Pleasure centers help the immune system. Free Technical Library News

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Pleasure centers help the immune system

18.07.2016

The feeling of pleasure, the feeling of satisfaction from the work done, from food, from sex, etc. is born in the reinforcement system of the brain - this is the name for a group of interconnected nerve centers, which include both certain areas of the cortex and subcortical areas.

The reinforcement system largely determines the motivation of actions, makes us strive for our goals, and helps to plan actions to achieve these goals. It is known that the placebo effect is also somehow connected with it: when a person takes a medicine, his system of reinforcement works - apparently due to the fact that we feel that we are being treated and everything is going as it should. The trick is that the same reaction occurs in response to a dummy pill, which is passed off as real medicine. But the placebo effect sometimes really helps with illness. Maybe it's all about the signal from the nerve centers of pleasure? It is only necessary to understand where it is moving from the brain and what specific effect it has.

One of the key divisions of the reinforcement system is the ventral region of the tegmentum, which is part of the midbrain. Asya Rolls and her colleagues at the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel excited neurons in the ventral tegmental region of mice, and then took immune cells from these mice and added pathogenic strains of E. coli to them. It turned out that immune cells, after activating the reinforcement system, are twice as effective at killing microbes: both on their own, in the form of a cell culture, and when they enter the body of other mice, in which nothing in the brain was stimulated.

Further experiments showed that the ventral tegmental region influences immunity through the sympathetic nervous system. This is the name of the department of the autonomic (or autonomic) nervous system, whose task is to maintain the work of internal organs in an autonomous mode from the brain (the brain itself, if such a need arises, can interfere with the work of the autonomic nervous system). One of the tasks of the sympathetic department is a reaction to any stress, it mobilizes the body's forces for vigorous activity, increases metabolism, etc.

Stress, on the other hand, is associated with danger: there is a high risk of getting injured and getting infected, so it is quite logical that the sympathetic nerve centers activate the immune system too. And what about the reinforcement system? Given that she feels when an individual has some kind of pleasure, whether it be food or sexual contact. But both are also associated with the risk of infection.

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