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The discovery of self-stimulation and other stories

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The author's recollections of the events leading to the discovery of rewarding brain stimulation at McGill University in 1953, with a history of his subsequent attempts to find a learning theory congruent with the phenomenon.

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      Olds and Milner noted that a rat that had been implanted with an electrode, within what was later identified to be the nucleus accumbens, preferentially spent time in the area where it had received electrical stimulation through the electrode the day prior (Olds and Milner, 1954). Further, when rats were trained to press a lever to electrically stimulate the electrodes themselves, they would press the lever repeatedly at astonishing rates reaching thousands of times per hour (Milner, 1989; Olds and Milner, 1954). Similar observations were then made in humans a short time later (Bishop et al., 1963).

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      The discovery by Olds and Milner in 1954 that rats will avidly work to self-administer electrical stimulation to some regions of the brain was a remarkable beginning to the study of brain reward circuitry [245]. In addition to the eruption in the scientific community provoked by this finding, newspaper headlines reading the “brain pleasure area” had been discovered and that “it may prove the key to human behaviour” stirred up much public excitement (The Montreal Star; March 12, 1954) [225]. Also known as brain stimulation reward (BSR), this phenomenon is considered to tap into the neural circuitry that conveys the rewarding properties of natural stimuli and behaviours.

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