Dr. Robert Malenka: How Your Brain's Reward Circuits Drive Your Choices

In this episode, my guest is Robert Malenka, MD, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine who has made numerous seminal discoveries of how the brain changes (neuroplasticity) in response to learning and in response to rewarding and reinforcing experiences. We discuss the brain’s several reward systems involving dopamine and serotonin and how these motivate us to seek out specific behaviors and substances. We discuss how these reward systems are modified based on context and our memories, and how they can be hijacked toward maladaptive drug seeking in addiction. We also explore how reward systems influence social connections, oxytocin and empathy and how that applies to our understanding of autism spectrum disorders. This episode should be of interest to those interested in neuroplasticity, social bonding, addiction, autism, learning and motivation.

Articles

• Distinct neural mechanisms for the prosocial and rewarding properties of MDMA (Science Translational Medicine)
• Oxytocin receptor is not required for social attachment in prairie voles (Neuron)
• Gating of social reward by oxytocin in the ventral tegmental area (Science)
• Anterior cingulate inputs to nucleus accumbens control the social transfer of pain and analgesia (Science)
• Social reward requires coordinated activity of nucleus accumbens oxytocin and serotonin (Nature)
• Selective filtering of excitatory inputs to nucleus accumbens by dopamine and serotonin (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Serotonin receptor regulation as a potential mechanism for sexually dimorphic oxytocin dysregulation in a model of Autism (Brain Research)
• 5-HT modulation of a medial septal circuit tunes social memory stability (Nature)

Other Resources

• MapLight
• Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
• MindMed