Ideas Can Be a Treat

Have you heard about dopamine? Most people think of dopamine as a chemical reward in the brain that is released when we do pleasurable things like eat something yummy. In fact, it is a neurotransmitter (that is, a chemical produced in the brain that relays and amplifies signals between brain cells) that is released when we see or think about something that will be pleasurable. It is more about motivation than reward.

According to Wikipedia, a research team deprived rats of 99% of their dopamine. The rats lost all desire to eat. When the rats were force-fed, scientists determined that they liked the food as much as ever—that is, getting the food was as pleasurable to the rats as if they had chosen to eat it themselves. However, without dopamine, they had no motivation to eat (or do anything else)!

(By the way, if you're like me, you are probably wondering just how scientists “determined” that the rats liked the food they were being force-fed. The rats' facial expressions were recorded and compared to facial expressions of rats choosing to eat food.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine

Jonah Lehrer, author of the Science Blog “Frontal Cortex,” says in his October 27th post that scientists call dopamine the currency of the brain, the “price tag of sensory information.” Dopamine allows us to quickly assign value to a wide variety of things in our environment, and of course that helps us to decide what to do, eat, pick up, strive for.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/

Interestingly, dopamine “price tags” get assigned to ideas as well as things. Read Montague, a leading dopamine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, says that intellectual concepts are tied to the same motivation-and-reward system as are food and other animal appetites. That's why people can choose to fast for a religious, political, or health idea.
As Montague puts it, “[T]he human brain is able to choose the abstract thought over the visceral reward, as long as the abstraction excites our cells more than apple juice.”

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/a_new_state_of_mind/