A Girl of Expectation

"An inviting, high-velocity ride through our most treasured mental act - deciding.  This is truly one of the most accessible and richly informed books on human choice.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the human mind and how cutting-edge research changes the way we think about ourselves.  A marvelous success."

- Read Montague

Brown Foundation Professor of Neuroscience

Baylor College of Medicine

... I read that and I was hooked so I picked up the book, "How We Decide", by John Lehrer and have been making my way through it at a surprisingly slow pace (at least for me, the bookworm). I'm almost at the point where I want to draft an outline of the brain and label each new part that the author brings up so that I can put a visual with it.  Hey...I think I'll do that! lol :)

Anyway, despite the author's hard core bend as an evolutionist, he really does make the inner workings of our decision making system more palatable.  In fact, in the beginning he caught my attention as he described the predictions of dopamine,

"But happiness isn't the only feeling that dopamine produces.  Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust.  It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives.  By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights."

Oh, so there is regulation of my emotions, after all?   ....huh!

But, I really got excited when he said,

"What's interesting about this system is that it's all about expectation.  Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based on experience:  if this, then that.  The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation that allow the brain to anticipate what will happen next."

It sent me flying over to Wikipedia to see what it says about dopamine, 

"Further, dopamine neurons are depressed when the expected reward is omitted.  Thus, dopamine neurons seem to encode the prediction error of rewarding outcomes.  In nature, we learn to repeat behaviors that lead to maximize rewards."

What??  I have a system within my brain that is providing me with expectations?  This news is huge!  

Here's why...if you had a conversation with Mr. Smart Guy about the one thing that sends me into an emotional twirl he would simply say, "She's a girl of expectation."  And, he's right.  

I plan, I do, I expect.  I am a girl with expectations and I tend to reel from the disappointments when they aren't met. But, to know that this may be happening in my brain and I'm truly unaware of it?  Could it really be possible that my expectations in life aren't based on emotional choice but are the result of neuron activity responding to past experiences? 

Now that's something to think about!