Motivation, reward and emotion at the circuit level.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Biology of Our Best and Worst Selves
Robert Sapolsky · 2017
Argues that behaviour, including our best and worst acts, traces back through chains of biological causes reaching from a stressful childhood to…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?
Kent Berridge & Terry Robinson · 1998
Argues dopamine drives 'wanting' a reward rather than 'liking' it, separating incentive salience from hedonic pleasure and reward learning as…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Clock Mutants of Drosophila Melanogaster
Ronald Konopka & Seymour Benzer · 1971
Isolates single-gene mutations in fruit flies that shorten, lengthen or abolish the daily activity rhythm, the founding evidence that circadian…
+3 more at this level
11 works
Robert Sapolsky
Argues that behaviour, including our best and worst acts, traces back through chains of biological causes reaching from a stressful childhood to hormones and genes, rather than to free will.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kent Berridge & Terry Robinson
Argues dopamine drives 'wanting' a reward rather than 'liking' it, separating incentive salience from hedonic pleasure and reward learning as distinct processes with distinct circuits.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bruce McEwen
Introduces allostatic load, the cumulative wear from stress hormones meant to protect the body in the short term but that damage it when chronically elevated.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Randy Nelson & Brian Trainor
Reviews how serotonin, vasopressin and steroid hormones interact within a conserved neural circuit to promote or restrain aggressive behaviour across species.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Catherine Dulac & Yael Kimchi
Reviews evidence from mouse pheromone circuits that innate sex-typical behaviours are wired into the same neural circuitry in both sexes and switched on by hormones rather than requiring separate male and female brains.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Sapolsky (Stanford)
Argues that no single discipline explains a behaviour, and works the same act through genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, ethology and culture to show what each level can and cannot account for.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marc Lewis (The Royal Institution)
Argues that addiction is accelerated learning rather than a brain disease, since the changes it produces are the ordinary mechanisms of habit; the claim is actively disputed within addiction medicine.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ronald Konopka & Seymour Benzer
Isolates single-gene mutations in fruit flies that shorten, lengthen or abolish the daily activity rhythm, the founding evidence that circadian timing has a genetic, molecular basis.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan & P. Read Montague
Shows dopamine neurons fire not to reward itself but to the error between predicted and received reward, linking a single cell's signal to formal reinforcement-learning theory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joseph LeDoux
Reviews evidence that a direct, fast thalamo-amygdala pathway lets fear responses to danger begin before the cortex has finished identifying what the danger is.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kent Berridge
Reviews the evidence for and against three competing accounts of dopamine's function and defends incentive salience over reward-prediction-error and hedonic accounts as the best fit to the data.
link checked 17 Sept 2026