This video, we're going to be going over neurotransmitters in a bit more detail. So neurotransmitters can either be excitatory or inhibitory. An excitatory neurotransmitter essentially increases the probability of our neuron becoming active and firing an action potential. This is kind of the equivalent of, like, if our presynaptic neuron was like hey, we have a message, we have to send it along, and then those neurotransmitters would make our postsynaptic neuron much more likely to fire that action potential and send that signal along. Now, in contrast, an inhibitory neurotransmitter is going to decrease the probability of the neuron firing an action potential.
So this is kind of the equivalent of like if our presynaptic neuron was like, hey, let's not send that one, and then that's going to basically decrease the chance of our postsynaptic neuron firing an action potential. Okay? So neurotransmitters can be excitatory or inhibitory. Now, we are going to go over some of the major neurotransmitters as well as their known effects. Now, this list is by no means exhaustive but this is typically what students are expected to know at this level.
So we're going to begin with glutamate, and glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. And one way that you can or maybe remember this is that if you've ever heard of MSG, it's what people use to often, like, make their food taste better, well the g in MSG is actually glutamate, it's monosodium glutamate. So I always think about how MSG kind of excites our taste buds to help me remember that glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. Now, next up we have GABA which stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid. Luckily, nobody calls it that, we all just call it GABA.
GABA is basically the opposite of glutamate, so it is going to be the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. All right? So, GABA will basically kind of slow things down and make it less likely for neurons to have action potentials. Okay? Next up, we have some that you've probably heard of.
We have serotonin. Serotonin has been heavily implicated in mood, which you may have heard about. We often talk about serotonin in the context of, like, depression. So serotonin is very important for mood. It is also important for sleep and appetite, and I know in my mind these things kind of group together very naturally.
Quite often if my mood isn't so great it's because my sleep or my food intake has been impacted in some way. So serotonin is important for mood, sleep, and appetite. Next up, we have dopamine. And dopamine, you may know it as kind of like the happy neurotransmitter or the happy chemical. It's very important for reward processing.
So, you know, dopamine essentially makes us feel good. It makes us feel happy. And so when we are doing an activity that makes us feel good, we get a little hit of dopamine in our brain, which our brain kind of processes as a reward. So dopamine is important for reward processing. It's also very important for movement.
So things like Parkinson's disease are very implicated in dopamine. Dopamine basically is not being produced in adequate quantities with Parkinson's and so that can lead to unwanted movements like tremors. So if we have something going wrong with dopamine we end up with some kind of dysfunction of movement. Dopamine has also been implicated in things like attention as well as cognitive function, so dopamine is doing a lot in our brains. I would say at this level the most important for you to probably know is that it's important for reward processing.
So just kind of think dopamine makes us feel happy, our brain interprets that as a reward. And then finally, another really important neurotransmitter is norepinephrine, and norepinephrine is involved in our fight or flight response, and one easy way to remember that is just that epinephrine is basically just the scientific name for adrenaline. Of course, when we think fight or flight we think about like adrenaline and that kind of rush that we get to help us engage with a threatening stimulus, right? Alright. So those are some of the major neurotransmitters in our brain and I will see you guys in our next video to talk a little bit more about neurotransmitters and how we can get them out of that synapse.
Bye bye.