Electrical hypothalamic stimulation in rats induces hyperthermia if and only if they learn to self-stimulate.
Handling and exposure to a novel environment has been shown to produce an emotional fever in rats. Electrical stimulation of lateral hypothalamus sites produced a rise of intracranial temperature not different from this emotional fever. Once the rats learned to self-stimulate, the same electrical stimulation produced a rise of the intracranial temperature significantly higher than the emotional fever. During the autoshaping for self-stimulation a significant relationship was found between the rise of the intracranial temperature and time expressed as successive days of self-stimulation training, or between the rise of intracranial temperature and the increasing frequency of operant responses. This seems to indicate that when the rats learned to self-stimulate, an initially nonsense signal, without specific thermal effect, was transformed into a neural or neurochemical code producing a new or modified effect which was a significantly higher fever.
Briese
E
E
Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela.
Rada
P
P
Hernandez
L
L
D000818:Animals; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001833:Body Temperature Regulation / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D007026:Hypothalamic Area, Lateral / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009042:Motivation; D051381:Rats; D011919:Rats, Inbred Strains; D012653:Self Stimulation / Q000502:physiology*