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Paulistano of birth but Brazilian of heart, Ivan de Araujo studied philosophy, mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence. Today, a neuroscientist competing between foreign universities is studying the communication between the brain and the body – or, more or less, the functioning of our mammals.
Your research has already appeared in major scientific journals. One of them showed, for example, that the stimulation of the stomach gives a direct pleasure in the brain, beyond satiety pure and simple. He is now evolving in the relationship between obesity and depression and wants to improve the treatment of mental illness.
The work is being played in a new home since August: the Department of Neuroscience Laboratory of the Icahn School of Medicine's Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Araujo spent 11 years in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University.
The Brazilian arrived in the United States in 2004, when he went to do a post-doctorate at Duke University in North Carolina. It's there that he heard about genetically modified mice that did not feel certain tastes. "I still wanted to check if the animals would still like the sugar.In the beginning, they completely ignored the ingredient, but over time, they started looking for more and more sugar."
At a At a given time, animals consumed as much sugar as a sweet-tasting animal. But the crack has nothing to do with flavor because the tests with sweeteners did not have the same effect.
By observing the activity of reward neurons in the brains of these animals, Araujo realized that they were releasing dopamine in the same amount of normal animals.
"This neurotransmitter is fundamental to any motivated behavior: race, addiction, diet, bad.When you eliminate these cells, the animal is completely indifferent to everything.They are starving."
Further research show that if you give the animal a new flavor and you simultaneously feed him food directly into the stomach, he will begin to love that taste more than the others. In a way, he says, the brain has learned to badociate flavor with stimulus from the gastrointestinal system. Thus, it might be possible to reprogram the brain for the choice of less caloric foods.
Depression is also part of the field of study of another neuroscientist regarding obesity. According to his research, even in animals, the induction of a state of obesity causes depressive behaviors, he says.
Since self-image is not a concern for animals, Araujo attempts to identify the relationship between the two problems. It also examines whether altered reward systems in case of obesity and addiction are responsible for depression.
"There is a kind of systemic change in the body that connects the metabolic state to the brain functioning of areas that protect the emotional state".
Araujo also attaches importance to understanding the difference between the distribution of nerves in the nervous system. Central can be explored to improve the effectiveness of the treatment of depression, identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the major ills of our time.
"We study how these nerves enter the brain, which path they take and what are the peripheral parts of the nerve that are relevant to stimulate these central and emotional areas," he says.
By identifying the mechanisms allowing the vagus nerve stimulus to alter the emotional state of the person, it would be possible to improve the response of patients to the therapy, he says.
"And this has great relevance because, in depression, patients who do not respond to drugs are subjected to this type of stimulation," he says.
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