8 ms·
Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten
- 190eH169ps 2y agocan someone build a script that extracts the names of all this stuff like neurotransmitters, messengers, proteins, hormones and visualizes their amounts per metabolism around/at the time of the measured effect/observed behavior and or during the time of conditioning -- when stimulating (chemical, physical, psychological) measures were taken? a table to start with would be fine. please? all that lingo is above my pay-grade
- xattt 2y agoI believe this may be called neuroscience.
- K0balt 2y agoI’m sure the whole fold will fit into a cute infographic!
- ricksunny 2y agoStrikes me that parent comment wants to see a knowledge graph constructed. Could be done for a lot of fields, and would be effectively named for the field they describe, like 'neuroscience' in the example you illustrated.
- rom16384 2y agoAsk Google Deep Research, I'm sure it will do a good enough job
- burnished 2y agoNo, not really. It is difficult to measure because the tissue is delicate and the scale is very, very small. You can look at my citation manager for some educational resources on the topic however https://www.zotero.org/i_o/collections/C2QRMIZE https://www.zotero.org/i_o/collections/C2QRMIZE But I would mostly recommend a neuroscience textbook. The following link is to the entry discussing what a neurotransmitter is so I think you'll find it immediately interesting https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10957/ In general neurotransmitters trigger a response in the target neuron by interacting with a channel embedded in the cell wall. This can trigger a change in the target cell if the triggered channel causes a protein to be released, or it can be an input signal used by the target to determine whether or not it should fire and pass a signal (through the medium of neurotransmitters) on to the neurons it itself targets. If you are interested in the topic I strongly recommend creating a personal glossary for yourself. That textbook I linked has one I believe, and that ncbi domain has many other useful resources. There is a lot of simple sentences whose meaning is obscured purely because of a deficit of vocabulary, once you get some definitions down then a lot of medical texts really open up.
- chillingeffect 2y agoGive this a whirl: https://chatgpt.com/share/6813d85a-4d20-800f-881a-9b6133281d31 https://chatgpt.com/share/6813d85a-4d20-800f-881a-9b6133281d... I fed it the article and asked for a python sim.
- abhisek 2y agoI have a simple question. How do I control dopamine in "my" brain so that I can focus on "here and now" instead of HN and GitHub.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sosodev 2y agoStrengthen your prefrontal cortex so "you" have more control over your urges. You typically do this with meditation.
- pyrophoenix 2y agoOr you just set a firewall and block these 2 websites ^^ (Welcome to the club)
- mirekrusin 2y agoYour firewall seems broken.
- shermantanktop 2y agoMaybe they are texting from the embedded browser in their car's infotainment system? Never underestimate the creativity of a procrastinator.
- ipaddr 2y agoThey just used a proxy.
- guntars 2y agoThis was an interesting connection to me between meditation and neuroscience. Buddhists talk about the "monkey mind" that chatters incessantly. Well, that's the default mode network, part of your brain that is active when you're not engaged in a specific task, when you're thinking about self, others, past or future. A useful adaptation in our past environment for sure, but overactivity can be detrimental. The Buddhist solution is to mediate, to focus the attention on a singular thing and not be distracted by the chatter. That ability lives in the prefrontal cortex! It's able to override the DMN and it's something that can be trained by just exercising it.
- childintime 2y agoMakes sense, as Parkinson patients, freeze or tremble, which are both fear responses. I have seen my mother die of Parkinsons. I see a static (permanent) fear response as the straightforward cause for Parkinsons (combined with a helpful personality, which makes it difficult to just snap out of it). On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
- burnished 2y agoIf I remember correctly it is not at all related to fear but a disfunction in the basal ganglia (which performs action selection). Think of it as more like an inability to select an action or to select just one from a range of related movements (not at the conscious level, but between the conscious decision making and the signals being fired down your spine).
- dayvigo 2y agoNo, the pathology of Parkinson's Disease is dopaminergic dysfunction (the symptoms coming from this happening in the area relevant to planning movements, separate from areas that influence emotion or reward), usually driven by loss of dopamine-producing neurons. This is well-described by decades of research and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
- mountainriver 2y agoIncoming cocaine therapy! Seriously though as someone who suffers from extreme anxiety I am eternally grateful for this kind of work. I would really like to see this combined with brain stimulation.
- celdon25 2y agoGive it about 5 years.
- SequoiaHope 2y agoWell MDMA therapy is a real one and probably much more effective than cocaine for these purposes.
- pier25 2y agoPsilocybin too
- dns_snek 2y agoMDMA (or psilocybin) assisted psychotherapy to be specific. I don't think just taking these drugs has been shown to be an effective treatment :)
- SequoiaHope 2y agoYes I was referring to MDMA assisted psychotherapy, which I am a huge proponent of. However I’ve found these materials to be quite effecting at healing when taken conscientiously outside of a traditional assisted therapy session. Of course there probably haven’t been a lot of studies on this because formal therapy studies are probably easier to get approved, so I wouldn’t take the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
- roughly 2y agoWhat’s interesting here is that in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder, and an awful lot of drugs (not just cocaine) play heavily with the dopamine pathways. The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be. (Of course, like everything in biology, dopamine also does about a gazillion other things, too, so it’s not quite that cut and dry, but it rhymes, at least.)
- voytec 2y agoIt's weird that there's no mention of adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline (norepinephrine). Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction. All three - with dopamine - play crucial roles in our bodies' stress response system, and definitely with fear reactions. Dopamine is just a neurotransmitter. tyrosine -> dopamine -> (beta-hydroxylase) -> noradrenaline -> Phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase > adrenaline
- Aurornis 2y ago> Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction. No, dopamine is a signaling molecule that participates directly in this functionality. You're right that it's just a neurotransmitter, but the relative pathways about how they're produced are irrelevant for this study. They looked at how dopamine binds to certain receptors in certain parts of the brain under certain conditions.
- voytec 2y agoOK, maybe not "just a precursor" but still "just a neurotransmitter". I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
- gbnwl 2y agoFTA: “The team showed that indeed they express “D1” receptors for the neuromodulator. Commensurate with the degree of dopamine connectivity“ There are receptors specifically for dopamine on the amygdala neurons. Dopamine molecules are released by the pre-synaptic neurons, travel across the synapse, and bind to these receptors. Dopamine’s role in the nervous system is not simply an intermediate on the pathway to produce epinephrine or norepinephrine. If you thought like this you’d reach the conclusion that testosterone is simply a precursor to estrogen because the pathway to convert it exists in some tissues of the body.
- isomorphic 2y agoThis line in the article is horrifying: > The researchers were surprised that when they activated VTA dopaminergic inputs into the aBLA they could reinstate fear even without any new foot shocks, impairing fear extinction. That... seems like the first step in being able to literally induce fear without having to bother with pesky things like finding the subject's triggers. Although I suppose if one has direct access to the subject's amygdala, the point is somewhat moot. Still, it's sort of like a reverse wirehead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
- exe34 2y agoI feel like this would deprive the FSB/ICE/law-enforcement officials of their entire motivation for taking pride in their jobs. Automate the paperwork, yes, but let the psychopaths have their fun!
- XorNot 2y agoTorture is ineffective for information recovery. Those organizations do it because they want to, not because it works.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 2y ago>extinguish fear after a peril has passed Surprised that there is no mention to extreme sports in this. Big "what a rush" moment right after the person does something extreme and survives. Big dose of adrenaline in there not just dopamine but the parallels seem striking
- pessimizer 2y agoAlso "Duper's Delight."
- Aurornis 2y agoWhen you see headlines (or hear podcasters) talk about dopamine and other neurotransmitters, remember that neurotransmitters are merely signaling molecules. The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important. The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome. Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462400127X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago(The "brains are computers" analogy needs to die, but) it's a bit like saying "hard drive activity increases when a file is being secure-erased". Yes, but also, no.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- dboreham 2y agoNeurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU. What the variable does or means is trained. Probably trained in the context of "I/O" signals. E.g. if the chemical also speeds up heart rate or breathing then that becomes part of the training data set. So Dopamine can potentially "do" different things in different examples of the same animal, if environmental training data is sufficiently different.
- Aurornis 2y ago> Neurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU. No, neurotransmitters are very local. Dopamine exists all throughout your body, including your bloodstream. The dopamine in one location is uncoupled from the dopamine in another location. The dopamine in your bloodstream can't get into your brain. Dopamine within the brain doesn't spill over into entirely different regions of the brain.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoLike saying a loud noise can cause an avalanche
- pgt 2y agoI'm still reading the paper, but dopamine rebalances neuronal weights, so I'd be surprised if it did'nt change fears and aspirations.
- carlgreene 2y agoThis is a really cool study—finally shows that dopamine isn’t just about reward but actually acts as the “all-clear” signal that lets the brain unlearn fear. By watching dopamine neurons light up when an expected shock doesn’t happen, and then using light to tweak that pathway, they prove dopamine release in the amygdala actively drives extinction rather than just tagging along. It’s exciting because it hints at new ways to boost therapies for PTSD and anxiety by tweaking that VTA→BLA circuit or D1 receptors
- amanj3777 2y agoGreat
- justanotherjoe 2y agoI don't know why more attention here is not put in appreciating the headline. What a brilliant, insightful line. Simple. Abstract enough to apply to many things that you experienced just begging to be synthesized, but haven't.
- vanjajaja1 2y agoI was thinking something similar, i know i'm going to build skyscraper high arguments that hinge on just this headline
- elia_42 2y agoThe role of dopamine in superimposing new positive experiences on past fear-related memories is interesting. I am curious to see the possible effects on therapeutic treatments.
- seydor 2y agoIt's amazing how many pioneering studies about the anatomy of memory engrams come from Tonegawa's lab (who is already a Nobelist on another field)
- castillar76 2y agoThis is a fascinating finding! As someone with a neurodivergent brain (and kids with it as well), I'm wondering if this has something to do with the greater degree of anxiety in neurodivergent brains, which often have trouble processing dopamine the same way neurotypical brains do.
- michaelbrave 2y agoThis could explain the link between why so many with ADHD also tend to have anxiety, since ADHD could roughly be considered a lack of dopamine (I know it's more complex than that, but it is a significant portion of it).
- ednite 2y agoInteresting—I just posted a piece on my blog today about an experience that felt exactly like this. Once the panic settled, it was like my brain rewired itself for learning. Fear gave way to focus. Deadline pressure turned into this weird kind of superpower.