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This monkey has been trained...
...that when the little light comes on...
"It's one of those sessions where I can now get food."
..and it knows that "If I press this lever ten times...
...after a little bit of a delay, I'll get some food...
...if I press the lever ten more times...
...I'll get some more food." It understands the task.
So what do we have here? We have first a signal...
The light coming on, saying: "It's one of those sessions, we're starting one of those."
Then the monkey does the work, and then with a delay it gets the reward.
And what everyone initially thought was dopamine would go up after the reward.
That's not when it goes up, it goes up when the signal comes on.
What's this? This is the monkey there sitting and saying:
"I know this, I know the drill, I know this, I'm on top of this, this is gonna be great...
...I know what I do know, this is completely perfect, 100% I'm going for it today.
Dopamine is not about pleasure, it's about the anticipation of pleasure.
It's about the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself.
And what's most remarkable is experimentally, if you block that rise of dopamine from occuring...
...you don't get the work, you don't get the behavior. This is not only the anticipation...
...but this is what is capable of eliciting goal directed behavior.
Amazing elaboration on this which now begins to tell us something real familiar.
Ok, so in this study, elaboration, rather than this design you press the lever...
...a right number of times you get the reward.
You do the work, you get the reward 100% of the times, that's how it works.
Now instead shift to where you get the reward only 50% of the time.
You do the work and only about half the time you get the reward.
So what happens to dopamine levels there, this is what they do, they go through the roof!
Because what have you just done, you've introduced the word "maybe" into the equation...
...and maybe is addictive like nothing else out there. As the light comes on and you're doing the:
"I know how this works, this is gonna be great but I screwed up last time, because I didn't get the food...
...but this time, I'm feeling good today. But I'm a total screw-up and I'm inadequate...
...in junior high school and it was terrible but maybe this time is my lucky day."
Just vacillating all over the place. What we see here is dopamine comes pouring out like mad.
It's the uncertainty of the reward. And here's the really elegant thing they did in that study.
Now instead of a 50% reward rate either a 25% or a 75%.
This are diametrically opposite states, worse news-better news...
...the only thing they have in common is you decrease the level of unpredictability and...
...the rise of dopamine winds up being halfway between the 50% and the 100%.
And what's this about? This is the world of brilliant social engineering by humans...
...say in Las Vegas who understand how to design a place to take a curve where somebody has a...
...gazillion from 1% chance of getting a reward and making you think...
...because it's the special day in this casino, and you especially are so much tilted to the right...
...that you are gonna get, and humans are profoundly manipulatable in this realm.
And, it turns out, so are other species, the exact same neurochemistry.
So what winds up being unique about us? What you see is, with humans...
...it's the time dimention. You get the signal, you do the work, you get the reward.
And the question becomes: "How much time, lag time, can there be between the work...
...and the reward, to still elicit the behavior, to still get the work coming out.
And we have just entered uniquely human terrain there for the very simple reason...
...that probably most of us recognize, which is somewhere along the way...
...almost all of us work very hard at school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college...
...to get into a good grad school, to get a good job, to get into the nursing home of our choice, that sort of thing.
And what we see is this astonishing ability of humans to keep those dopamine levels up...
...for decades and decades waiting for the reward. And in the most bizarre, unique realm of this in humans...
...sometimes we can maintain it with a belief system where the reward doesn't come in our lifetime.
The reward comes after our death, the reward comes in our afterlife...
...the reward comes onto the next generations and there's no monkey out there...
...who's willing to level-press all the time because of what St. Peter is gonna think...
...somewhere down the line. So that is unique about us.