Shining light on motivation, emotion, and memory processes

Over the last 10 years, methods that combine genetics and optics have neuroscientists glowing about the possibilities to study movement, motivation, reinforcement, emotion and abnormal reward seeking processes such as addiction and obesity. From the fruit fly, rodents, to primates, optogenetics sheds light on the previously unanswered questions. With its specificity and high temporal precision, we gained several insights about the brain processes and we were the witnesses of those changes in the field. Search with the key word “Optogenetic ” retrieved close to 1500 articles in PubMed, almost more than 90 % of them pub-lished in the past 5 years with tremendous progress in several areas of Neuroscience research. This includes dissection of neural circuitries combined with a vast array of behavioral procedures while simultaneously obtaining neurotransmitter measurement and electrophysiological signatures. These developments led us