Now you may be Able to Control the 'Feel Good' Brain Messenger

Feeling vibrant and immersed in pleasure after a glorious victory to even the thrill of hearing an ice cream truck, dopamine takes all the credits. Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter (chemical messenger in the brain) that is popularly referred to as the brain's "feel good" chemical. It is related to the reward and pleasure of our daily lives long with multiple aspects of cognitive processing. Apart from being ‘happy messenger’, the spontaneous impulses of dopamine in mice have shown that the animal can willfully manipulate these random dopamine pulses as per a study at the University of California San Diego published in the journal Current Biology.

The Dopamine Impulse

A feedback scheme was designed by the team to investigate if these impulses are occurring in the mice. The animal was trained to receive a reward on a treadmill if they show that they were able to control the impromptu dopamine signals.

It was found that the mice, apart from being aware of these dopamine impulses, also learned to anticipate and volitionally act upon a portion of them.

"Critically, mice learned to reliably elicit (dopamine) impulses prior to receiving a reward. These effects reversed when the reward was removed. We posit that spontaneous dopamine impulses may serve as a salient cognitive event in behavioral planning," says the researchers in the paper.

The study thereby opens a new dimension in the study of dopamine and brain dynamics, stating that dopamine appears to invigorate, rather than initiate, motor behavior.

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"We further conjecture that an animal's sense of spontaneous dopamine impulses may motivate it to search and forage in the absence of known reward-predictive stimuli," note the researchers.

Source-Medindia