A recent study revealed an unexpected role for dopamine, as it was found that it reduces the importance of memories associated with bonuses and participates in their reshaping, which contradicts the previous theories that link dopamine to enhance the feeling of reward.
The study was conducted by researchers from Michigan State University in the United States of America, published in the “Nature-Communications Biology” magazine and wrote about “Eurekalert”.
Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter, made by the body, and used by the nervous system to transmit messages between nerve cells.
Dopamine plays a role in feeling fun, and in the ability to think and plan, it helps to focus and find interesting things.
“We have discovered that dopamine plays a role in modifying how to perceive the memory associated with the reward over time,” said Alexander Johnson, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Michigan State University and the head of the study.
Recover memories
The researchers sent auditory signals previously associated with a sweet taste of experimental mice, which led to the recovery of the memory associated with eating. Meanwhile, a satisfactory feeling in mice is similar to that of an unhealthy food.
After the mice completely recovered from this feeling, the researchers noticed that they began to act as if the sweet food was what made them feel sick, although they did not eat it again.
This indicates that the mice recovered the anniversary associated with sweet food, not the food itself and linked it to the negative experience, which affected their behavior towards it. This indicates that reducing the value of the memory associated with food is sufficient to prevent mice from eating it in the future.
The research team then was interested in studying the brain mechanisms that can control this phenomenon using a technique that allows for determining and re -activating the brain cells that were active when retrieving the memory associated with food, and the researchers found that dopamine -producing cells play an important role in that.
This was re -verified through experiments in which the activity of neurons produced and recorded, and the team also used computer modeling to clarify how dopamine signals reshape the memories associated with the reward.
Anonymous dopamine roles
“Our results were surprising based on our previous understanding of the dopamine function. Usually we do not think that dopamine is involved in processing information and memory in the detail that our study showed, and this changes what we expected and reveals that the role of dopamine is more complicated than previously believed,” says Johnson.
Johnson explained that the broad understanding of dopamine functions in the brain can provide new visions on how to deal with cases such as addiction, depression and other mental disorders.
“Given that dopamine contributes to many aspects of brain function, these visions have large -scale effects. In the future, we may be able to use these methods to reduce the value of memories that cause psychological problems, and then reduce their ability to control unwanted behavior,” he said.