Researchers have discovered a part of the brain that may be responsible for why we crave carnal pleasures, like sex, drugs and chocolate, according to the Daily Mail. A new study from Dartmouth says that the roots of cravings can be traced back to the ventral pallidum, a part of the brain that scientists believe "spurs habitual behavior by associating cues with rewards."
The study attempts to understand this area of the brain in hopes of learning to suppress it in order to deal with unhealthy or unwanted behaviors, like obsessive eating or drug addiction.
They used rats for the research and activated receptors in their brains which they believed suppressed the ventral pallidum, according to Science Daily.
"'Although we have a sense of what brain circuits mediate reward, less is known about the neural circuitry underlying the transfer of value to cues associated with rewards," said the study's lead author Stephen Chang.
The study explains that cues in the brain associate what we see with the reward or pleasure that we can obtain from it - similar to how we can see an advertisement for a type of food and desire it despite not even being hungry, according to EurekAlert.
