TWISTS IT? –
April 28, 2026 – I thought that dopamine adaptations alone were unlikely to be sufficient to lead to addiction and that there had to be an important role for glutamate and synaptic plasticity. The brain is obviously changing during addiction — people sometimes describe that as maladaptive learning — and synaptic plasticity is the way that experience changes the brain. And there are glutamate synapses throughout the circuits that connect different brain regions that are important for addiction.
So I started doing experiments to test the role of glutamate in a super-simple rat model of addiction called behavioral sensitization. I was very excited when we got positive results, so I just kept going with this line of work, incorporating better and better animal models and more sophisticated techniques as time went on.
