphine makes lasting -- and surprising -- change in the brain

...on drugs." Kauer recorded the phenomenon in the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, a small section of the midbrain that is involved in the reward system that reinforces survival-boosting behaviors such as eating and sex ?a reward system linked to addiction. The affected synapses, Kauer found, were those betw...