Neuroscience Daily for 08 October follows 3 stories from r/neuro and r/neuroscience, moving through optogenetics nobel, dopamine reward signals, social pain codes.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 — Intro
• 00:00:11 — Optogenetics Nobel
• 00:01:12 — Dopamine Reward Signals
• 00:02:06 — Social Pain Codes
• 00:03:01 — Closing

1. Optogenetics Nobel

Beezloop reports that a Stanford psychiatrist is sharing the Nobel Prize in Medicine for work that helped turn light into a way of controlling brain cells. The technology is optogenetics, which uses light-sensitive proteins and carefully delivered flashes of light to activate or silence selected neurons.

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2. Dopamine Reward Signals

BioRxiv presents a preprint on how dopamine neurons communicate reward-prediction signals to the basal forebrain. In recordings from freely moving rats, activity in ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons consistently led bursts in a separate basal-forebrain population by about ten milliseconds.

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3. Social Pain Codes

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the source behind a discussion of whether social rejection shares neural mechanisms with physical pain. The original study reported overlap in somatosensory representations, which helped popularize the phrase The question raised here is how much that overlap means, since the same broad brain region can support different computations.

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That's it for today.