[note from Dr. Martini: At some point soon, please watch Sweet Misery, a great victim's film about aspartame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toKyRlpmG7A]
From an article published 26 June 2018 By Maria Cohut in Nature Communications:
What is serotonin and what does it do? Serotonin is a chemical that transmits messages between nerve cells. Known as the happy chemical, serotonin plays a major role in the body by contributing to well-being, good mood, appetite, memory, and sleep. This article looks at what happens when a person is deficient in serotonin, and whether it can aid depression.
The neurotransmitter serotonin is linked to the control of mood,
though it also helps to regulate various other functions, such as sleep and sexual
desire. New research has uncovered another role played by serotonin: boosting
learning speed.
Serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is key to the regulation of
emotions, also plays a role in learning processes.
Though variations in serotonin levels
are linked to mood disorders such as depression,
we still do not know that much about all the roles played by this
neurotransmitter. Some previous study papers have linked it with memory and neuroplasticity, or the
brain's ability to continuously adapt throughout a person's life so as to
preserve health and cognitive function.
Scientists from Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU) in Lisbon, Portugal,
and University College London (UCL) in the UK have found that serotonin is
involved in learning processes, by contributing to the speed at which we learn
new information, as the researchers explain in a paper now
published in the journal Nature Communications.
The study tested how quickly the animals would be able to adapt their behavior
to a given situation. Serotonin seemed to play a role in this process.
"The study found that serotonin enhances the speed of learning,"
explains study co-author Zachary Mainen, from the CCU. "When serotonin
neurons were activated artificially, using light, it made mice quicker to adapt
their behavior in a situation that required such flexibility," he adds.
"That is, they gave more weight to new information and therefore changed
their minds more rapidly when these neurons were active."
The researchers exposed the mice to a learning task, in which the aim was to find water. "Animals were placed in a chamber where they had to poke either a water-dispenser on their left side or one on their right which, with a certain probability, would then dispense water, or not," says study author Madalena Fonseca, of the CCU, explaining the experiment template.
The mice kept trying to get water from the dispensers, and they
learned how they were more likely to find it based on trial and error. how long
the animals waited between attempts tended to vary; the animals made another
attempt at getting water immediately after having already tried, and sometimes
they waited longer before another trial; and the mice tended wait longer
between attempts at the beginning and end of a day's experimental session.
This led the researchers to hypothesize that the animals might still be quite
distracted and uninterested in the task at hand, "perhaps hoping to get
out from the experimental chamber." At the end of a session, the mice may
lack motivation to keep on searching for water because, by that time, they may
already have had their fill.
The variability observed eventually led the team to understand how serotonin
might affect learning and decision-making. Depending on the waiting time
preferred by mice between their attempts to find water, they also employed one
of two kinds of strategies in order to maximize the likelihood of success in
their trials.
With short intervals of waiting time between the animals'
attempts, the scientists noticed that the mice tended to base their strategy on
the outcome successful or unsuccessful of the preceding trial. If the mice had
just succeeded in retrieving water from one dispenser, they would try the same
one again. If this one now failed, they would then move on to the other dispenser.
This approach is referred to as the "win-stay-lose-switch" strategy.
In the case of longer intervals of waiting time, the mice were more likely to
make a choice based on accumulated past experiences.
The mice employed their working memory, or the type of short-term memory that
leads to adaptive decision-making based on immediate experience, and they also
used their long-term memory, accessing already stored knowledge that had been
built over time.
Serotonin makes learning more efficient
Using optogenetics a
technique that employs light to manipulate molecules in living cells the CCU
researchers stimulated the serotonin-producing cells in the mice's brains to
see how raised levels of this neurotransmitter might affect the animals'
behavior in the learning task. When they analyzed the accumulated data, taking
into account waiting time intervals between the mice's trials, they concluded
that higher serotonin levels amplified how effectively the animals learned from
previous experiences. This, however, only applied to choices made following
longer waiting intervals.
"Serotonin is always enhancing learning from reward, but this effect is
only apparent on a subset of the animals' choices," notes study co-author
Masayoshi Murakami, of the CCU.
"On most trials," adds UCL researcher Kiyohito Iigaya, "choice
was driven by a 'fast system,' where the animals followed a
win-stay-lose-switch strategy. But on a small number of the trials, we found
that this simple strategy didn't explain the animals' choices at all. We
instead found that animals followed their 'slow system,' in which it was the
reward history over many trials, and not only the most recent trials, that
affected their choices. Moreover, serotonin affected only these latter choices,
in which the animal was following the slow system."
Links with mood and behavior
The findings may explain why selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors (SSRIs) a drug type that boosts serotonin levels and that is used in
the treatment of depression are most effective when used in combination
with cognitive
behavioral therapy(CBT).
While SSRIs tackle depression by addressing chemical imbalances in the brain,
CBT's objective is to change behavioral responses to improve symptoms of
depression.
"Our results suggest that serotonin boosts plasticity by influencing the
rate of learning," adding that this resonates with the fact that treatment
with an SSRI can be more effective when combined with so-called cognitive
behavioral therapy, which encourages the breaking of habits in patients."
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Serotonin Boosts Learning Speed: Aspartame depletes it!
Notes by Dr. Betty Martini
This is an excellent article on serotonin as affected by the carcinogenic and neurotoxic artificial sweeteners, in that aspartame depletes serotonin; this article explains serotonin enhances learning, not just mood. There has been in my city of Atlanta numberous discussions of why students can't learn.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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