In the first pages of her book Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist working at Stanford University, tells the story of a patient who masturbated for hours a day using a machine he ...

Human beings are programmed to approach pleasure and avoid pain. It's an instinct that dates back millions of years, to a time when people needed to actively seek food, clothing and shelter every day, ...

Researchers have revealed how the brain processes emotions related to sustained pain and pleasure. A team of researchers led by LEE Soo Ahn and WOO Choong-Wan at the Center for Neuroscience Imaging ...

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have zeroed in on the ventral pallidum (VP), an information-processing hub in the brains of mice to discover how VP neurons influence animals' ...

Be it sugar, social media or sex, the response in our brain is the same: It produces the "feel-good" neurochemical called dopamine, which brings on feelings of pleasure and motivation. "It may be even ...

Anticipating pleasure or pain before tasting hot sauce appears to influence how the brain responds to the spicy flavour. “This has broader implications beyond spicy food,” says Yi Luo at East China ...