How Dopamine Affects Your Motivation?

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In complex organisms survival depends on as accurately as possible predicting what will happen next based on what happened before. Our ability to notice errors in those predictions depends on dopamine this neurotransmitter crucial for regulating motivation. If successful positive surprises change our beliefs attitudes and values it leads to behaviors that seek out that positive pattern again if stable if not surprising we maintain the old behavior from before, and if negatively surprised we engage in behaviors that avoid that pattern happening again.

In this episode, Micheal Rousell, author of The Power of Surprise, explains the science of surprise at the level of neurons and brain structures, and then talk about how surprises often lead to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the different personal narratives that guide our behaviors and motivations and goals, and, perhaps most importantly, our willingness to be surprised again so that we can change and grow.

In the show, you will how we can use the current understanding of how surprise leads to learning, and how learning depends on interpretation, to improve our lives, and the lives of others