That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bite-The Ventral Tegmental Area

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Next in our series of Neuroscience Bites, we discuss the Ventral Tegmental Area: a brain area important for processing rewards in the brain. 

Hi, my name is Oliver Krugolson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another neuroscience bite. The last time we did a bite, I talked about the Stubstantia Nigra Pars Compacta, the SNPC. Well, it only seems fair to talk about the ventral tegmental area or the vta the ventral tegmental area is a collection of nuclei that basically is located very close to the floor of the midbrain and why i wanted to talk about the vta is as you know from the last bite the snpc is a part of the dopamine system in the brain. And the dopamine system, of course, is incredibly important because it's tied to drug responses, reward circuitry, depression,

all sorts of cortical functions in psychological states. So by telling you about the SNPC, I only told you half the story. Now, the story with the VTA is much the same. Basically, it projects from this midbrain region out to a lot of the brain. The VTA largely projects to the prefrontal cortex, but it does project to other regions. And those projections, like I said, are tied to rewards and salience, pleasure, euphoria, motor function, fine tuning it, compulsions, even perseveration when you keep doing something over and over again and you can't stop it. So it's important to realize that your dopamine system that we have talked a lot about actually has two parts. There is the SNPC and

there's the VTA. Now, why are there two? Well, no one knows those high-level philosophical answers, but the reality is the SNPC largely reprojects into the midbrain regions, whereas the VTA largely projects out. So it's sort of wired that one is taking care of the frontal parts of the cortex and other parts of the cortex, and the other is more tied to the midbrain regions, like the striatum and the amygdala in the hippocampus. Anyway, so there's two dopamine regions, not one, the SNPC and the ventral tegmental area or VTA. As usual, I'll put up a little blog post just so you can see where it is and you just get a little bit about it. Just so while you're learning about all these cool topics we talk about, like we just talked about how to interpret scientific findings,

you're also learning a bit of neuroanatomy and about the brain. All right, that's all I got for this bite. I'll see you on Sunday for an episode. Remember, of course, just check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's a lot of stuff there. And please, of course, if you can,

subscribe to the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. My name's Olaf Kregolsen and I'm that neuroscience guy.