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Human Brains Have Evolved Unique 'Feel-Good' Circuits A brain system involved in everything from addiction to autism appears to have evolved differently in people than in great apes, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science. The system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a major role in pleasure and rewards. "Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees," says Nenad Sestan, an author of the study and a professor of neuroscience at Yale. That could help explain why human behavior is so different from our nearest relatives even though our brains are remarkably similar, he says. It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism. The finding came from a massive, multicenter effort to compare the brains of several species. Researchers looked at 247 samples of brain tissue from five macaque monkeys, five chimpanzees and six people. They looked at which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. And in most places, the differences among species were subtle. But there was a striking difference in the neocortex, an area of the brain that is much more developed in people than in chimpanzees. The team found that a gene called TH, which is involved in the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of people, but not chimpanzees. "That caught our attention," says Andre Miguel Sousa, another author of the study who works in Sestan's lab at Yale. Dopamine is best known for its role in the brain's reward system, which responds to everything from sex and food to addictive drugs. But dopamine also helps regulate emotional responses, memory and movement. And abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson's, schizophrenia and autism. [...] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/23/566034172/human-brains-have-evolved-unique-feel-good-circuits study http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6366/1027
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