My colleagues and I recently found that we were able to train mice to voluntarily increase the size and frequency of seemingly random dopamine impulses in their brains. Conventional wisdom in ...

Mice are both aware of random dopamine signaling in their brains and can willfully control it, according to new research from UC San Diego. The study was published in Current Biology. In previous ...

UC San Diego researchers who set out to investigate less understood aspects related to spontaneous impulses of dopamine — the "feel good" brain chemical — have determined that mice can willfully ...

Michael Long is not the typical neuroscience guy. He was trained as a physicist, but is primarily a writer. He coauthored the international bestseller The Molecule of More. As a speechwriter, he has ...

Within the human brain, movement is coordinated by a brain region called the striatum, which sends instructions to motor neurons in the brain. Those instructions are conveyed by two pathways, one that ...

For decades, dopamine signaling was viewed primarily through the lens of motor vigor—how fast or forcefully one moves. However, a landmark 2025 study from Karolinska Institutet published in Nature ...

Dopamine in the brain influences movement, learning, motivation and sleep. In humans, problems with dopamine are linked to conditions like Parkinson’s disease, depression and sleep disorders. While ...

Last week we covered the issue of choice and how we absolutely love having more options. We love to choose, and we particularly love to choose to have MORE and MORE stuff. Much of the drive we humans ...