Alcohol has long been used in social situations and has been considered a luxury item that helps improve sociality, but until now, its neural circuit mechanism has been unknown.

　When a mouse feels fear, it shrugs its limbs and becomes immobile, and the length of time indicates the degree of fear.In the experiment, it was confirmed that the mice have empathy because they behave immobile even when they see their feared companions.In addition, the research group found that feeding mice with ethanol showed sympathetic-like behavior that increased akinesia for fellow pain (electric shock).

　Furthermore, by observing neurons in the brain of alcohol-treated mice, we found that the neural activity that responds to fellow pain is similar to the neural activity that responds when oneself actually receives pain.In other words, it is thought that alcohol tends to cause a brain state as if oneself is in the same situation when witnessing an emotional change of another person.It was also clarified that such changes in brain behavior are caused by the regulation of the balance between the excitatory signal and the inhibitory signal of the neural circuit by alcohol.

　This study not only showed the mechanism by which alcohol promotes empathy, but also revealed that the brain diverts its own emotional circuit as a circuit for empathy with others, and the mechanism of empathy. Great progress has been made towards elucidation.This result is expected to be a stepping stone for the development of a treatment for autism spectrum disorders, which is characterized by decreased empathy.

Paper information:[Nature Communications] Ethanol facilitates socially-evoked memory recall in mice by recruiting pain-sensitive anterior cingulate cortical neurons