The most interesting and frustrating encounters I have with people tend to be based on their reaction to the implications of the brain’s reward system. Regardless of anyone’s individual attitude about it, though, the reward system is a biological fact. So we can either learn how to use it or we can let it use us.
It’s true that some personality types have an easier time with rewards than others. But in addition to that, let’s face it: Homo sapiens is a jaded lot these days. When we can get what we want when we want it—and do so regularly—waiting any amount of time for something can feel painful, like deprivation. We expect, and even require, immediate gratification.
In Behave, the Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky talks about the conundrum we’re in as a result of having access to stimulation of the brain’s reward circuitry, some of which is “at least a thousandfold higher” than anything previous humans experienced. Sure that includes drugs like fentanyl and cocaine, but it also includes processed sugar, which wasn’t readily available until the 18th Century.
An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top non-natural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task [emphasis mine]. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger.
The Molecule of More
Well, the brain has been referred to as an insatiable wanting machine, and dopamine—the primary agent of the brain’s reward system—isn’t called “the molecule of more” for nothing.
I’ve written and talked a lot about rewards and dopamine already, including the important role of craving in creating desirable habits or pursuing juicy desired outcomes. But it appears there’s a state to be mastered before craving can be put into play. That state is anticipation.
While craving is a powerful desire for something, anticipation is the condition of looking forward to it, especially with eagerness. Without the ability to anticipate, a craving will take you directly and immediately to the object or sensation. You will experience pleasure, but pleasure (aka liking) neurochemicals fade quickly, and then you’re right back to wanting.
For the record, I hate that Carly Simon song, but as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed anticipation: going to the beach, strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream, the next issue of a particular magazine, a picnic in the backyard, beginning—and finishing—a new piece of writing. When scientists talk about the pleasure evoked by anticipation, I totally get it. As Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native:
Pleasure not known beforehand is half-wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.
So it surprised me to discover that anticipation can have either neutral or even negative connotations for others. But it’s entirely logical that if you don’t enjoy anticipation, you will probably have a hard time delaying gratification. Sapolsky says that once your brain figures out what it gets rewarded for, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.
The Utility of Anticipation
Temporal discounting suggests that rewards are more attractive when they are imminent as opposed to when they are delayed. But this is not always the case. If you were the recipient of an Easter basket or bag of Halloween candy as a child, did you consume the contents quickly or did you moderate your consumption and delay gratification?
A paper published just last year in Science Advances describes a function called anticipatory utility, which counteracts temporal discounting:
An influential alternative idea in behavioral economics is that people enjoy, or savor, the moments leading up to reward. That is, people experience a positive utility, referred to as the utility of anticipation, which endows with value the time spent waiting for a reward. Anticipatory utility is different from the well-studied expected value of the future reward (i.e., a discounted value of the reward) in standard decision and reinforcement learning theory, where the latter’s utility arises solely from reward and not from its anticipation. Crucially, in the theory of anticipatory utility, the two separate utilities (i.e., anticipation and reward) are added together to construct the total value [emphasis mine]. The added value of anticipatory utility naturally explains why people occasionally prefer to delay reward (e.g., because we can enjoy the anticipation of eating a cake until tomorrow by saving it now), as well as a host of other human behaviors such as information-seeking and addiction.
The paper is a report of cutting-edge research conducted to test how the brain dynamically constructs anticipatory utility. Three different brain regions appear to be involved:
- the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which tracks the value of anticipatory utility
- the dopaminergic midbrain (DA), which enhances anticipation
- the hippocampus, which mediates the functional coupling of the vmPFC and the DA
Researchers suggest that the vmPFC and DA link reward information to the utility of anticipation, while a strong conceptual tie between the hippocampus, memory, and future imagination supports a suggestion from behavioral economics that the utility of anticipation relates to a vivid imagination of future reward [emphasis mine].
And that brings us smack into the arena of personality and personal operating systems. It explains why I find anticipation to be enjoyable and am therefore able to use future rewards effectively to alter my behavior. It’s not a skill I’ve developed. I’m just wired that way!
Coming up next: (1) my personal example of successfully employing and enjoying anticipation; (2) an investigation into learning how to anticipate.
If I understand this correctly, the degree in one’s ability to delay, and/or to savor the anticipatory portion of a reward or happy event/thing, is hard-wired, but can also be learned/developed. Is this right?
If that is so, this would go at least part way to explaining why some of us not only become addicts, but some of us never make it to recovery. It would explain, in the same way, thrill seekers who take ever greater safety risks to heighten their “high”. Or the highly acquisitive nature (Jeff Bezos’ new yacht looks like a cruise ship!) of modern Capitalist societies.
It would also explain why some of us can get “cheap thrills” from simple things. Like some of the things you mentioned in the natural world. Or, say, cooking & serving a fine meal for friends. Or going on a whale-watching trip.
What really struck me was the idea that the ability to really enjoy anticipation, e.g. even by delaying reward, is an inate characteristic.
Essentially yes to all. But the differences in the two dopamine reward circuits, which I didn’t go into yet, might explain the ability to anticipate (desire circuit) vs the craving to achieve/complete (control circuit).