Kelly Clancy

crucial to the brain important to the brain and if you think about it it kind of makes sense so our brains mo it's like whole purpose for existing is kind of to like predict things to anticipate things it wants to know what's going to happen in advance so that it can like make the best choices as quickly as possible and so

When it encounters something it doesn't understand, it doesn't know, it cannot predict, that's really, really interesting to it.

It's sort of like a flag to say, you don't have a model of the world here.

You don't quite understand what's going on in this little corner of the world.

So the brain will sort of hone in on that and be interested and want to learn it.

And so this is when you get chess prodigies just like endlessly playing chess or people getting addicted to gambling and just endlessly gambling.

And one really interesting thing about gamblers is we think of them as – or maybe gambling addicts.

We think of them as maybe hoping for a big payout.

And often when they do win –

they just put that money back into playing more.

So it's not necessarily that they're looking for money.

It's actually this kind of interesting... They just get pure pleasure out of playing, out of trying to understand the game.

And a lot of people who are really, really heavy gamblers will...

say things like oh i'm really close to cracking the system or understanding how this works or there's a sense like the brain is giving off this sense of like i'm learning something and of course we know in dice we can't really learn much we kind of know what we know about dice like you know the chances of getting a six or one out of six and yada yada

In some games like chess, you really can kind of learn and improve your skills.

And in others, you can't, but you still get this illusion of learning because of that uncertainty.

And this is actually... This is sort of even neurologically verified.

So you can take a monkey, train it to press a lever to get a reward, and look at the firing of their dopamine neurons.

So dopamine neurons are... They're often called like a reward...

like dopamine is often thought of as a reward molecule, but it's really a sort of motivation and wanting molecule.