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Drug seeking is associated with activation of reward neural circuitry. Here we argue that drug addiction also involves a 'dark side'—a decrease in the function of normal reward-related neurocircuitry and persistent recruitment of anti-reward systems. Understanding the neuroplasticity of the dark side of this circuitry is the key to understanding vulnerability to addiction.
In the United States, efforts to treat addiction are hampered by prejudice and a public view that treats it as a disorder of self-control, not a disease. We highlight select advances in addiction research that, if disseminated to the public, could reverse these misconceptions and facilitate changes in policy to improve treatment access and care delivery for this highly prevalent disease.
Long-term potentiation and long-term depression require postsynaptic depolarization, which many current models attribute to backpropagating action potentials. New experimental work suggests, however, that other mechanisms can lead to dendritic depolarization, and that backpropagating action potentials may be neither necessary nor sufficient for synaptic plasticity in vivo.
To the degree that drugs and food activate common reward circuitry in the brain, drugs offer powerful tools for understanding the neural circuitry that mediates food-motivated habits and how this circuitry may be hijacked to cause appetitive behaviors to go awry.
The potential benefits of neuroscientific research into sexuality are great, but neuroscientists must participate in debates over the social, forensic and therapeutic implications of their findings. If serious research in sexuality is to be supported by the public, researchers must continue to earn society's trust with responsible and thoughtful presentation of their work.
There is growing public awareness of the ethical issues raised by progress in many areas of neuroscience. This commentary reviews the issues, which are triaged in terms of their novelty and their imminence, with an exploration of the relevant ethical principles in each case.
Is face perception carried out by modules specialized only for processing faces? Or are faces perceived by domain-general mechanisms that can also operate on non-face stimuli? Considerable evidence supports the domain-specific view.
Much evidence suggests that the fusiform face area is involved in face processing. In contrast to the accompanying article by Kanwisher, we conclude that the apparent face selectivity of this area reflects a more generalized form of processing not intrinsically specific to faces.
The claim that there are too many life sciences graduate students has generated much debate, including a recent editorial in Nature Neuroscience . A 1998 survey suggests that these concerns are misplaced, and that career prospects for neuroscience graduates remain bright.
Although over 100 molecules have been implicated in long-term potentiation and depression, no consensus on their underlying molecular mechanisms has emerged. Here we discuss the difficulties of providing molecular explanations for cellular neurobiological phenomena.