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Why motivation to learn declines with age
Improving cost-benefit motivation
Neuroscientists have now identified a brain circuit that is critical for maintaining cost and reward motivation.
Researchers are working on possible drug treatments that could stimulate this circuit. They suggest that training patients to enhance activity in this circuit through biofeedback could offer another potential way to improve their cost-benefit evaluations.
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Key Ideas
Dopamine
Dopamine plays many roles in the brain. It is related to movement, motivation, and reinforcement of behavior.
Dopamine appears to exert significant effects in two regions of the brain...
Tracking dopamine
Dopamine, like other neurotransmitters, helps neurons communicate with each other over short distances. Most of the brain's dopamine is produced in the midbrain by neurons that connect to the striatum.
High dopamine concentrations do not make the neurons more active. However, they do make the neurons remain active for a more extended period of time, suggesting a longer response to the reward. It may have something to do with how dopamine promotes learning, which is one of its main functions.
Long-range effects
Researchers set out to determine if dopamine might affect more distant locations in the brain.
The regions that showed the most significant surges in activity in response to dopamine were the motor cortex and the insular cortex. The findings can help researchers understand the effects of dopamine in the human brain, including its roles in addiction and learning.
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Key Ideas
Detecting Loneliness
- Scientific literature has linked loneliness to depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
- Loneliness makes you more likely to fall ill by suppressing healthy immune function....
Loneliness is subjective
It's possible to be completely isolated and feel invigorated.
It is also possible to be surrounded by a crowd or be accompanied by close friends and feel lonely.
Research on loneliness findings
- Research showed that after social isolation, subjects' brain scans showed more activity in the midbrain when shown pictures of social cues.
- When subjects were hungry but had not been socially isolated, they showed a similar reaction to food cues, but not social ones. This shows that the drive for social contact and for things like food seems to be represented in a similar way.
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Key Ideas
Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics may lose their ability to treat bacterial infections.
Scientists have been warning us about the alarming rise in drug-resistant bacteria, but it can be curbed.
Penicillin
- Penicillin was the first widely-used antibiotic. It was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist.
- He noticed that the staph cells he'd been studying in a petri dish had died, and an unusual mold was growing in it.
- The mould was purified and tested in 1940, and later mass-produced.
- By 1943, the US was supplying all the Allied forces with this miracle drug, which gave them an advantage in treating injuries.
Existing antibiotics found in the dirt
- An agriculture student-turned-microbiologist, Selman Waksman, tested 10,000 soil samples over the years.
- In 1943, he identified streptomycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.
- Drug companies caught on to it, and commissioned pilots, explorers, and foreign correspondents sent back soil samples as they traveled, collecting dozens of new antibiotics.
- By 1970, researchers found themselves discovering the same molecules over and over.