Wolfram Schultz

And that gap actually shows up in the brain, which I find quite fascinating.

And we've known about this for a while, because back in 1997, a neuroscientist called Wolfram Schultz and his colleagues published some work on monkeys and dopamine.

Dopamine is one of the brain's chemical messengers.

It's often called the pleasure chemical, although it's really more about wanting and motivation than pleasure.

And the one thing dopamine really responds to is the surprise.

There's this whole research by Wolfram Schultz with monkeys and dopamine, which I'm not actually gonna get into.

But for an analogy, using this experiment that he did with monkeys, let's say that your partner brings you flowers home on a random Tuesday.

And if he brings it home, you're like floating.

This isn't metaphor.

It's the direct result of a mechanism first identified by Wolfram Schultz at the University of Cambridge in 1997, published in the journal Science.

Schultz's research on primates demonstrated that dopamine neurons don't simply fire in response to reward.

They fire in response to the prediction of reward.

Let me walk you through two lines of research, because I think once you see them, you can't unsee them.

The first one comes from a neuroscientist named Wolfram Schultz.

And in 1997, he published a paper in the Journal of Science with Peter Dayen and Reed Montague.

And these references will be on my website.

Well, okay, so that was the big overarching, but there are some general themes that you can, has been well documented throughout the literature.

And I think the, you know, some of the seminal work was from Wolfram Schultz, who is recording from primates and putative dopamine neurons and found that, you know, when you give an unexpected juice reward, you see that the dopamine neurons increase their firing to that.

But then if this reward was preceded by a cue, then over training, you would see that the dopamines would instead fire to the cue instead of to the reward.

And this sort of mirrored what, you know, happens under Pavlovian conditioning, which was occurring there where, you know, an animal's response is they're initially going to have a response to the reward, but then they're going to get a conditioned response to the cue after repeated training.

And on this other trial, you made the movement thinking you were going to get a reward, but you didn't.

And then I just subtract those two, and the difference is the reward response.

Is that the kind of thinking it is? And if we do that, what happens? I think, I thought Schultz did

that.

I'd even like to amp it up an octave.

Not that I even expect a lot of listeners to even get this, but Wolfram Schultz says, there are no specific receptors for rewards in the brain.

The brain generates signals for something.

It makes itself up.

And that description is incomplete rather than just wrong.

Wolfram Schultz is a neuroscientist.

He won the Brain Prize in 2017, which is the largest prize in neuroscience.

And he won it for one finding.