Principles of Behavioral Neuroscience

Humans have about one-hundred billion neurons.  Cats have about a billion.  We win.

My cat’s name is Emma.  Her one billion neurons are enough for her to find her way through her environment.  They allow her to carry out physical gymnastics like jumping gracefully from the dresser to the bed.  They allow her to occasionally seek my affection — when she considers me worthy of giving it to her.  That happens mostly around feeding time which is at 9am and 5pm.  And that brings me to her most impressive trait:  she can tell when it’s her mealtime – with about 10-minute accuracy.

Her one billion neurons are also enough, I imagine, for her to have a mind.   But what is a mind?   The mind’s contents include everything we (you, me, and Emma) experience.  The mind includes all our sensations, our emotions, our thoughts (verbal and non-verbal), even our dreams.

The mind is the stage upon which we represent both the outer world of things around us – sights, sounds, and the rest, and also the inner world of our own desires and concerns.  For those of us who study psychology, the mind is not only the stage upon which our lives play out, but also the focus of our professional work.

The focus of my work is on motivation and habit learning and their brain underpinnings.  The basal ganglia keep a record of our pleasure experiences, our ‘rewards’, and the actions that bring about those rewards. The basal ganglia also allow us to form habits to carry out behaviors that have led to reward in the past – without having to pay much attention as we carry them out.

As I type this post, my cat, Emma, enters the room and looks at me.  Now she turns away and leaves. Ten seconds later she’s back.  It’s getting near her feeding time, and she’s becoming particularly alert.  I imagine basal ganglia circuits in her brain are driving her to seek out food-related stimuli – stimuli like me, since I feed her. She seems to realize that the more time she spends in my presence, the more likely I am to feed her on time.  If she bothers me enough, I may even feed her a little early– just to get her off my back.   For Emma, I’ve become a reward-related cue, and sniffing at me around mealtime has become a reward-associated action.  She’s even somehow learned how to press the power button that turns off my laptop screen.  No lie.

But I feel sure that her neural circuits give her something more than just a collection of cognitive, motivational, and behavioral functions. They also give her a mind, a stage upon which her life plays out. A stage that’s interacting with my own right now.