Brain Stimulation Reward

Brain stimulation reward (BSR) is a phenomenon in which direct stimulation of regions of the brain through either electrical or chemical means is rewarding and can serve as an operant reinforcer. The stimulation activates the reward system and establishes response habits similar to those established by natural rewards such as food and water. BSR experiments soon demonstrated that stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus and other regions of the brain associated with natural reward was both rewarding as well as drive inducing. Electrical brain stimulation and intracranial drug injections are among the most powerful rewards because they activate the reward circuitry directly rather than through the peripheral nerves. BSR has been found in all vertebrates tested, including humans, and it has provided a useful tool for understanding how natural rewards are processed by the brain as well as the anatomical structures and the neurochemistry associated with the brain's reward system.

Read more about Brain Stimulation Reward:  History, Brain Stimulation Reinforcement, Relationship To Natural Rewards and Drives, Anatomy of Reward, Modulation With Drugs, Clinical Relevance

Famous quotes containing the words brain, stimulation and/or reward:

    Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather.... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
    Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes, 4:9-12.