nucleus accumbens
Article
nucleus accumbens is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 13, 2022 and August 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the ‘reward center’ of the brain - the nucleus accumbens - monitors actual reward minus predicted reward”; “Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions)”; “ventral striatum (aka nucleus accumbens)“. It most often appears alongside dopamine, Andres, companionate love.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 13, 2022
- Last seen: August 13, 2024
Appears In
- Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness
- Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward
- Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
Related Pages
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- dopamine (3 shared issues)
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- Andres (2 shared issues)
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- companionate love (2 shared issues)
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- Ventral Tegmental Area (2 shared issues)
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- VTA (2 shared issues)
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- 5HT2A serotonin (1 shared issues)
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- acetylcholine (1 shared issues)
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- alcoholism (1 shared issues)
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- Alhadeff et al. (2012) (1 shared issues)
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- Alice (1 shared issues)
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- alpha-adrenergic receptors (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward center” of the brain - the nucleus accumbens - monitors actual reward minus predicted reward. Or to be even more finicky, currently predicted reward minus previously predicted reward. Imagine that on January 1, you hear that you won $1 billion in the lottery. It’s a reputable lottery, they’re definitely not joking, and they always pay up. They tell you that it’ll take a month for them to get the money in your account, and you should expect it February 1. You’re going to be really busy the whole month of February, so you decide not to start spending until March 1. What happens?
I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors:
One neuroscientific perspective on this is that in order for dopamine to track reward prediction *error* (RPE), it is logically necessary that some other piece of neural circuitry track reward prediction *per se*, often called "value." Those of us who think that dopamine is computing RPE on a moment-by-moment basis (the first derivative of value; see Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020) therefore generally also believe that some other part of the brain, especially the ventral striatum (aka nucleus accumbens) and perhaps also the prefrontal cortex, maintains an estimate of value that gets updated by dopamine. And indeed, there are dozens of papers reporting that neural firing in these brain regions correlate with value over and above RPE.
I answered with “Thanks, this is helpful (though I had always thought nucleus accumbens *was* "reward center", is it doing both these things?)”, and they continued:
Let’s go back to the second pathway by which GLP-1 causes weight loss, which goes through the mesolimbic system, aka ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens, aka the reward center.
Inline links: goes through the mesolimbic system
The nucleus tractus solitarii uses neurotransmitter-GLP-1 to inhibit the ventral tegmental area, which then releases less dopamine into the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens act as a multiplier for reward (that is, a given reward feels more rewarding when there’s high dopamine in those areas).