Today's New York Times has a nice video showing how stimulating a small set of neurons in the amygdala can turn off a rat's motivation to eat. The stimulation relies on a newly discovered technology called 'optogenetics'.
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About the Author
I work at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, where my time is divided between research, teaching and avoiding committees. In grad school I studied olfaction in snakes and salamanders, but I’ve been studying the rat hippocampus and its relations to navigation and memory since the 1980s.
References
Nature Neuroscience:
http://www.nature.com.newproxy.downstate.edu/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3767.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25064852
