Functions
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, and is found in all bilateral animals, where it mediates gut movements and the animals' perceptions of resource availability. In the simplest animals, resources are equivalent with food, but in advanced animals, such as arthropods and vertebrates, resources also can mean social dominance. In response to the perceived abundance or scarcity of resources, an animal's growth, reproduction or mood may be elevated or lowered. Recent studies involving the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTT have shown the short allele of this gene increases synaptic serotonin levels.
Read more about this topic: Serotonin
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)