A molecule tells the brain whether to put a positive or negative spin on events. Mental disorders may result when the up/down labeling goes awry
For as long as she can remember, Kay Tye has wondered why she feels the way she does. Rather than just dabble in theories of the mind, however, Tye has long wanted to know what was happening in the brain. In college in the early 2000s, she could not find a class that spelled out how electrical impulses coursing through the brain’s trillions of connections could give rise to feelings.
The switch was found in mice in Tye’s study. If it works similarly in humans, it might help a person activate a different track in the brain when hearing an ice cream truck rather than a bear’s growl. This toggling mechanism is essential to survival because animals need to act differently in the contrasting scenarios. “This is at the hub of where we translate sensory information into motivational significance,” Tye says. “In evolution, it’s going to dictate whether you survive.
In a paper published in 2015, Tye, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues found those neurons in a part of the amygdala called the basolateral amygdala. One set was needed for mice to learn that a tone predicted a sip of sugar water, and the other was needed for them to link a noise with a mild electric shock. To locate the cells, the researchers used a technique Tye had developed several years before.
The result: In only one of these populations did the trick disrupt the mice’s ability to learn to associate a tone with sugar or a shock. This set came from the thalamus, a nearby sensory relay station. Deleting neurotensin in those neurons in the thalamus made mice slower to learn about the sucrose reward and faster to encode the shock, as evidenced by behaviors such as running to a spout that delivers sugar water and freezing when predicting a shock.
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