Highlights from The Neurotech Investing and Partnering Conference 2010: Translational Researchers Showcase Innovation

        While venture capitalists have been dialing back on potentially risky early stage investments, translational researchers have been marching ahead. Government funding is pushing new discoveries forward, but sometimes the best of these languish in academic labs where companies and more adventurous investors are less likely to discover them. This year the Neurotech Development Foundation (NDF), a new nonprofit founded to promote the advancement of translational neuroscience research, and several institutes at the NIH (including NINDS, NIMH, and NIA) teamed up to find and showcase the most promising work to Neurotech 2010 attendees in Boston on May 20, 2010.  
         The projects were selected by a steering committee including industry, government and academic representatives.

Rendezvous in Hedonia

Psychiatrist Morten Kringelbach: Our basic pleasures are caused by feelings intimately related to food, sex and social interaction. On a neural level, such sensations are first detected by sensory receptors located throughout the body. These are then decoded in the sensory regions of the brain.  Pleasure is not just a mere stimulation of such receptors, but the result of interactions between anticipation, evaluation and stored away sensations.

Pleasure can therefore be seen as a sweet mix of desire, pleasant sensations and learning.

Understanding the nature of pleasure will help to treat affective disorders.