You've Got Dopamine Backwards (and I Can Prove It On Piano)

What do a false ending to the Star Spangled Banner, a food delivery website where nothing ever arrives, and a monkey waiting for a squirt of juice have in common? In this episode I sit down at the piano to demonstrate the deceptive cadence, the musical trick of setting up the "home" chord and then stepping sideways instead. I use it to explain a new trend: "dopamine sites," where people order meals that never come and take smoke breaks with cigarettes that don't exist. The popular story says dopamine is the brain's pleasure chemical, released when you get the reward. The research says otherwise. I walk through Wolfram Schultz's work on reward prediction error, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson's distinction between wanting and liking, and Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre's study showing that dopamine is released in the seconds before the musical peak that gives you chills. I also cover George Loewenstein's question about how much you'd pay to kiss a movie star (and when), and a study from Carey Morewedge and colleagues showing that imagining eating 30 M&Ms led people to eat fewer real ones. Along the way, Mr. Spock turns out to have been right about wanting and having. References and definitions of key terms are on the website.