Distributed brain systems for motivation and action

The brain is important for learning and deciding what it is good to do. For example, when we decide between visiting a restaurant or museum or not even bothering to leave the house at all. These mechanisms may not work optimally in psychological illnesses such as depression. As a consequence people may evaluate their opportunities incorrectly and feel apathetic. Because these learning, decision-making, and motivation problems are so important, they depend on complex, coordinated neural activity between subcortical nuclei (groups of cells deep in the brain) and prefrontal cortex (more recently evolved brain regions especially prominent in humans). Recently, it became possible to measure and even alter activity levels in the brain circuits we think are important in humans. We seek to exploit these new techniques to understand how these circuits enable learning about costs and benefits of courses of action and to make decisions between them.