#neuroscience
3 posts
Dopamine isn't the reward — it's the signal teaching you to want
Dopamine doesn't measure pleasure; it's a signal teaching the brain what to *want*. And because it teaches wanting as something separate from liking, any system that fuses the two into one signal — from the human brain to an AI agent — will end up chasing what has stopped being good.
Anti-Convergence Design: Why Biology Doesn't Let You Stand Still — and What That Teaches AI Agents
Biology and AI engineering have independently arrived at the same design principle: no system that needs to adapt can be allowed to converge permanently. The mechanisms behind hedonic adaptation in humans mirror the mechanisms behind exploration schedules in agents. Lessons for how you build organizations, products, and yourself.
Habits, Weights, and the Brain as a Prediction Machine
Habits are not essence — they are weights, accumulated across tens of thousands of repetitions in your neural network. This essay places environment design, attention training, and cognitive reframing alongside Hebbian learning, predictive coding (Friston), constructed emotion (Barrett), and three distributed brain networks (DMN/SN/CEN) — to show why 'knowing but not doing' is not a bug, but a feature.