By analogy to a piano's sustain pedal, emotional responses to sensory stimuli require the brain's "sustain pedal" to be activated, allowing signals to persist and accumulate.

One high level takeaway is that emergence of emotional responses in mammals seems to rely on the brain's capacity to sustain persistent activity dynamics. By pharmacologically disrupting this ability of the brain, we blunt emotional responses in both humans and mice.

Emotions are core to the human experience 😆😮🙂😊☹️😠😳😑
But how do they arise? Our brain-wide ⚡recordings in humans and mice reveal some answers @ScienceMagazine. A big team effort and debut paper from @Stanford's new Human Neural Circuitry program. bit.ly/4dEyX7Z