Below is a lightly edited transcript of the btrmt. lectures podcast. For the article that inspired it, see Anticipation beats reward.

Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action, because that’s the brain’s job: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

¶A year of lectures

I’ve been doing the Betterment Lectures for a year now. I started at Samhain, Halloween, last year, and here we are just after that same time of year. I’m pretty pleased with how things have been going. I’ve had some pretty good feedback, and I’ve settled into quite the routine. So thank you to everybody who has been part of the journey so far. Hopefully I’ve been responding to your emails and your comments, and producing more of the kind of content people want to hear. Because the point of this podcast, unlike my articles—which are more me working out an idea—is me trying to teach people who haven’t had the luxury of studying the mind and the brain for, what, fifteen years now. Your feedback, your responses, your direction are exactly what I want to hear.

And one of the most common responses has been to have a look at some of my more popular articles, which are often about the way humans are driven by the brain, by the nervous system. So I thought I’d return to that kind of neuroscience, and pick up an article on how the brain deals with rewards. It’s almost part of a series of two—with Addictive Work—about how rewards are treated in the brain. But this one makes the case that maybe we aren’t driven so much by reward as we are by anticipation. So let’s talk about that.

¶Carrots and sticks

I think most people have a basic sense that you can drive human behaviour through rewards and punishments. One of the lessons we teach the cadets here is about transactional versus transformational leadership. I think I’ve talked about it before on the podcast, but transactional leadership is very much: you do what I say, and as a consequence you’ll either get a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a transaction. You’re paying or punishing the person for following your leadership. And that’s necessary at certain times. If you don’t have a lot of time, or you don’t have a lot of trust, then transactional leadership is going to be a necessary feature of how you influence people to do what you want. And then, I guess, the point in the military is that there are other times when you want more transformational leadership.

Again, I think most people have an intuitive sense of this. If you’ve ever tried to get a toddler to eat their dinner, you’ve relied on transactional leadership. You won’t be able to do the thing you like, or maybe I’ll put you down for a nap. And sometimes transformational: oh, it’ll give you excellent vision if you eat your carrots, or whatever.

And if you’ve attended any Psych 101 course, you’ve probably also been introduced to operant conditioning: the idea that to get people to do something, you reward that behaviour, and to get them to stop doing something, you punish that behaviour. And there are these schedules of reward and punishment that can create quite complicated behaviour in non-human animals, but also in humans. If you have a dog, or you’ve seen people training dogs, you engage in operant conditioning to get them to learn how to sit, or raise their paw, or lie down. Or there’s that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon is trying to teach Penny to do stuff by giving her chocolates every time she does something good, like when she moves off his sofa spot.

So I think we all have a pretty intuitive sense that animals, and humans among those animals, are motivated by rewards and by punishments. But what’s interesting is that the brain tells a slightly different story. It says that maybe what’s important isn’t the reward. Maybe it’s us anticipating the reward. And that’s really what I want to talk about today.

¶Why everybody loves the reward system

The reward system is one of the better studied networks in the brain. There’s been a lot of research on dopaminergic pathways and how they influence behaviour. Everybody loves the reward centre of the brain—it’s part of why I’m doing a podcast on it today, to celebrate a year of the Betterment Lectures.

Neuroscientists like it because it’s sort of predictable, and it involves a lot of the brain in a way that helps us understand systemic neural processing. Cognitive neuroscientists—people like me, who care about how thinking happens in the brain—like it because you can tie elements of the way we think pretty closely to neural structure, and that’s what we really care about. Neuroscientists care about the structure of the brain and how it works; cognitive neuroscientists care about how that creates processes of thinking.

Psychiatrists like it because it tells us a lot about certain pathologies. For example, there’s an interesting apparent relationship between schizophrenia, or some subtypes of it, and Parkinson’s disease, which was discovered because of a drug for Parkinson’s. To the extent that I understand this, Parkinson’s disease is characterised by a depletion of dopamine. I realise I’ve been talking about dopamine without explaining it, but for now we’ll just call it the reward neurotransmitter, like everybody does. So there’s this depletion of dopamine, particularly in the front of the brain, I think.¹ You can dose it with a drug that increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, and it improves the Parkinson’s symptoms. But if you put too much dopamine in there, you end up producing other symptoms that look very much like the positive psychotic symptoms you get in some forms of schizophrenia. So there’s a relationship between too much and too little dopamine that psychiatrists are really interested in.

And psychologists love the reward pathways because they’re related to addiction. There is chemical addiction—you can be very dangerously chemically addicted to alcohol, or to opiates like heroin. But that’s often not the cause of the really problematic behaviour we associate with substance use disorders. Often it’s more of a psychological problem, and that psychological problem can be well described by what’s happening in these reward pathways.

So everybody loves this. And then you have thousands of books on habits: Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, Tiny Habits, Good Habits, Bad Habits—heaps of these things. That’s because all of us are interested in how we’re motivated by stuff. And often, when I’m coaching or talking to people, it’s because we wish we could control the process better. Maybe the reward system tells us a little about that.

¶How the reward system works

So I wanted to talk about a very specific aspect of it, because it was something I got a lot of feedback on when I wrote an article about the reward system. I have to tell you a little about the reward system for this to make sense. But I don’t want this to be a long podcast. I want it short and sweet, so I’ll try and go through it quickly. If there’s enough interest, I’ll do another podcast that goes into more detail.

For now, you can think of it like this. There’s a very small patch of neurons in the middle of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, which appears to flood a related part of the brain, called the striatum, with dopamine, this reward neurotransmitter, to signal that a reward of some kind is coming. And the striatum—you might have heard it called the basal ganglia—does a bunch of shit. But one of the things we know it does is evaluate how rewarding things are, in order to help us make decisions: value-based judgements. Do I want this, or this other thing? The basal ganglia helps us evaluate that by assessing how rewarding the thing is. Do you want to drink a can of Coke, or eat an apple? Both are sort of sweet and juicy, but the Coke is going to deliver heaps more of it. So the basal ganglia might respond more to that. It helps you evaluate between the two based on how much reward.

Now, when the striatum, the basal ganglia, gets all this dopamine from the ventral tegmental area, it gets super excited. And the basal ganglia mostly controls things by inhibiting information passing through the brain. So back to our example: if you’re trying to decide between the apple and the can of Coke, it doesn’t tell you to go for the Coke. It inhibits you going for the apple, and as a consequence you go for the Coke. It’s not super intuitive, but it’s important here, because the basal ganglia mostly stops information from passing. When the ventral tegmental area sends dopamine into the striatum, you see an increase in go signals—the opposite of what it normally does, which is inhibit. I’m simplifying a great deal, but what I’m trying to communicate is that this is weird for this area of the brain. It tells us the basal ganglia finds this so important that it stops doing what it normally does and does this other thing instead. It stops inhibiting, and it starts saying go, go, go.

¶Go, go, go

And while that’s happening, the brain starts collecting all sorts of other information from around the brain too. It’s getting quite excited by what’s going on, and it starts trying to figure out what’s causing this. So it checks the amygdala for the emotional salience. Is this good? Is it bad? Is it scary? How much emotion was attached to this in the past, when it’s happened before? It goes to the insula, this patch of brain at the side, and asks what the body is doing at the moment. Are we tense? Are we relaxed? What’s happening?

There are also these hedonic hotspots in the brain. The nucleus accumbens is part of this, a place called the ventral pallidum,² the brain stem. These are older parts of the brain, which is what you might expect from parts of the brain that cause hedonic pleasure. And they ask: how pleasurable is this? How good does this feel? Because reward isn’t necessarily good feeling. And then it’ll go to the hippocampus to see if it needs to record a memory, and so on and so forth.

I don’t know how good a job I’m doing of explaining all these brain regions, but basically the brain is going: this seems important. What is going on? Do we need to remember this? Has it happened before? What’s the body doing, and what’s that telling me? Is it pleasurable? All of it related to this rush of dopamine.

And that’s why stuff can become so addictive, regardless of how chemically addictive it is. Because it’s not just the thing itself. The brain collects all this context around the thing that sets you off wanting it. If you drink a can of Coke—or, you know, shoot up some smack—and you’re sitting in the same room every time, then when you start walking into that room your brain goes: oh, wait, I remember this. This is related to me drinking a can of Coke, or shooting up a bunch of drugs. The brain is collecting information from everything you’re doing while you’re doing the rewarding thing. Fundamentally, it’s a process of learning. Your brain wants to learn what in the world is associated with reward.

¶Anticipation uses the same machinery

So that’s the reward system, if you’ll allow me to gloss over some of the details. What’s super interesting about it—and perhaps you can predict this, given the build-up—is that anticipating a reward seems to activate the exact same machinery as the reward itself.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that anticipating the reward just straightforwardly activates the ventral tegmental area, the tiny patch of cells responsible for sending dopamine to the striatum and kicking off this cycle of reward. The second is that anticipating the reward usually comes coupled with the context around the reward. You go into the room where you drink that can of Coke, or shoot up that heroin, and you’re probably remembering a time you were in that room doing exactly that. It’s hard to distinguish the two things in the brain, so the brain just reuses the same infrastructure. In many ways you get the same outcome from anticipating a reward as you do from the reward itself.

¶Wanting versus liking

But there’s a really important difference, and it’s in how the controlly bits of the brain are engaged by this process. By the controlly bits, I mean the bits at the front of the brain. You might have heard it called the PFC, or the prefrontal cortex. Frankly, it’s like a third of the brain, so it’s involved in basically anything you do. But it’s often associated in particular with a kind of control network: a network that’s more active when you’re doing really complicated tasks that need planning and self-regulation, and trickier things like that.

Now, when you look at the reward network—remembering that it’s this go, go, go being sent from the basal ganglia in response to dopamine—what we assume happens is that these go signals stop the prefrontal cortex from helping you evaluate rewards sensibly and regulate your impulses. You’re getting all this go, go, go when normally you’d get more of an inhibitory response. So maybe the prefrontal cortex isn’t as good at saying, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do this. It’s probably not a good idea to have another can of Coke.” You’re worse at controlling your behaviour. It worsens the controlly part of the brain.

But there’s a difference in how the prefrontal cortex is engaged depending on whether you’re actually experiencing the reward or anticipating it. Anticipating a reward seems to give you the classic picture: the ventral tegmental area makes the basal ganglia go, go, go, and that inhibits or worsens the controlling behaviour of the prefrontal cortex, making you worse at regulating your impulses.

When you’re experiencing the reward—you’re not just thinking about a can of Coke, you’re actually drinking it—it seems to follow a different pathway. Rather than coming so strongly through the ventral tegmental area, it seems to activate those more primal brain areas I told you about before, the ones you could call hedonic hotspots. I said the nucleus accumbens was part of this; the ventral pallidum plays a role; the brain stem plays a role. These are all older, more phylogenetically ancient regions of the brain, and they seem to be responsible for causing pleasure. And this is coded by the PFC. Anticipation doesn’t necessarily cause pleasure in the same way that being pleasured does, and it comes in through the PFC slightly differently.

I’m not sure if that split makes sense, so I’ll try and simplify it a little. Suppose we can make this assumption about what’s going on, based on whether you’re being made to go, go, go, or whether you’re experiencing pleasure. Wanting—anticipation—is making you crave something. Go, go, go. Your body is remembering how good it was, remembering the context around it, and saying: now is the time to go and get that reward. It’s probably going to be available. You need to go, go, go.

When you’re actually experiencing the thing, by contrast, you don’t need to go and get the reward. You’ve already got it. So the brain is doing something different. It’s probably using the prefrontal cortex to train your body to want the reward. The prefrontal cortex is acting in its other, less controlly capacity: associating things with the reward, to help that wanting become stronger in the future. To remind you, later, that this good thing is available at this time, when your body’s feeling this way, when these things are going on in the environment.

So: the same infrastructure, but with this important difference. The emphasis on go, go, go, versus the feeling of goodness.

That was a lot of brain jargon for a pretty compressed period of time. So I’ll slow things down, do a bit of a summary, and then talk about the implications of this weird little feature of the reward system.

¶The short version

So, the reward architecture of the brain. Everybody loves to talk about dopamine—if you haven’t heard about it, it’s the reward neurotransmitter of the brain. And I’ve described a little of what happens when you’re getting rewarded. The ventral tegmental area, this tiny bundle of cells in the middle of the brain, sends all this dopamine to the part of the brain that evaluates rewards, the striatum, the basal ganglia. That gets it excited, and tells it to send all these signals to go, go, go, where normally that part of the brain tells you to stop, stop, stop. As a consequence, the prefrontal cortex has a harder time doing its job of regulating your impulses: telling you, hey, maybe this isn’t a good idea right now.

That’s the basic structure. But there’s an important difference between experiencing the reward and anticipating it, and that difference is how much pleasure it causes you. Anticipating the reward makes that go, go, go signal stronger. Experiencing the reward gives you a much bigger pleasure response, which tells the prefrontal cortex, this controlly bit of the brain, to remember this. This is important. We’re going to want to do this again in the future. Remember what’s going on here, because this is great. I love this.

What that means is that even though the same regions of the brain are involved, there’s a very clear distinction between wanting and liking. And that distinction makes it very clear that anticipating something is much more motivating than receiving the thing itself.

¶Why we keep moving the goalposts

That’s the fundamental finding, and I think it’s so interesting because it explains so much of human behaviour. In particular, it explains something this whole project, Betterment, is about. I call Betterment Betterment, but I spell it without the vowels. And I spell it without the vowels because I think, in a modern society, we’re so focused on betterment—on excellence, on productivity—that we forget to stop and smell the roses. To celebrate the fruits of our successes. We achieve a thing and then immediately push out the goalposts, and start trying to achieve the next thing, or the next stage of the thing.

And when you look at the brain, you sort of realise why. Because receiving the thing isn’t as good as anticipating receiving the next thing. I think there’s more to it than that, and I write about it—I’ll link to some of my articles on that. But fundamentally, the brain seems to care more about, or be motivated more by, anticipating stuff than receiving it.

So if what we want is to celebrate the fruits of our successes—if what we want is to be happy with who we are and what we have—we have to work much harder at it. We have to spend much more time reflecting on what we’ve achieved, on the liking part, and try to dial back the wanting part. Because otherwise the wanting part is always going to win. And I think everybody can recognise that just chasing desires, without ever celebrating what you’ve achieved, is a pretty forlorn and futile way to go about living life.

And I think I’ll leave it there. Thanks for sticking with the Betterment Lectures for a year.