In a nice bit of cheerful news, thinking about futures might be a good thing for the brain, according to a new study. Well, positive futures. An experiment on monkeys found that:
the dopamine neurons that signaled the monkey's expectation of water rewards also signaled the expectation of advance information in a manner that was correlated with the strength of the animal's preference. "The monkeys and dopamine neurons treated information about rewards as if it was a reward itself," explains Dr. Bromberg-Martin.
Question: do negative futures lack dopamine rewards? Are the pleasures of apocalypse thinking located elsewhere, then?
Note, too, confirmation of what every writer knows:
Specifically, people (and animals) do not like to be held in suspense and prefer to receive advance information about the rewards they will receive in the future.
(thanks to Ian Campbell!)
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