Monday, July 20, 2009

Brain Response To Information About The Future Suggests That Ignorance Isn't Bliss

The point is this might be one of the underlying nueral mechanisms for the "thirst for knowledge."
Brain Response To Information About The Future Suggests That Ignorance Isn't Bliss: "The authors conclude that the same dopamine neurons that signal primitive rewards like food and water also signal the cognitive reward of advance information. Importantly, this finding has important implications for modern theories of reinforcement learning. 'Our data shows the need for a new class of models that assign information a positive value,' says Dr. Bromberg-Martin. 'Dopamine neurons might treat information as desirable because it can help us learn how to predict and control our environment.'"

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