© ROB STRONGWhen Kyle Smith was a kid, he didn’t like science. “I didn’t do very well” in the subject, he says. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, he initially saw himself going into film or television production, but he says the jump to psychology with a neuroscience bent wasn’t really such a big one. With film, “basically you start out with nothing, come up with an idea, figure out how to get it done, be creative, make it interesting to people. . . . push boundaries, [which] is exactly the same kind of thing I’ve found in science,” Smith says.
Smith was drawn to psychology partly by the problem of drug addiction. “Watching people go through that, it just hijacks the person in a sad but really fascinating way,” he says. As an undergraduate he studied at the University of Oxford, focusing on “the neuroscience side of psychology,” which further hooked him, so Smith became a graduate student in the lab of Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan.
Berridge’s group had previously found that ablating a region of the rodent brain called the ventral pallidum (VP) wiped out the animals’ reward response so completely that they stopped eating. To learn more about specific areas involved in the reward response, Smith used tiny syringes to inject neurotransmitter-mimicking chemicals into preimplanted tubes in the brains of ...
