{"id":242746,"date":"2026-08-15T01:20:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T06:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/curiosity-has-its-own-neural-signal-brain-separates-valuable-information-from-water-rewards-in-mice"},"modified":"2026-08-15T01:20:53","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T06:20:53","slug":"curiosity-has-its-own-neural-signal-brain-separates-valuable-information-from-water-rewards-in-mice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/curiosity-has-its-own-neural-signal-brain-separates-valuable-information-from-water-rewards-in-mice","title":{"rendered":"Curiosity has its own neural signal: Brain separates valuable information from water rewards in mice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/curiosity-has-its-own-neural-signal-brain-separates-valuable-information-from-water-rewards-in-mice.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Often, humans and other animals seek information that can help them complete tasks and attain desired rewards. In some cases, however, they seek information driven simply by curiosity and a desire to obtain knowledge for its own sake, even if it does not lead to external rewards.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Columbia University, Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins University recently created a new experimental paradigm for studying the neural processes associated with curiosity and the desire for knowledge in mice. This paradigm, outlined in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41593-026-02377-y\" target=\"_blank\">a paper in <i>Nature Neuroscience<\/i><\/a>, allowed them to gain new insights into how the brain represents the value of information regardless of physical rewards.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe wanted to understand the neural basis of our desire for knowledge\u2014why we read books, explore, and have such a strong drive to find things out,\u201d Jennifer J. Bussell, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. \u201cEarlier experiments had suggested that the brain responds to information as if it is a reward, to such an extent that even the exact same neurons in the brain\u2019s reward centers respond to predictions of juice and information.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Often, humans and other animals seek information that can help them complete tasks and attain desired rewards. In some cases, however, they seek information driven simply by curiosity and a desire to obtain knowledge for its own sake, even if it does not lead to external rewards. Researchers at Columbia University, Harvard Medical School and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}