{"id":99450,"date":"2019-12-07T22:44:22","date_gmt":"2019-12-08T06:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/internal-brain-timers-linked-with-motivation-and-behavior"},"modified":"2019-12-07T22:44:22","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T06:44:22","slug":"internal-brain-timers-linked-with-motivation-and-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/internal-brain-timers-linked-with-motivation-and-behavior","title":{"rendered":"Internal brain timers linked with motivation and behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QhBiV1LLE2A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Time can be measured in many ways: a watch, a sundial, or the body\u2019s natural circadian rhythms. But what about the sexual behavior of a fruit fly?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you ask a bunch of scientists whether animals can keep time, many would say they cannot, that things happen over time\u2014but time itself is not measured,\u201d says Michael Crickmore, Ph.D., a researcher in Boston Children\u2019s Hospital\u2019s F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center whose laboratory studies motivation. But in new research published in the journal <i>Neuron<\/i> in collaboration with the lab of Dragana Rogulja, Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School, he shows that the mating <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/behavior\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">behavior<\/a> of fruit flies is not haphazard. Instead, motivation and behavior are under the control of <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/neurons\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neurons<\/a> that track time.<\/p>\n<p>Crickmore uses the mating drive in <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/male+flies\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">male flies<\/a> to study how motivations are produced by the brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Time can be measured in many ways: a watch, a sundial, or the body\u2019s natural circadian rhythms. But what about the sexual behavior of a fruit fly? \u201cIf you ask a bunch of scientists whether animals can keep time, many would say they cannot, that things happen over time\u2014but time itself is not measured,\u201d says [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99450","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\/99450","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\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}