Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure

for a TV the world is thinking 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 they're sitting and saying I know this I know the drill I know this I'm on top of this this is going to be great I know what I do now this is completely perfect 100% I'm going for 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 occurring 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 okay so in this study lab eration rather than this design you press the lever or right number of times you get reward do the work you get a reward hundred percent of the time 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 because the light comes on and you're doing the I know how this works this is going to 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 screwup and I'm inadequate in junior high school and it was terrible and I've kept but maybe this time it's my lucky to add 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 25 percent or 75 percent these are diametrically opposite states worse news better news the only thing they have in common is you've decreased the level of unpredictability and the rise and dopamine winds up being halfway between the 50% and the hundred 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 of 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 going to get and humans are profoundly manipulable in this realm and it turns out so are other species the exact same neural chemistry so what winds up being unique about us and what you see is with humans it's the time dimension 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 worked very hard in school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get GRE sticking to a good grad school to get a good job to get in the nursing home of our choice there 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 rule and in the most bizarre unique realm of this in humans sometimes we could 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 unto the next generations and there's no monkey out there who's willing to lever press all the time because of what st. Peter is going to think somewhere down the line so that is unique about us

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 305,627

Keywords: robert, sapolsky, science, pleasure, human, primate, animal, neurology, biology, dopamine, gambling, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv, california, academy, of, sciences

Id: axrywDP9Ii0

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/zirzo]

Full version if you liked the 5 min version.: http://fora.tv/2011/02/15/Robert_Sapolsky_Are_Humans_Just_Another_Primate

[u/chr0n1x]

That's A GREAT BIG BUSHY BEARD.

[u/[deleted]]

Psychology novice here. This video was saying that basically the chance or promise of a reward is what makes us happy, instead of the reward, right? Does this explain the buyers remorse I feel after researching and anticipating a product?