A partial history of the serotonin literature

If you ask two scientists what serotonin does in the brain, you’re sure to get three different answers. How did we get here?

I’m in Okinawa this week to talk about serotonin, and as part of my visit I gave an informal overview of some of the main schools of thought about the involvement of serotonin in reward learning, where these ideas come from, and why they’ve been (mostly) drifting further apart instead of coalescing around a unifying theory. As a visual aid, I put together an interactive diagram connecting some papers from the past two decades that I find particularly influential. Clicking on different points in the diagram will pull up key results and ideas from individual papers, plus (for selected works) a short discussion of how these ideas fit into broader themes.

You can find the diagram here or by clicking on the video below.