The work on the 'prize mechanism' in the brain won 1 million Euro prize

The three scientists together won the prestigious 1 million euro prize for discovering the "prize mechanism" in the human brain, explaining how people like to buy bigger houses or go to the moon.

Three neuroscientists Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan shared the 1 million euro prize of the Lundbeck Foundation (Denmark). This is a prestigious award for those who make a big contribution to understanding the mechanism of brain activity.

Wolfram Schultz, from Cambridge University, said: "This is a biological process that makes people want to buy a bigger house, a bigger car or get promoted."

The work Schultz began 30 years ago when he discovered in monkeys, every time he was rewarded, some special cells in the brain became more flexible and made dopamine. During the study, Schultz found that the brain can produce dopamine through learning without any reward.

Dopamine plays a big role in helping the brain make decisions - (Photo: Reuters).

Schultz commented that nerve cells make dopamine " like small demons in the brain that lead us to more rewards".

Professor Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computer Neuroscience Department at the University of London, explains the work: "Nature gives us an interesting system to optimize behavior."

Mr. Dayan explained that in our lives we have to make decisions every time, such as what restaurants to eat, where to go, where to look for a job or whether to continue reading the whole book and "the mechanism The award will help us optimize our choices. "

Scientist Dayan added: "Animals at all levels are able to judge what is good, what is bad and act on this judgment." And when the results are suddenly better than expected, the award mechanism is activated, causing us to repeat this action many times.

Thanks to this mechanism, human decisions can be predicted. And Mr. Dayan is bringing this mechanism into algorithms of artificial intelligence to "help computers make judgments."

Meanwhile, Professor Ray Dolan of the Max Planck Institute for Aging and Neurology, Berlin, Germany, says that when people get old, people lose about 10% of their nerves that make dopamine, thus causing them to lose accurate judgment. Dolan also proved that if dopamine is supplemented, the elderly will recover their judgment.