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Too bored to stay awake

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While the relationship between motivation and sleep is intuitive, its behavioral and neural features are poorly understood. A new study tackles both issues, showing that dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area mediate this relationship.

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Figure 1: Relationship between motivation and arousal, as determined by Rothschild et al.6.

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Correspondence to Michael M Halassa.

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Happ, M., Halassa, M. Too bored to stay awake. Nat Neurosci 19, 1274–1276 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4383

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