Dopamine is not a reward for your achievements
#Dopamine
A few questions about dopamine that are often overlooked.
- Who the hell fuels your brain with dopamine at the end of a marathon?
- How does the dopamine system sort out your achievements at work, school, sport, or elsewhere?
- Why does the brain treat achievements in video games the same way as in real life
- Why does almost any sort of novelty feel so nice?
- Why do we like a get fed up when listening to the song repeatedly?
- Why do we like travel?
- What makes the dopamine system so smart that it knows about all possible achievements that it can reward me for them?
- How can earthworms have a similar dopamine reward system, but with a different achievements database?
- How can it be that all these complicated questions are related to the same molecule?
I can only think of a single explanation. It's because dopamine is not a reward for your achievement.
My favourite hypothesis is that Brain is a prediction machine and dopamine is a reward for a good prediction. It not just very true to life but also explains a big number of things and biases: [[Brain is a prediction machine – explains everything]]
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