Home Article The Brain’s Reaction to Unexpected Events

The Brain’s Reaction to Unexpected Events

by Psychology Roots
0 views
A+A-
Reset

The Brain’s Reaction to Unexpected Events

Here in this post, we are discussing “The Brain’s Reaction to Unexpected Events”.  You can read more about psychology-related material on our website. Keep visiting Psychology Roots.

According to recent research from MIT, a surge of noradrenaline may be one way your brain gets your attention when it requires you to focus on something crucial. The locus coeruleus, a subcortical region, is responsible for producing a neuromodulator that may have far-reaching consequences. The MIT group discovered that noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine) plays a crucial role in facilitating the brain’s ability to learn from novel experiences.

Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and the director of MIT’s Simons Center for the Social Brain, says that this work demonstrates that the locus coeruleus encodes unexpected events and that attending to those surprising events is crucial for the brain to take stock of its environment.

Researchers found that noradrenaline, in addition to its function in communicating surprise, serves to motivate behaviour that leads to a reward, especially in instances when it is unknown if a reward would be delivered. The new work has been published today in Nature, and Sur is the corresponding author. Former MIT postdoc turned associate professor at Laval University Vincent Breton-Provencher and current MIT graduate student Gabrielle Drummond wrote the paper’s first and second authors.

The Brain's Reaction to Unexpected Events
The Brain’s Reaction to Unexpected Events

Influencing actions using modulation

Along with dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine, noradrenaline is a neuromodulator that may have an effect on the brain. Neuromodulators, in contrast to neurotransmitters, which allow for communication between individual brain cells, are secreted over extensive regions of the brain.

“Neuromodulatory drugs are considered to perfuse huge portions of the brain and, in doing doing, modify the excitatory or inhibitory drive that neurons are getting in a more point-to-point approach,” explains Sur. They must serve fundamentally critical, system-wide brain tasks that are necessary for life and the control of mental states, according to this evidence.

Dopamine’s significance in driving our desire to seek out rewards has been well-documented, but what other neuromodulators like noradrenaline contribute to these behaviours remains largely unknown. Overproduction of noradrenaline has been related to anxiety despite its role in arousal and increased alertness. The locus coeruleus, the brain’s principal generator of noradrenaline, has been found to receive input from and convey its signals to many other regions. The MIT group’s latest investigation into its function focuses on reinforcement learning, sometimes known as learning by trial and error.

In this experiment, mice were taught to activate a lever in response to a high-frequency tone, but not to a low-frequency tone. Mice who pushed the lever in response to the high-frequency tone were rewarded with water, whereas those that pushed the lever in response to the low-frequency tone were given a squirt of air. When the tones were louder, the mice likewise pushed the lever with more force. During quieter times, they debated whether or not to make an effort to advance. Mice that had their noradrenaline levels lowered were substantially less likely to press the lever in response to low-volume tones, showing that noradrenaline encourages risk-taking when the reward is unclear.

The locus coeruleus “provides vital signals to say, push now, because the reward will arrive,” explains Sur. “The animal is pushing because it wants a reward.” To further support their conclusion that this noradrenaline signal prompts movement, the researchers observed that the neurons responsible for generating it seem to direct most of their output to the motor cortex.

As a sign of surprise

Researchers observed that although an initial jolt of noradrenaline seems to get the mice moving, a second jolt commonly happens after the trial is over. These short spurts occurred when the mice got their predetermined rewards. The bursts were much greater, however, when the trial result was unexpected. The locus coeruleus released a flood of noradrenaline, for instance, when a mouse was given a breath of air rather than the reward it had been anticipating.

When the mouse was unsure whether or not it would be rewarded, it was far less likely to press the lever in future trials. “The animal is always changing its ways,” Sur explains. Even though it has mastered the procedure, it is now adapting its actions to reflect its recent experience. When the mice were given a reward out of the blue during trials, they demonstrated an increase in noradrenaline. These surges seemed to cause noradrenaline to travel throughout the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and other higher cognitive processes.

Surprise is a moderating factor in all of our actions, therefore it seems reasonable that the locus coeruleus’s surprise-encoding role would be more broad in the brain, as anticipated by Sur. The team plans to investigate the possibility of synergy between noradrenaline and other neuromodulators, in particular dopamine, which similarly reacts to unexpected rewards. Moreover, they seek to get insight into how the prefrontal cortex maintains the short-term memory of information from the locus coeruleus in order to aid the animals in future trials.

This study was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Simons Foundation (through the Simons Center for the Social Brain) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC), as well as the Quebec Research Funds (Fonds de recherche du Québec), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD Young Investigator Award), and the NIH BRAIN Initiative.

Help Us Improve This Article

Have you discovered an inaccuracy? We put out great effort to give accurate and scientifically trustworthy information to our readers. Please notify us if you discover any typographical or grammatical errors.
Make a comment. We acknowledge and appreciate your efforts.

Share With Us

If you have any scale or any material related to psychology kindly share it with us at psychologyroots@gmail.com. We help others on behalf of you.

Follow

Related Posts

Leave a Comment