https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wDgei7bfdN8
Now, dopamine will signal if you lay out a structure of behavior and that structure of behavior produces the desired outcome. You get a dopamine kick that feels good, which is sort of the generalized element, but the dopamine also preferentially encourages the neural structures that were active in the sequencing of that behavior to grow and flourish. And that’s the distinction between reward and reinforcement. But you talk about anticipation, and I know I’m missing something there. So will you walk me through in a little bit more detail how the dopamine system works in relationship specifically to anticipation of the future rather than just responding, say to successful behavior? So you know, unpacking this a bit, exactly what you were referring to, like take a rat, take a monkey, take a college freshman and Psych 101, whatever, and give them a totally unexpected reward from out of nowhere. And you can show that there’s activation of dopaminergic reward pathways in the limbic system. And you can do that with functional imaging, you could do that with something invasive with your lab animal, whatever. Okay, dopamine is about reward. It’s completely about reward. If somebody cocaine and they will release more dopamine than any vertebrate in all of history has ever been able to do. And yeah, it’s about reward until you then get a little bit more subtle with your paradigm. And now you take that, you know, human rat monkey and put them in a setting where you’ve trained them in a contingency. A little light comes on, which means now if they go over to this lever and hit the lever 10 times, they’ll then get a reward, signal work reward, signal work reward. And as soon as they’ve learned it, when does dopamine go up? And what we think we just learned from the first example is when you get the reward, nodding, it goes up when the signal turns on, because that’s you sitting there saying, I know how this works. I know how that light helps me. I’m on top of this. I know that lever pressing. I’m really good at it. I’m in familiar territory. Exactly. And I have agency. And this is going to be great. It’s about the anticipation. So why I have agency? Why use that phrase? Because that’s very interesting, right? Because agency implies that, well, it implies now that you’re master of the situation, right? Is that you said you’re on top of it. So is it the signaling that you’re in it? It’s got to be something like the signaling in a domain. The signaling that you’re now in a domain where your behavioral competences are matched to the environmental demands, right? And that would be on being, that’s like being on sacred ground in a very, very fundamental sense, right? Because you know what to do there. And it seems profoundly logical. And then you see this gigantic piece of vulnerability and illogic in the system. Okay, so the light comes on, dopamine goes up. It’s about anticipation. If you block the dopamine rise, you don’t get the lever pressing. It’s not just about anticipation. It’s about the work you’re willing to do driven by the anticipation. So that’s motivation, that’s goal-directed behavior, all of that. Now you throw in this extra wrinkle. Like what we’ve been talking about are circumstances. The light comes on, you do the work, you get the reward. You do the work, you get the reward, 100% predictability, and you have complete sense of mastery and agency over it. Now the grad student switches things to you do the work, you press the lever, you do the work on that, and you get the reward only 50% of the time. It’s not guaranteed. And beautiful work, this guy Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge, he like pioneered all of this, showing at that point, as soon as the buzzer, the light comes on signaling, it’s one of those circumstances. And then you get a much bigger rise in dopamine than you got before. Now let me ask you about, okay, so let me ask you about that. So what that seems to me to indicate is that you’ve now entered an environment where that’s quasi predictable, but now there’s novelty. And the advantage to having the dopamine signal kick in when novelty makes itself manifest is that it signals that there’s also more to be learned here through exploration that might signal extreme future reward if you can just map the territory properly. Right? Because it’s good to have a good thing, but it’s even better to have a potentially better thing. And novelty does contain, is that what’s happening? That’s exactly it. The most proximal thing that’s going on in your head when suddenly dopamine goes 10 times higher is you’ve just introduced this word into the neurochemistry, you’ve introduced the word maybe. And maybe is intermittent, you know, that’s incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what’s always between the lines with maybe is exactly what you’re outlining. If I keep pressing the lever, I’m going to figure out what the maybe is about and be able to turn it through. I’m going to master it. I’ll be the new master of a new territory then. Exactly. And the longer they can dangle the maybe in front of you and the more they can manipulate you into thinking that what feels like a 50% chance of getting reward, in reality, it’s a one tenth of a thousandth percent chance, but they understand your… Right. …sufficiently. So that’s intermittent partial reinforcement. That’s why it grips you. Because it falsely signals… Right, it falsely signals novelty treasure. And you can manipulate that. Now, you pointed out something extremely dangerous in your book, right? Because I’d thought about this in terms of building the ultimately addictive slot machine. You showed that if you’re playing a slot machine and the tumblers line up, almost line up, two out of three or four out of five, then you’re much more likely to get a dopamine kick. So you could imagine a digital slot machine where you have multiple tumblers, where you code it to the player so that the machine knows that it’s the same player playing and that the proportion of almost lined up tumblers increases with gameplay. So then you’d have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that indicated that you were obtaining false mastery over the damn game. God, you’d have old people glued to that nonstop. As we head toward a presidential election in November, one thing you can be sure of, is that the 2024 will be a tumultuous year. How will your hard earned savings fare? You already see the impacts of inflation at the pump in the grocery store. The dollar continues to lose buying power quicker than wages can increase. So how are you protecting your savings? Consider diversifying with gold from the Birch Gold Group. For decades, gold has been the choice of investors and central banks to hedge against inflation. 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Comes over and feeds him for free. Yeah, right. The notion that not only. Okay. And so, and so, so as far as you’re concerned, so that’s so cool. So imagine that. So I was thinking mythological terms too, because so there’s a hero element that’s emerging there because the hero in mythology is the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it. Right. The hero is a broad symbol character because the hero isn’t just the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it, but also gains what’s there and then distributes it reciprocally. That’s the whole hero mythology, essentially. And so your point is that the dopamine system kicks in, in part as a consequence of predictability. So that shows that you know what you’re doing when you’re in a place that’s going to give you reward. When you’re in a garden that’s fruitful. But it’s even better if there’s an intermittent element of the reinforcement because it shows you that there’s fruit there that you have left to discover. And if you go down that pathway, you’re going to be hyper motivated to go down that pathway. So you want to be in a garden. You want to be in a garden where there’s fruit, but where the possibility of more fruit beckons and where that possibility is dependent on the morality and what would you call it, daring of your actions.