Kelly Clancy

And it's involved in addiction as well.

The monkey sees a cue, it does its behavior, it presses a lever, and then it gets a reward.

And the dopamine neurons kind of start firing in advance of the reward.

But if you make that reward uncertain, so for example, you give the monkey a 50-50 chance of getting a reward,

the dopamine neurons actually fire a lot, a lot more.

It turns out that they're really motivated by this randomness, by uncertainty.

So it's actually like a deep neurological principle why we're so fascinated by uncertainty.

Yeah, and this is one kind of cool thing about humans is we've been doing the same things for ages.

So there's an almost 4,000-year-old Hindu poem where they describe dice as being like a drug.

It's like addictive.

And a lot of the Greek and Roman emperors were huge gamblers.

Gambling was really huge in Renaissance Venice.

That's where the casino was born.

And the casino was so powerful and so kind of addicting that the aristocracy, the people in charge, all almost collapsed because they all lost their money in the casino.

So the casino kind of took over Europe and became super popular.

And that kind of incentivized mathematicians to start looking at dice and say, okay, what's happening here?

What can we...

Yeah, I think that's another really kind of cool thing about games is it's a nice window into other people.

And that's kind of what they were for from the beginning.

You know, when we think about those rats who don't play as children and then they grow up and they're not very well socialized, play is all about learning how to kind of interact with other people.