IMPROVE YOUR GAME NOW –
July 3, 2025 – I am a behavioral neuroscientist studying addiction, and my team is interested in how reward memories are formed and processed in the brain. We study how memories linked to natural rewards such as food, water and sex differ from those linked with rewards from drugs such as fentanyl and cocaine.
Understanding the differences between these types of rewards and how memories of different drugs interact may lead to more effective treatments for addiction.
To study reward memories, it is important to understand the neurobiology of memory, or how the brain remembers things.
In 1904, evolutionary zoologist Richard Semon introduced the term engram to describe the physical representation of a memory – also called its trace – that forms in the brain after an experience. Later, psychologist Donald Hebb hypothesized that interconnected brain cells that are active at the same time during an experience form a physical ensemble that make up a memory.
In the past decade, neuroscientists have developed new tools that support the idea that neuronal ensembles, or small populations of brain cells that are activated at the same time, are likely the physical representation of memory. How new memories recruit neurons into ensembles is not fully understood, but the plasticity of neurons – their ability to change their connections with each other – seems to play a major role.
