Two days from now, our paper on octopamine and flight performance will appear in the Journal of Neuroscience. You can get the PDF file already today from here. Very soon, I'll also have an HTML version ready with all the figures in color (which wasn't possible in this journal).

What we describe in this paper is the very interesting finding that octopamine, a biogenic amine mediating reward in insects, is also involved in controlling behavior, in this case flight initiation and maintenance. This is interesting because also in humans the circuits mediating reward and those responsible for controlling behavior are using the same transmitter, in the case of humans dopamine. Obviously, there needs to be a lot more research, but for now this is consistent with the hypothesis that reward systems may have evolved from the systems controlling behavior, or co-evolved with them. The reason for this hypothesis is that for all animals tested, controlling behavior and controlling the environment with behavior has rewarding properties. So maybe this octopamine/dopamine parallel is not just a statistical coincidence, but there is an evolutionary reason for reward-mediating transmitter systems to also be involved in the control of behavior.