The Prediction Machine: The Story of Dopamine

Dopamine has long been called the brain's pleasure chemical — the one that surges when you eat sugar or scroll through your phone. That story turns out to be mostly wrong. What dopamine neurons are actually doing is more surprising, and more mathematical. This episode traces how that discovery came together — through a neurophysiologist recording from monkey brains and a pair of computational neuroscientists who had been reading about reinforcement learning. It ends with how the same math is being used to understand depression and addiction.