Addicting Mice To Light

Al writes "In an attempt to better understand how the reward system in the brain functions in people suffering from addiction, scientists at Stanford have created mice that are addicted to light. They engineered light-sensitive proteins to trigger signaling pathways in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain that responds to pleasurable stimuli. They then connected a fiber-optic cable to this part of the brain and delivered a blast of light whenever the mice wandered into a 'reward chamber.' In previous experiments the mice have been given drugs like cocaine or amphetamine when they enter these rooms. The light treatment works in exactly the same way but lets the researchers very precisely control timing and dose of reward administered to the brain. The approach could also provide a way to probe receptors that cannot be accessed using existing drugs."

Comments

Re:Morning people

[geekgirlandrea]

Heh. I doubt it. In my experience, BDSM events tend to be just getting started by midnight.

Re:Nucleus Accumbens

[HTH NE1]

Just trying to help: there's no "t" in either "conscious" or "unconscious". There's also one's "conscience" which seems to want to be wrong for not being pronounced con-science. They are difficult words, easily leading to confusion. Then there's "conscientious" which does have a "t". "Consensual" is another troubling word in the group, especially with the root "consent" having its "t" change to an "s" and feeling wrong for being more like "sense" than "sent".

I look upon all those words with suspicion when I write them, and if I didn't have Firefox's built-in spell checker I'd be consulting online dictionaries every time, so don't feel bad or upset. (It can also take me as many as four tries to spell "thorough" correctly.)

You made other mistakes, but these are the ones you (and really everyone) should watch out for. The others are more like typos.