That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-The Reticular Activating System

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Next in our series of Neuroscience Bites, we discuss the Reticular Activating System: a brain area important for perception and motor control. 

My name is Olof Kregolsen 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. Well on Sunday we talked about the neuroscience underlying ADHD and right at the end of the podcast, I mentioned that deficits in neurotransmitter release, norepinephrine and dopamine specifically impacted a couple of different brain regions and brain systems. And one of them was the reticular activating system. But I didn't really say much about it. And we haven't talked about it before. Well, I'll instruct you to go to the blog. If you go to olovkrigolson.com, you find life and you look at TNG, you're going to see a blog and you can see a picture of the reticular activating system and really what it does. Now, it's important

to note that the reticular activating system basically acts like a filter or a gate. That's its purpose. So for incoming sensory information, whether it's coming up the spinal cord or in through the eyes, it's basically helping filter it out. It's sort of smoothing it, if you will. Now we're talking about touch receptors, pain receptors, temperature receptors, visual information. So all of this information needs to be filtered so that only important stuff that's very salient gets through. And that's the job of the reticular activating system. It also helps filter motor output. So, output to the motor system gets filtered and smoothed as well. So, it plays a

really crucial role in terms of controlling function. And in something like ADHD, for instance, differences in neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and dopamine, result in a reduction in basically how good the filter is. So the reticular activating system can't filter information the way that we need it to normally, and that results in the differences in behavior that we see. So the reticular activating system, the brain's filter to smooth out all of the sensory input in the world and also to smooth out outgoing motor output. That's all I've got for this bite. I'll see you on Sunday for another episode of the podcast.

Remember, please subscribe. It really helps. Or you can just check out our website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. Anyway, my name is Olive Kregolson and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. Thank you so much for listening.