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Posts Tagged ‘Dopamine’

RARB says I was born when my late born striosomal cells were born

Posted in Basal Ganglia, RARB, Striatum, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Everyone has a birthday right. Its the day you (your infant self) popped into the world and started breathing, right?  But what about the day “you” were born – that is – “you” in the more philosophical, Jungian, spiritual, social, etc. kind of a way when you became aware of being in [...]

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Thousands of genes together with thousands of resting-state nodes actually makes the genes-to-cognition problem LESS complex

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

DON’T tell the grant funding agencies, but, in at least one way, the effort to relate genetic variation to individual differences in cognitive function is a totally intractable waste of money. Let’s say we ask a population of folks to perform a task – perhaps a word memory task – and then we use neuroimaging [...]

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Catecholaminergic genes may help my son hear things more clearly

Posted in ADRA2A, Frontal cortex, Noradrenaline, Parietal cortex, TH, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

This year, my 5 year-old son and I have passed many afternoons sitting on the living room rug learning to read.  While he ever so gradually learns to decode words, eg. “C-A-T”  sound by sound, letter by letter – I can’t help but marvel at the human brain and wonder what is going on inside.  [...]

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echoblog: understanding how neuromodulator (genes) help the brain compute

Posted in 5HTT, Dopamine, Noradrenaline, acetylcholine, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by jurvetson via Flickr pointer to: Computational Models of Basal Ganglia Function where Kenji Doya provides computational explanations for neuromodulators and their role in reinforcement learning. In his words, “Dopamine encodes the temporal difference error — the reward learning signal. Acetylcholine affects learning rate through memory updates of actions and rewards. Noradrenaline controls width [...]

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Interview with Professor Michael Frank: Computational Neuroscience (and Genetics) of Decision Making

Posted in COMT, DARPP32, DRD2, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

If you’re interested in the neurobiology of learning and decision making, then you might be interested in this brief interview with Professor Michael Frank who runs the Laboratory of Neural Computation and Cognition at Brown University. From his lab’s website: “Our research combines computational modeling and experimental work to understand the neural mechanisms underlying reinforcement [...]

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New developmental clues on the function of COMT rs4680

Posted in COMT, Inferior frontal gyrus, Middle temporal gyrus, Superior temporal cortex, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Image by Ethan Hein via Flickr Here’s a new addition to a rapidly growing list of findings for the valine-to-methionine substitution in the COMT gene (rs4680).  The paper, “Effects of the Val158Met catechol-O-methyltransferase polymorphism on cortical structure in children and adolescents” by Shaw and colleagues at the NIMH [doi:10.1038/mp.2008.121] finds that when genotype was used [...]

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Dopaminergic genes capture Keynes’ animal spirits in an uncertain world

Posted in COMT, DARPP32, DLPFC, DRD2, Dopamine, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

In 1802, in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson warned that, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the [...]

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Poor li’l orphan receptor becomes master of the dopamine, epigenetic universe

Posted in NURR1, tagged , on July 10, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Yesterday, there were some grumblings on the nomination of Francis Collins to the head of NIH.  Some folks feel that the genome-wide, genome-everything approach to medicine has somewhat over-promised and under-delivered in its promise to elucidate the molecular pathways of human disease.  In the field of mental health, the whole-genome era is [...]

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Michael Frank probes neurogenetic basis of “oops!”

Posted in COMT, Cingulate cortex, Dopamine, tagged , , , on September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Amidst the current economic panic, I’m feeling more shocked than usual when listening to the flip-flopping, falsehoods, fabrications, backstepping, about-facing and unabashed spin-doctoring spewing forth from the news media. If watched long enough, one may even develop empathy for Henry Paulson who carries the weight of the global economy [...]

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Beauty is in the ventral striatum of the beholder

Posted in Dopamine, Striatum, tagged , on September 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia You see a masterpiece while I see splatters of paint on a canvas. Why – in neural terms – do we see the same painting and feel so subjectively different ? Understanding the neural crosstalk between visual inputs (the raw neural activity generated in the retina) and our complex internal states (needs, [...]

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Sweets now, sweets later: rs165688 makes my holidays hell

Posted in COMT, DLPFC, Dopamine, Frontal cortex, Orbitofrontal cortex, Parahippocampal gyrus, Posterior parietal cortex, tagged , , , on January 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Holiday time is full of all things delicious and fattening. Should I have a little chocolate now, or wait till later and have a bigger dessert ? Of course, this is not a real forced choice (in my case, the answer too often seems – alas – “I’ll have both!”), but there are many times [...]

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GPR6 teaches B.F. Skinner that actions have consequences

Posted in G-protein, GPR6, Striatum, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia I’m not sure what Skinner would have thought, but its clear that, nowadays, mechanisms of behavior can be understood in terms of dynamic changes in neural systems and, furthermore, that individual differences in these neural dynamics are heavily regulated by genetic variation. Consider the recent paper by Lobo et al., “Genetic control [...]

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Dopamine genes dissociate neural mechanisms for complex decision making

Posted in COMT, DARPP32, DRD2, Dopamine, tagged , , on September 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia To go out tonight or stay home? Hillary or Barack? Curly fries or onion rings? How do I make these important choices and why will others decide differently? Although there are many reasons for not stressing-out and over-thinking one’s decisions (except for really important choices like curly fry vs. onion ring), it [...]

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