Pleasure Expectation - How Dopamine Influences Our Decisions
A study in Current Biology has confirmed that the brain chemical dopamine plays a role in decision making by influencing our expectations of the pleasure associated with the outcomes of our choices. Dopamine's role in reward learning and reward-seeking behavior has been established in animals, said Tali Sharot of University College London. In humans, however, much less was known. Her team recently found that when we imagine future events, activity in a dopamine-laden part of the brain tracks people's estimates of the expected pleasure to be derived from those events. Based on these findings, the researchers suspected that they could alter people's expectations, and with them their choices, by manipulating dopamine levels in the subjects' brains. read more