Intracranial self-stimulation
Intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS), in German: "intracranial self-stimulation " is an experiment in behavioral research in rats carried out for the first time in 1954 by James Olds and Peter Milner .
With the ICSS, the test animal can stimulate itself by pressing a button via an electrode previously implanted by the experimenter in a certain brain area. The rat even prefers such self-stimulation to eating and sex because here addiction centers (“reward centers”, “pleasure centers”) are directly stimulated (e.g. prefrontal cortex , thalamus , nucleus accumbens ). Pain-inducing actions are also accepted, for example crossing an electrified metal grille to reach the button for self-stimulation.
literature
- Birbaumer, N. & Schmidt, RF. (1999, 2006 etc.): Biological Psychology . Berlin: Springer. (P. 676 ff., With a sketch of the experiment).
Individual evidence
- ^ Styliani Vlachou, Athina Markou: Animal Models of Drug Addiction . In: Neuromethods Volume 53, 2011, pp 3-56, Springer-Verlag, here online ; last accessed on April 13, 2014