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Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten
Study shows how a dopamine circuit between two brain regions enables mice to extinguish fear after a peril has passed.
The research therefore pinpoints a potentially critical mechanism of mental health, restoring calm when it works, but prolonging anxiety or even post-traumatic stress disorder when it doesn’t. When the mouse then learns that a place is no longer associated with danger (because they wait there and the zap doesn’t recur), neurons in the posterior basolateral amygdala (pBLA) that express the gene Ppp1r1b encode a new fear extinction memory that overcomes the original dread. The rigorous set of experiments the team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that it’s dopamine sent to the different amygdala populations from distinct groups of neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA).
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