Functional opposition between habenula metabolism and the brain reward system

Matsumoto and Hikosaka (2007) provided the first electrophysiological evidence that lateral habenula (LHb) neurons are inhibited by stimuli predicting reward and excited by stimuli predicting no reward, in exact opposition to the firing responses of midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons. Discovering the temporal relationship between LHb neuronal activity and negative reward prediction was groundbreaking. But for the metabolic brain-mapping field, development of a more general model of functional opposition between the LHb and the brain reward system (BRS) began with metabolic findings in the 1980s (Shumake and Gonzalez-Lima, 2003).