Dr. Casey Halpern

And if you think about these problems, I mean, these are some of the most common conditions in our society today.

And I think the nucleus accumbens and the cortical areas that we've been discussing that sort of send projections to these areas are probably at least one of the main circuits involved in these kinds of things.

Yeah, the nucleus accumbens is a part of the brain, part of our reward circuits.

It has a lot of functions.

It interconnects with many parts of the brain.

So when I started getting interested in reward and what I could do as a surgeon to try to improve how we manage rewards, and what I mean by that specifically is if you have an urge for a reward,

That's a normal phenomenon.

That's not something we're trying to stop.

The issue is if you have an urge for a reward that either puts you or somebody else at risk, it's probably a reward we shouldn't have.

If you're a drug addict and you use heroin or opiate, that opiate might make you feel better because life is stressful.

But the risk of doing those things is really high.

In fact, potentially lethal.

If you have OCD and you...

You can't sleep at night because you're so nervous that you didn't lock the door and you've checked 30 times.

That's an urge we got to treat.

Eating disorder is the same.

This problem can be ameliorated or improved upon by a better understanding and a tailored treatment to the nucleus accumbens specifically.

It seems that repeated exposure to something like a drug of abuse or any type of reward that is a really strong reward

In a way, it can hijack normal functioning of the nucleus accumbens.

So the goal is to just disrupt perhaps what is kind of habitual or at least this kind of recurring problem that is happening.