Floyd Bloom; Best of the Brain from Scientific American
Book	Page		Topic
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	12		Ease with which we routinely string together appropriate words during a conversation should leave no doubt that our brains are fundamentally creative.
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	12		Intelligence does not mirror the totality of a person's cognitive capacity.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	14		Psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry of the California Institute of Technology revolutionized neurology and psychology in working with split-brain patients who suffered from epilepsy.The only way to end their horrible seizures was to surgically sever their corpus callosum.		2
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	14		Sperry and his colleague Michael Gazzaniga put patients through a series of sophisticated experiments, which led to the break-through discovery that the left and right hemispheres do not process the same information.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	14		Roger W. Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work with split-brain patients.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	14		Left-hemisphere is responsible for most aspects of communication.  It processes hearing, written material, and body language.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	14		Right hemisphere processes images, melodies, modulation, complex patterns such as faces, as well is the body's spatial orientation.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Stroke patients confirm the basic division of labor.  Damage to the right hemisphere leaves speech largely intact but harms body awareness and spatial orientation.  Patients with right hemisphere strokes lose whatever creative talents they had for painting, poetry, music, and playing games such as chess.		1
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Left hemisphere examines the details and processes them logically and analytically but lacks a sense of overriding, abstract connections.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Right hemisphere is more imaginative and intuitive and tends to work holistically, integrating pieces of an informational puzzle into a whole.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Consider a poem.  Right hemisphere interprets a poem as more than a string of words.  It integrates the information with its own prior ideas and imagination, allows images to well up, and recognizes metaphorical meaning.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Right hemisphere's divergent thinking underlies our ability to be creative. Curiosity, love of experimentation, playfulness, risk taking, mental flexibility, metaphorical thinking, aesthetics -- all these qualities play a central role.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	15		Targeted logical thinking, factual competence, and language and math skills -- all purviews of the left brain.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	17		Creative geniuses such as Vincent van Gogh and Francisco Goya.		2
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	17		The most important creative work is useful, relevant or effective.  The left hemisphere conducts the self-evaluation as creative thoughts bubble up from the right.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	17		Creativity involves the entire brain.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	17		Various psychologists have floated different models of the creative process, but most involve an early "preparation" phase.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	17		Important to be able to combine ideas.  People who are especially inventive have a gift for connecting elements that at first glance may seem to have nothing in common.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		Latent inhibition is a filter that allows the brain to screen out information that has been shown by experience to be less important from the welter of data that streams into our head each second throughout sensory system.		1
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		Lower latent inhibition scores have been associated with psychosis.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		Creativity depends primarily on the ability to integrate pieces of disparate data in novel ways.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		It is good to filter out some information, but not too much.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		To gain inspiration, simply get away from the problem for a while. Creativity does not prosper under pressure.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		Creative revelations come to most people when their minds are involved in an unrelated activity.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	18		Mental fermentation or incubation.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	19		At some point, newly combined associations break into consciousness, and we experience sudden, intuitive and enlightenment.		1
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	19		Adequate preparation and incubation.		0
Kraft; Unleashing Creativity	19		Neural processes that take place during creativity remain hidden from consciousness.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	47		Neurobiology of the self		28
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	47		How the self emerges from the brain.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	48		Phineas Gage		1
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	50		Anterior insula helps to designate some information as relating to ourselves instead of to other people.		2
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Medial prefrontal cortex, a patch of neurons located in the cleft between the hemispheres of the brain, directly behind the eyes, is important when thinking about oneself.		1
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Medial prefrontal cortex may bind together all of the perceptions and memories that help to produce a sense of self, creating a unitary feeling of who we are.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Medial prefrontal cortex could be continuously stitching together a sense of who we are.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Medial prefrontal cortex becomes more active at rest than in many kinds of thinking.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Most of the time we daydream -- we think about something that happened to us or what we think about other people.  All this involves self-reflection.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	51		Brain networks that may be organized by the medial prefrontal cortex.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	53		Information specifically related to the self or in maintaining a cohesive sense of self.  (Diagram)		2
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	54		Two brain networks -- reflective system and reflexive system.		1
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	54		Reflective brain network taps into the hippocampus and to other parts of the brain known to retrieve memories.  It also include regions that can consciously hold pieces of information in mind.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	54		Reflexive brain network encodes intuitions, tapping into regions that produce quick emotional responses based not on explicit reasoning but on statistical associations.  The reflexive system is slow to form self knowledge, because it needs many experiences to form these associations.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	54		Humans have evolved a sense of self that is unparalleled in its complexity.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	54		Medial prefrontal cortex is one of the most distinctly human brain regions.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	55		Medial prefrontal cortex is larger in humans than in nonhuman primates, and it also has a greater concentration of uniquely shaped neurons called spindle cells.		1
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	55		Human self network may have evolved in response to the complex social life of our ancestors.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	55		Humans are uniquely skilled at inferring the intentions and thoughts of other members of their species.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	55		Understanding ourselves and having a theory of mind are closely related.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	55		The self requires time to fully develop. It takes a while for children to acquire a stable sense of who they are.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	56		Self network is always online -- I can never get away from living in my body or representing the fact that I'm the same person I was 10 seconds or 10 years ago.		1
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	56		Alzheimer's disease.  Some of the first regions to be damaged are the hippocampus and precuneus, which are among the areas involved in autobiographical memories.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	56		Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.		0
Zimmer; Neurobiology of self	57		The real value of the science of the self will come in treatments for Alzheimer's and other dementias  Once we know which brain regions are involved in self-representation, we can take a closer look at which cells in  those regions are important.		1
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	60		Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, University of Oxford, quantum level phenomena occurring in microtubules.		3
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	63		Semir Zeki, University College London.		3
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	63		Damage to distinct regions of the visual cortices interferes with color perception while leaving discernment of shape and movement intact.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	63		Correspondence between the structure of an object observed by the eye and the pattern of neuronal activity generated within the visual cortex.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Brain directly represents the organism and indirectly represents whatever the organism interact with.		2
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Functionality in the brainstem and hypothalamus manages the life of the organism so that the internal chemical balances indispensable for survival are maintained at all times.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Brain devices that regulate life also represent the constantly changing states of the organism as they occur.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Brain has a natural means to represent the structure and state of the whole living organisms.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Expand from the biological self to the sense of ownership of one's thoughts.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		Biological foundation for the sense of self can be found in those brain devices that represent, moment by moment, the continuity of the individual organism.		0
Damasio; Brain Creates Mind	65		The organism, as mapped in the brain, is involved in interacting with an object, also mapped in the brain.These mappings occur in neural structures such as the thalamus and the cingulate cortices.  [Edelman's dynamic core]		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	69		Mind and brain are inseparable.		4
Kandel; Science of Mind	69		Brain's specific signaling modules have been conserved through millions of years of evolution.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	69		Our most distant and primitive evolutionary relatives, single cell organisms such as bacteria and yeast, and simple  multicellular organisms such as worms, flies and snails, use some of the same molecules to function in their environment that we use in ours.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	70		Human mind evolved from molecules used by our ancestors.		1
Kandel; Science of Mind	70		Biology of mind will be to the 21st century what biology of the gene was to the 20th century.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	70		To relate neural systems to complex cognitive functions, we must focus on neural circuits, discerning how patterns of activity in different circuits merge to form a coherent representation.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	70		To learn how we perceive and recall complex experiences, we must determine how neural networks are organized and how attention and awareness shape and reconfigure neural activity in those networks.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	71		Crick and Koch have stated that selective attention is a critical component of consciousness.		1
Kandel; Science of Mind	71		Re: attention, investigate "place cells," which determine an animal's location in space, and the hippocampus, a brain region linked with long-term memory, and how place cells create an enduring spatial map.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	71		How do unconscious and conscious mental processes relate to one another?		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	71		We are unaware of much of our mental life.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	71		Most of our mental life is unconscious.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	72		"mirror neurons"		1
Kandel; Science of Mind	73		Bernard Katz discovered the fundamental principles of signaling in the human nervous system by probing the neural axons of squids and the synapses joining nerves and muscles in frogs.		1
Kandel; Science of Mind	73		All nerve cells are similar, but neural circuitry and behavior differ markedly in vertebrates and invertebrates.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	73		Cyclic AMP, which is important for short-term sensitization in Aplysia, plays a critical role in more complex forms of learning, such as classical conditioning.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	73		The regulatory protein CREB, proved to be a key molecular component in switching from short- to long-term memory.		0
Kandel; Science of Mind	74		Few experiences excite and stimulate the imagination more than discovering something new.		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	79		Visual perception -- how we interpret what we see.		5
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	79		Brain activity that underlies consciousness.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	80		Francis Crick, Kristof Koch		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	81		Necker cube		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	81		Visual information leaving the eyes ascends through successes stages of neural data processing.  Different modules analyze various attributes of the visual field.  In general, the type of processing becomes more specialized the farther the information moves along the visual pathway.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Neurons in V1 can usually be activated by either eye, but they are sensitive to specific attributes, such as the direction of motion of a stimulus within the receptive field.		2
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Visual information is transmitted from V1 to more than two dozen other distinct cortical regions.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Inferior temporal cortex (ITC) is important in perceiving form and recognizing objects.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Neurons in V4 are known to respond selectively to aspects of visual stimuli critical to discerning shapes.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		In the ITC, some neurons respond only when entire objects, such as faces, are placed within their very large receptive fields.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Other signals from V1 pass through regions V2, V3, and area MT/V5 before reaching the parietal lobe.  Most neurons in MT/V5 respond strongly to items moving in a specific direction.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Neurons in other areas of the parietal lobe respond when an animal pays attention to a stimulus or intends to move toward it.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	83		Many neurons in the visual pathways still respond with their characteristic selectivity even in animals that have been completely anesthetized.  Clearly, an animal is not conscious of all neural activity.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	84		At the optic chiasm, the optic nerves cross partially so that each hemisphere of the brain receives input from both sides.		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	84		Inferior temporal cortex is important for seeing forms.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	86		By the time visual signals reach the inferior temporal cortex (ITC), the great majority of neurons are responding in a way that is linked to perception.		2
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	86		Inferior temporal cortex is particularly active when people are seeing images of faces.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	87		The persistence of slowly changing rivalrous perceptions when stimuli are switched strongly suggests that rivalry occurs because alternate stimulus representations compete in the visual pathway.		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	87		We are unaware of a great deal of the activity in our brains.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	87		We are mostly unaware of the activity in the brain that maintains the body in a stable state -- one of its evolutionarily most ancient tasks.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	87		Only a tiny fraction of neurons seem to be plausible candidates for what physiologists call the "neural correlate" of conscious perception.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	87		The relatively few neurons whose behavior reflects perception are distributed over the entire visual pathway, rather than being part of a single area in the brain.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	88		Visual awareness cannot be thought of as the end product of a hierarchical series of processing stages.  Instead, it involves the entire visual pathway as well as the frontal-parietal areas, which are involved in higher cognitive processing.		1
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	88		The activity of a significant minority of neurons reflects what is consciously seen even in the lowest levels we look at, V1 in the V2; it is only the proportion of active neurons that increases at higher levels in the pathway.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	88		Activity of neurons in the very early areas is determined by their connections with other neurons in those areas as well as top-down, "feedback" connections emanating from the temporal or parietal lobes.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	88		Visual information flows from the higher levels down to the lower ones as well as in the opposite direction.		0
Logothetis; Window on Consciousness	89		Brain is a system whose processes create states of consciousness in response not only to sensory inputs but also to internal signals representing expectations based on past experiences.  [Llinás;  brain operates as a reality emulator.]  [Llinás; wakefulness, a dreamlike state modulated by the senses]		1
Bower; Cerebellum	90		Cerebellum article by Rudolfo Llinás.		1
Bower; Cerebellum	90		Cerebellum is a central control point for the organization of movement.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	90		Human cerebellum is active during a wide variety of activities that are not directly related to movement.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	90		Cognitive studies have revealed that the cerebellum is involved in how quickly and accurately people perceive sensory information.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	90		Research studies indicate that the cerebellum made play important roles -- short-term memory, attention, impulse control, emotion, higher cognition, the ability to schedule and plan tasks, and possibly even in conditions such as schizophrenia and autism.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	91		It is perhaps not surprising that the cerebellum acts as more than just a simple controller of movement.  Its great bulk and intricate structure imply that it has a more pervasive and complex role.		1
Bower; Cerebellum	92		Cerebellum's most remarkable feature is that it contains more individual neurons than the rest of the brain combined.		1
Bower; Cerebellum	92		The way the cerebellum's neurons are wired together has remained essentially constant over more than 400 million years of vertebrate evolution.  A shark's cerebellum has neurons that are organized into circuits nearly identical to those of a person's.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	92		Lack of motor coordination in World War I soldiers who has suffered gunshot or shrapnel wounds to the cerebellum.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	92		Patients with cerebellar injuries cannot accurately judge the duration of a particular sound or the amount of time that elapses between two sounds.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	92		Neurodegenerative diseases that specifically shrink the cerebellum affect the judging of fine differences between the pitch of two tones.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	93		Cerebellar patients have difficulty modulating their emotions -- they either fail to react or overreact to a stimulus that elicits a more moderate response from most people.		1
Bower; Cerebellum	93		Cerebellum might be involved in working memory, attention, mental functions such as planning and scheduling, and impulse control.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	93		Cerebellum may be more involved in coordinating sensory input than in motor output.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	93		Removing the cerebellum from young individuals often causes few obvious behavioral difficulties, suggesting that the rest of the brain can learn to function without a cerebellum.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	95		Cerebellum is reduced in size in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is characterized by lack of impulse control.		2
Bower; Cerebellum	95		Cerebellum is normally active during sensory processes such as hearing, smell, thirst, need for food and air, awareness of body movement, and perception of pain.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	97		Sensory exploration using the fingers causes an intense cerebellar response.		2
Bower; Cerebellum	97		"Generalized timing" hypothesis of cerebral function suggests that the cerebellum controls the timing of body movements to allow individuals to time the duration of sensory inputs such as sights and sounds.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	97		Cerebellum not only facilitates fine movements but also "smooths" the processing of information related to mood and thought.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	97		Scientists have proposed that the regions of the cerebellum that have expanded dramatically during human evolution provide computational support for psychological tasks that can be offloaded from the cerebral cortex when it is overburdened.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	97		Scientists must explain how the cerebellum, a single brain structure whose neural circuitry is organized into a uniform, repetitive pattern, can play such an  integral role with so many disparate functions and behaviors.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	97		People can recover from cerebellum injury, although total removal of the cerebellum initially disrupts movement coordination.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	100		People with cerebellar damage slow down and simplify their movements -- reasonable strategies to compensate for a lack of high-quality sensory data.		3
Bower; Cerebellum	100		Cerebellar involvement in disorders such as autism in which patients fail to respond to incoming sensory data.		0
Bower; Cerebellum	101		Michael S. Gazzaniga		1
Hickok; Sign Language	102		Broca's area; Wernicke's area.		1
Hickok; Sign Language	102		Right hemisphere damage is often associated with severe visuo-spatial problems.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	102		Left hemisphere is often branded the verbal hemisphere and the right hemisphere the spatial hemisphere.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	102		Wernicke's area, involved in speech comprehension, is located near the auditory cortex, the part of the brain that receives signals from the ears.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	103		Broca's area, involveed in speech production, is located next to the part of the motor cortex that control the muscles of the mouth and lips.		1
Hickok; Sign Language	103		Sign languages of the deaf are highly structured linguistic systems with all the grammatical complexity of spoken languages.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	103		There is no universal sign language for the deaf.  People in different countries use very different sign languages.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	103		American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language are mutually incomprehensible.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	103		Spoken languages are encoded in acoustic-temporal changes -- variations in sound over time.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	105		A deaf signer with comprehension difficulties had damage that included Wernicke's area, whereas another patient who had trouble making signs had damage that involved Broca's area.		2
Hickok; Sign Language	105		Left hemisphere plays a crucial role in supporting sign language.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	105		Signers with damage to the right hemisphere were fluent and accurate in their production of signs.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Brain's left hemisphere is dominant for sign language, just as it is for speech.		3
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Organization of the brain for language does not appear to be particularly affected by the way in which language is perceived and produced.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Left-right dichotomy of the brain is an oversimplification.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Most cognitive abilities can be divided into multiple processing steps.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Language ability has many components.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	108		Of all the many aspects of linguistic ability, the production of language is the one most sharply restricted to the brain's left hemisphere.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Patients with right hemisphere damage may be able to construct words and sentences quite well, but they frequently ramble from one subject to the next with only a loose thread of connection between topics.		1
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Perception and comprehension of language appear to be less confined to the left hemisphere than language production.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Both hemispheres are capable of distinguishing individual speech sounds, and the right hemisphere seems to have a role in the comprehension of extended discourse.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Deciphering the meaning of words and sentences seems to take place primarily in the left hemisphere.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Common tests for aphasia evaluate the comprehension and production of words and sentences.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		Nonlinguistic spatial abilities can also be broken down into components with differing patterns of lateralization.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	109		It has been suggested that the left hemisphere is important for local-level spatial perception and manipulation, whereas the right hemisphere is important for global-level processes.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	111		Broca's area is activated in hearing patients when they are speaking and and deaf patients when they are signing.		2
Hickok; Sign Language	111		Brain imaging has confirmed that regions that play a role in sign-language comprehension are much the same as those involved in understanding spoken language.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	111		Neural organization of sign language has more in common with that of spoken language than it does with the brain organization for visual-spatial processing.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	111		Brain is a highly modular organ, with each module organized around a particular computational task.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	112		Comprehending and producing sign language appear to be completely independent of visual-spatial abilities such as copying a drawing.		1
Hickok; Sign Language	112		Spoken and sign languages share a great deal of neural territory in the more central, higher-level brain systems but diverge at the more peripheral levels of processing.		0
Hickok; Sign Language	112		Peripheral processing of speech occurs in the auditory cortices in both hemispheres, whereas the initial processing of signs takes place in the visual cortex.  But after the first stages of processing, the signals appear to be routed to central linguistic systems that have a common neural organization in speakers and signers.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		The sight of a drug or its associated paraphernalia can elicits shudders of anticipatory pleasure in an addict.		30
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		With the drug fix, comes the real rush: the warmth, the clarity, the vision, the relief, the sensation of being at the center of the universe.  For a brief period, everything feels right.  But something happens after repeated exposure to drugs of abuse -- whether heroine or cocaine, whiskey or speed.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		The amount of drug that once produced euphoria doesn't work as well, and users come to need a shot or snort just to feel normal; without it, they become depressed and often, physically ill.  Then they began to use the drug compulsively.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		Become addicted, losing control over drug use, suffering powerful cravings even after the thrill is gone.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		Euphoria induced by drugs of abuse arises because all these chemicals ultimately boost the activity of the brain's reward system -- a complex circuit of neurons that evolved to make us feel flush after eating or sex.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		Chronic drug use induces changes in the structure and function of the brain's neurons that last for weeks, months or years after the last fix.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	142		Neural adaptations to drugs dampen the pleasurable effects of a chronically abused substance.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	143		Various drugs of abuse ultimately lead to addiction through a common pathway.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	143		Given the opportunity, rats, mice and nonhuman primates will self-administer the same substances that humans abuse.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	144		Researchers have mapped the regions of the brain that mediate addictive behaviors and discover the central role of the brain's reward circuit.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	145		Key component of the reward circuitry is a mesolimbic dopamine system -- a set of neurons that originates in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), near the base of the brain, and send projections to target regions in the front of the brain -- most notably to a structure deep beneath the frontal cortex called the nucleus accumbens.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	145		VTA neurons communicate by dispatching dopamine from the terminals of their long projections to receptors on nucleus accumbens neurons.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	145		Dopamine pathway from the VTA to the nucleus accumbens is critical for addiction: animals with lesions in these brain regions no longer show interest in substance of abuse.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Reward pathways are evolutionarily ancient.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		In mammals, reward circuit is integrated with several other brain regions that serve to color an experience with emotion and direct the individuals response to rewarding stimuli, including food, sex and social interaction.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Amygdala helps to assess whether an experience is pleasurable or aversive -- and whether it should be repeated or avoided -- and helps to forge connections between an experience and other cues.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Hippocampus participates in reporting the memories of an experience, including where and when and with whom it occurred.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Frontal regions of the cerebral cortex coordinate and process all of the information and determine the ultimate behavior of the individual.  [Fuster's  perception-action cycle]		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		VTA-accumbens pathway acts as a rheostat of reward: it "tells" the other brain centers how rewarding an activity is.  The more rewarding an activity is deemed, the more likely the organism is to remember it well and repeat it.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Equivalent pathways control natural and drug rewards in humans and nonhuman mammals.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Using fMRI and PET, researches have watched the nucleus accumbens in cocaine addicts light up when they are offered a snort.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	146		Nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and some areas of the cortex light up for fMRI and PET when compulsive gamblers were shown images of slot machines, suggesting that the VTA-accumbens pathway has a similar critical role even in non-drug addiction.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		All drugs of abuse cause  the nucleus accumbens to receive a flood of dopamine, or sometimes, dopamine-mimicking signals.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		Cocaine and other stimulants temporarily disable the transporter protein that returns the neurotransmitter to the VTA neuron terminals, thereby leaving excess dopamine to act on the nucleus accumbens.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		Heroine and other opiates bind to neurons in the VTA that normally shut down the dopamine producing VTA neurons.  Opiates release this cellular clamp, thus freeing the dopamine-secreting cells to pour extra dopamine into the nucleus accumbens.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		Opiates can also generate a strong reward message by acting directly on the nucleus accumbens.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		Over time and with repeated exposure, drugs of abuse initiate the gradual adaptations in the reward circuitry that give rise to addiction.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		After a drug binge, an addict needs more of the substance to get the same effect.  This tolerance then provokes an escalation of drug use that engenders dependence, a need that manifests itself as painful emotional and physical reactions.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		Tolerance and dependence occur because frequent drug use can suppress parts of the brain's reward circuit.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	147		At the heart of the reward circuit suppression is the molecule CREB, a transcription factor that regulates the expression of genes and the overall behavior of neurons.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	149		Chronic drug use causes sustained activation of CREB, which enhances expression of the target genes, some of which code for proteins that then dampen the reward circuitry.		2
Nestler; Addicted Brain	149		CRB controls the production of dynorphin, a natural molecule with opium-like effects. Induction of dynorphin by CRB stifles the brain's reward circuitry. Inhibition of the reward pathway leaves the individual depressed and unable to take pleasure in previously enjoyable activities.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	150		If an addict abstains from the drug, sensitization sets in, kicking off the intense craving that underlies the compulsive drug-seeking behavior of addiction.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	150		A mere taste or a memory can draw an addict back. This relentless yearning persists even after long periods of abstention.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	151		Long-term potentiation (LTP) helps memories to form and appears to be mediated by the shuttling of certain glutamate-binding receptor proteins from intracellular stores to the nerve cell membrane where they can respond to glutamate released into a synapse.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	151		Drugs of abuse influence the shuttling of glutamate receptors in the reward pathway.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	151		All of the drug induced changes in the reward circuit ultimately promote tolerance, dependence, craving, relapse and the complicated behaviors that accompany addiction.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	152		With prolonged abstention, changes in the delta FosB activity and the glutamate signaling predominate.  These actions draw an addict back for more -- by increasing sensitivity to the drug's effects if it is used again after a lapse, and by eliciting powerful responses to memories of past highs and to cues that bring those memories to mind.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	153		Revisions in CREB, delta FosB, and glutamate signaling are central to addiction.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	154		Biological basis of drug addiction.		1
Nestler; Addicted Brain	154		Today's treatments fail to cure most addicts.  Some medications prevent the drug from getting to its target.  These measures leave users with an "addicted brain" and intense drug craving.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	154		Biology of addiction		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	154		About 50% of the risk for drug addiction is genetic.		0
Nestler; Addicted Brain	154		Emotional and social factors operate in addiction.		0