Anticipation beats reward

In a previous article, I wrote about how you could ‘hijack’ the reward system to make work addictive. It’s a pretty clear example of the kind of pop-science I get fussy about elsewhere, to be honest. But people love this stuff, and I can shoehorn real brain science into the thing, so everyone wins I reckon.

But I was uncharitable, and consigned an interesting little aside to a footnote, assuming people wouldn’t really care. But my emails tell me that they did. And it actually represents an example of bit of brain science that would be interesting to brain scientists and lay people.

It said that people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour.

¶The reward system, redux

So the reward system is one of the better studied networks in the brain. It gets a lot of attention from everyone: neuroscientists, cognitive neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists.¹ I do a pretty good job in the previous article of walking through it, so I won’t rehash everything. But I’ll go over the critical bits quickly.

There’s a tiny patch of cells in the middle of the brain (the ventral tegmental area, or VTA), that floods the striatum with dopamine to signal that a reward of some kind is coming. The striatum, or basal ganglia, does heaps of shit, but one of its better known characteristics is that it sort of evaluates how rewarding stuff is to help us make decisions. So, you know, you could eat fruit or you could crush a can of diet coke. Both are similar kinds of rewards—sweet and juicy. But one is going to be more rewarding to you, and the basal ganglia seems to help you figure out which.

When the basal ganglia gets all this dopamine from the VTA, it gets all excited, and where:

it normally mostly inhibits information from passing through (leaving the ‘correct’ choice uninhibited, so to speak), here we often see an increase in the striatum sending ‘go’ signals instead … It’s more complicated than this, but I’m simplifying to make it clear that the striatum gets very keen when the VTA showers it in dopamine.

Importantly, the brain also starts collating information from other places. The amygdala to get the emotional salience of the event. The insula to clock what the body’s feeling like. The hippocampus to secure a memory. And so on. So in the future, when the environment (your memory, your emotions, your body) matches this scenario, the basal ganglia is ready to send those ‘go’ signals.

That’s the reward system, if you’ll forgive me crushing it into three paragraphs. And thats why stuff is addictive even when it’s not chemically addictive. It’s not just the thing, its the context around the thing that sets you off wanting the thing.

¶The difference between wanting and liking

Ok, so my note in the last article was:

anticipation of the reward activates the same machinery as the reward itself. There’s two reasons for this. Anticipation of the reward activates the VTA, kicking off the exact same cycle as reward itself. But also, because anticipation of the reward is usually coupled with the context around the reward, it’s just as reinforcing.

Is it exactly the same? Definitely not. But you almost certainly aren’t that interested in the difference. If you are, there’s the hedonic/incentive-salience account that reckons that the actual goodness of something (hedonic pleasure) comes into the system through your value-judging bits (part of the PFC and the striatum), and the anticipation of the goodness (incentive-salience) comes in through the VTA. Again, simplified.

Now I didn’t mention the PFC in my recap. But this is a shorthand for a collection of—[P]re-[F]rontal [C]ortices—regions at the front of the brain that are involved in basically anything you do, but in particular lots of people suspect they’re involved in a kind of ‘control’ network. They seem to be more active when you’re doing complicated tasks that require planning and self-regulation and tricky things like this.

In the reward network, we typically assume that the basic thing happening here is that the reward system is stopping the PFC from helping you evaluate the rewards sensibly, and inhibiting your impulse-control and whatnot. We don’t want sense, we want more of the thing! But also, if the PFC is a sort-of ‘controlly-bit’, then you’re probably also planning how to get at the thing and whatnot too.

But, as I mention there, there seems to be something different going on based on whether you’re actually experiencing the reward versus when you’re anticipating it. When you anticipate the reward, it seems like it’s more the classic picture—VTA makes the basal ganglia ‘go go go’, engaging the PFC as a result. When you’re experiencing the reward, it seems like the information is coming in more through the PFC, and not coming so much from the VTA.

We could make a pretty simple assumption here. The wanting is making you crave the thing. Your body is remembering how good it was and encouraging you to get more. But the experiencing is more about training your body to want the reward.² So here, the PFC is acting in its other capacity as associative cortex, maybe—helping you learn what this good feeling is all about.

And this would help us understand why we see a somewhat different pattern of neurotransmitters then too. It’s not quite so dopamine infused when you’re enjoying something; there’s a bit more of a showing from things like endorphins and opioid peptides, the difference you can read more about here.

¶Outro

We could try and make more assumptions too. Maybe pleasure is more outward-in—your brain telling you to focus inward—whereas wanting is more of an inward-out thing, encouraging you to focus out on the world to bring the thing you want into being. Or maybe wanting is more about remembering the context, and pleasure is more about integrating the reward with the context. There are lots of interesting avenues you could think about, but I’m not sure how confident I would be teasing them out.

What is clear is that wanting is different to liking, and this explains why we often find that the anticipation of a thing is much more motivating than the thing itself. I’ve said, and others often do say, that anticipation is a greater reward. But it’s not a greater reward, it’s a greater motivator.

This, I think, is a nice example of how brain science and lay-interest in the brain can come together, unlike some of the other, sillier examples out there](analects/education-is-entertainment.md).

It’s not the reward that drives us. It’s how much anticipation the reward generates. Changes the way you look at things, no?

Wanting refers to the desire to pursue a reward, spurred by the release of dopamine. It drives behaviour and motivates action. On the other hand, liking pertains to the actual pleasure derived from the reward itself, often associated with different neurochemical systems, such as endorphins and opioid peptides.

Understanding this differentiation can clarify many human behaviours. For instance, why some people crave unhealthy foods despite knowing they may not be as enjoyable or beneficial in the long term. This distinction helps us consider how goal-oriented behaviour (wanting) can diverge from immediate gratification (liking), leading to complex interactions in our decision-making processes and lifestyle choices.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9858756/