3 ms·

My understanding is that it's pretty complicated and is associated/released with craving/seeking, anticipation, as well as reward.

mullingitover 5y ago
Oh I'm definitely oversimplifying, and I think we're generally saying the same thing. My only point of clarification is that getting the reward causes dopamine levels to decrease. Dopamine isn't the reward, it's what makes you chase the reward.
- meowface 5y ago
  I could be wrong, but I think the moment of reward (among other things) actually also does cause certain kinds of neurons to release dopamine and then adjust their configuration depending on the relationship between the prediction and the reward, novelty, intensity, and other factors. I believe both the "chase" and the "getting" release dopamine; or, at least, different sets of dopaminergic neurons will adjust their firing rates, spike thresholds, and other things based on chasing, reward, and more. This dopamine neuron research by DeepMind is pretty interesting: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Dopamine-and-temporal-difference-learning-A-fruitful-relationship-between-neuroscience-and-AI https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Dopamine-and-temporal-diff... Dopamine itself probably isn't the most important component; the complex inner and interconnected workings of dopamine neurons may be the crucial bit. Dopamine is just one way for them to talk to one another and get them to adjust (or not adjust) what they're doing. It's only one particular form of message-passing; dopamine neurons can also directly send electrical signals to one another. Maybe kind of like an alien species trying to understand Earth's digital machines and deciding photons are the most important unit of functioning because they observe photons rushing back and forth through fiber optic cables and notice the timing and transmission frequency of the photons are closely correlated to the behavior of the systems. In some sense this is true, but in another sense it's a very superficial view. And this analogy definitely isn't remotely close to accurate, but maybe there could be something going on where electricity is like a "link layer" and dopamine is like an additional transport and/or session and/or application layer. Or perhaps not that, but another surely inaccurate analogy is that perhaps it's a separate communication channel entirely, like a router's ethernet port for data vs. its console port for management. (Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken about any of this. I am definitely not an expert and a lot of this could possibly be bullshit and the analogies are purely silly, contrived, speculative hypotheticals.)

mullingitover 5y ago

Oh I'm definitely oversimplifying, and I think we're generally saying the same thing. My only point of clarification is that getting the reward causes dopamine levels to decrease. Dopamine isn't the reward, it's what makes you chase the reward.

meowface 5y ago
I could be wrong, but I think the moment of reward (among other things) actually also does cause certain kinds of neurons to release dopamine and then adjust their configuration depending on the relationship between the prediction and the reward, novelty, intensity, and other factors. I believe both the "chase" and the "getting" release dopamine; or, at least, different sets of dopaminergic neurons will adjust their firing rates, spike thresholds, and other things based on chasing, reward, and more. This dopamine neuron research by DeepMind is pretty interesting: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Dopamine-and-temporal-difference-learning-A-fruitful-relationship-between-neuroscience-and-AI https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Dopamine-and-temporal-diff... Dopamine itself probably isn't the most important component; the complex inner and interconnected workings of dopamine neurons may be the crucial bit. Dopamine is just one way for them to talk to one another and get them to adjust (or not adjust) what they're doing. It's only one particular form of message-passing; dopamine neurons can also directly send electrical signals to one another. Maybe kind of like an alien species trying to understand Earth's digital machines and deciding photons are the most important unit of functioning because they observe photons rushing back and forth through fiber optic cables and notice the timing and transmission frequency of the photons are closely correlated to the behavior of the systems. In some sense this is true, but in another sense it's a very superficial view. And this analogy definitely isn't remotely close to accurate, but maybe there could be something going on where electricity is like a "link layer" and dopamine is like an additional transport and/or session and/or application layer. Or perhaps not that, but another surely inaccurate analogy is that perhaps it's a separate communication channel entirely, like a router's ethernet port for data vs. its console port for management. (Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken about any of this. I am definitely not an expert and a lot of this could possibly be bullshit and the analogies are purely silly, contrived, speculative hypotheticals.)