In Dr. Buhr’s talk, he discussed how psychological stress can lead to long lasting effects on physical activity, decreasing it. In his experiment, the rats exposed to 100 tail shocks exhibited the greatest decrease in voluntary wheel running, with this effect persisting through the nine-week study. The researchers also examined whether stress affected the rats’ ability to run on a treadmill. Once the rats became more accustomed to the treadmill, the rats going through stress stopped running before the non-stressed rats. After imaging their brains, researchers found that there were differences in dopamine and other neurotransmitters between the groups. This suggests that stress can affect physical activity through changes in the brain systems involved in motivation and reward.
This talk made me think of my own research in Dr. Steidl’s lab, where I study the dopamine system and its role in reward seeking behavior. Over the course of my research, I have become increasingly interested in how neural circuits influence whether an animal engages in a behavior associated with reward. To answer these kinds of questions, I usually frame it in a reward-seeking context, but Dr. Buhr’s talk made me consider how similar mechanisms might influence a behavior like exercise. This led me to wonder if changes in an animal’s neural systems involved in motivation could affect how willing it is to engage in a behavior that would otherwise be rewarding.
To explore this idea further, I found the article “Gut microbes may affect motivation to exercise” from the NIH by Dohnalová, who investigated how gut microbiomes influenced exercise in mice. They found that gut microbes can produce molecules that activate sensory neurons and increase dopamine signaling in the ventral striatum during exercise. The researchers also depleted the mice’s gut biomes, which showed a reduced exercise performance and lower exercise-related dopamine responses. Once the dopamine signaling was reactivated, they were able to restore their exercise capacity. These findings exhibit how communication between the gut and brain can influence motivation to do physical activity.
Although a different mechanism was discussed in Dr. Buhr’s talk, the connection between the two articles was interesting to me. From the talk, I learned that stress can produce lasting changes in physical activity, whereas the article explored how signals originating in the gut can influence dopamine signaling and exercise performance. Both of these findings show that physical activity is influenced by multiple biological processes rather than just an animal's ability to move. This could show that more research about how different experiences and physiological processes might affect the brain systems involved in motivation.
These studies made me rethink how I approach inactivity in daily life. It made me recognize the complexity and nuance in assuming that someone who struggles to exercise does not simply lack discipline or willpower, but could have a multitude of factors affecting their behavior. These findings suggest that motivation is a complex process influenced by experiences and biological systems that interact with the brain. As someone who does dopamine and reward seeking behavior, I find it fascinating that dopamine related mechanisms can contribute to different types of motivated behavior, such as exercise. Using these studies, more research can be done to find a way to directly apply these findings from mice to humans and develop better ways to encourage physical activity.
Buhr, Trevor J., et al. “The persistence of stress-induced physical inactivity in rats: An investigation of central monoamine neurotransmitters and skeletal muscle oxidative stress.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 1169151. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1169151
Dohnalová, L., Lundgren, P., Carty, J.R.E. et al. A microbiome-dependent gut–brain pathway regulates motivation for exercise. Nature 612, 739–747 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05525-z
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