PSYC 370 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Striatum, Positron Emission Tomography, Nucleus Accumbens
8 Jul 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
The ventral part of the striatum is also called the nucleus accumbens. When you are talking about the human brain, they tend to go with the term striatum. They don"t say dorsal vs ventral striatum because we don"t get a high enough resolution to tell. Because they can"t look at it with a high degree of precision they just collapse it with the idea of striatum. The dorsal striatum cause people to seek what they are after. This part of the brain has a lot to do with people playing tennis, riding bicycles, -- motor behaviours with a process. Preparatory reward behaviour that gets you to the reward. This gives us a good way to visualize. The drug is radioactive so when people are put in the pet scanner the image shows up brightly lit. Addicts have significantly fewer type 2 dopamine receptors in the striatum. Because the d2 receptors were hit by so much dopamine.
