r/todayilearned • u/thebigchil73 • 22h ago

TIL that the ‘high’ from gambling isn’t connected to winning - the dopamine rush peaks at exactly 50:50 probability. Gamblers get a rush when the roulette wheel is spinning but their pleasure is largely unaffected whether they win or lose.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12649484/
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u/RobbinDeBank 21h ago

Dopamine is not associated with rewards, but it’s instead associated with predicted rewards. It’s the core mechanism that allows reinforcement learning in more complex animals.

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u/Liesmyteachertoldme 21h ago

So I got curious and looked up what chemical is responsible for joy when you actually achieve a goal and it says that it’s just another dose of dopamine?

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u/WashedSylvi 21h ago edited 20h ago

Serotonin is more associated with satisfaction, which is related to joy but not exactly the same feeling you know?

It’s why dopamine drugs often leave you wanting it but always being unsatisfied by them. (Coke, meth). Whereas serotonin drugs (like mushrooms and LSD) often leave a sense of satisfaction (or at least having had your fill).

That incident where a woman had a dopamine button wired to her brain, causing her to press it incessantly until death, while hating it and being unsatisfied, really drove home to me that wanting is just wanting and doesn’t mean jack shit about how I’ll feel when I get it

If you’ve ever done enough drugs to be unable to stop smiling, while also having a sense of mental unhappiness, you’ll know what I’m talking about here.

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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 20h ago

Larry Niven (sci fi author) talks about future “wire heads” who are addicted to having their pleasure center triggered by an implant.

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u/lapideous 20h ago

Bad prediction. It’s already wireless!

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u/WashedSylvi 19h ago

I really hope we never hit a situation like that. At least our brain can adapt and respond to drugs on some level.

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u/VerdugoCortex 20h ago

It's more complex than that. Serotonin balances change and also oxytocin has a component in many types of pleasure.

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u/ExpensiveBookkeeper3 21h ago

Do you have a source on the material? Not questioning validity. Just find that interesting

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u/RobbinDeBank 20h ago edited 20h ago

Check out the book A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett. It’s a neuroscience book detailing 5 different stages of evolution in intelligence, one of those chapters is entirely about reinforcement learning. The coolest part about this finding (the link between dopamine and RL) is that RL was formalized for machine learning first, and then later on, neuroscientists found out that dopamine functions in the brain just like what the RL algorithm invented earlier did.

Edit: a whole book would be a lot just to elaborate more about 1 random comment on Reddit, so there are some alternatives: the book is very popular these days in the neuroscience and AI community, so there will be plenty of summaries. Max Bennett also has multiple interviews about it too. All good resources to check out.

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u/ExpensiveBookkeeper3 9h ago

I appreciate it! I am going to buy the book actually. It’s only $12 and I am actually interested. Thank you!