The closest jargon would be incentive salience in which activation of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area which is necessary but probably not suf

The closest jargon would be incentive salience in which activation of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area which is necessary but probably not sufficient. If you're interested in the neurological substrates of wanting (desire) and liking (pleasure) than check out the review papers over at Berridge Lab, https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/affectiveneuroscience.html https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/... In mice they have a stain for the expression of a particular type of "early" expression gene which coincides (most of the time) with neural activity. But this kind of staining is only useful for animal models you can sacrifice. I suppose if you wanted to explore this in humans you'd have to use PET with some neuronal population specific ligand or some fMRI modality(s). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivational_salience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivational_salience - this wikipedia article is helpful, but they mistakenly (as was tradition) cite the neurological substrates of liking (the shell of the nucleus accumbens) as the source. And that isn't correct even if the ventral tegmental area (wanting) projects heavily to it.