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We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change.
(www.technologyreview.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But as the seconds displayed on a timer at the bottom of the screen tick away, half the mice begin to stir—the first evidence that a chemical agent designed to turn on specific neurons associated with appetite is reaching its targets.
So by exciting the hunger neurons in those mice, Lowell catalyzed a storm of neural activity that spread to the cerebral cortex and other higher-order processing centers, leading directly to a chain of complex goal-directed behaviors (ineffective though they turned out to be).
To answer that question, Lowell has teamed up with Mark Andermann, a neuroscientist who studies how motivation shapes perception (and who also happens to occupy the office next to his at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center).
They believe identifying these neurons will make it possible to study how a simple basic impulse—in this case, a signal from the body that energy stores are beginning to run low and need to be replenished—propagates through the brain to dominate our conscious experience and turn into something far more complex: a series of complicated, often well-thought-out actions designed to get food.
When Lowell opened his own lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the early 1990s, after earning an MD and PhD at Boston University, he studied metabolism in tissues like muscle, organs, and fat that were connected to the brain through the peripheral nervous system.
The discovery added further evidence to the idea that obesity was biologically determined, and more specifically to the concept of a “set point” when it comes to weight—a predetermined weight, fat mass, or other measurable physiological characteristic that the body will defend.
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