So what are the underlying neural circuits?
For those of you that are not interested in biology and specific nomenclature, you can tune out now if you want, but it's actually pretty straightforward.
You have two main neural circuits in the brain that dopamine uses in order to exert all its effects.
The first one is a pathway that goes from this area in the what's called the ventral tegmentum. That's fancy, but ventral just means bottom, and tegmentum actually means floor.
So it's at the bottom of the brain, and it's the ventral part of the floor.
So it's really low in the back of the brain, the ventral tegmentum.
And it goes from the ventral tegmentum to what's called the ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex.
Now, that's a lot of language, but basically what we call this is the, mesocorticolimbic pathway.
This is the pathway by which dopamine influences motivation, drive and craving.
It involves structures that some of you may have heard of before. Things like nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.
