Shining light on motivation, emotion, and memory processes

Over the last 10 years, methods that combine genetics and optics have neuroscientists glowing about the possibilities to study movement, motivation, reinforcement, emotion and abnormal reward seeking processes such as addiction and obesity. From the fruit fly, rodents, to primates, optogenetics sheds light on the previously unanswered questions. With its specificity and high temporal precision, we gained several insights about the brain processes and we were the witnesses of those changes in the field. Search with the key word “Optogenetic” retrieved close to 1500 articles in PubMed, almost more than 90% of them published in the past 5 years with tremendous progress in several areas of Neuroscience research. This includes dissection of neural circuitries combined with a vast array of behavioral procedures while simultaneously obtaining neurotransmitter measurement and electrophysiological signatures. These developments led us to deconstruct a detailed view of circuits underlying neuropsychiatric disorders. From studying reward, aversion, anxiety, associative learning, habit formation, the tools also applied to study the long lasting and persistent memories, which are bad for the healthy brain (for example, fear and addiction). The scope of the present research topic “Neural circuits underlying emotion and motivation: Insights from optogenetics and pharmacogenetics” is to provide a panoramic view of recent progress in this direction, with special emphasis on circuit level exploration of emotion, motivation and memory. A number of topics are covered which are of great interest to a broad readership. These include reinforcement, motivation under the influence of drugs compulsive consumption of food reward, and formation of habits and reactivation memory. Some of the reviews explicitly addressed the problems and the necessity of developing the next generation tools. We believe, leveraging the knowledge obtained from this research topic in Behavioral Neuroscience will help us to gain deeper insights in the future.