Dopamine helps the brain make decisions Henrik Sorensen/Getty

Unpicking the secrets of the brain’s reward system has earned three neuroscientists a reward of their own.

Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and Ray Dolan have today been awarded the €1 million Brain Prize by Denmark’s Lundbeck Foundation. The prize recognises researchers who have made vital contributions to understanding how our brains work.

Together, their research has revealed how reward systems in the brain that involve the signalling chemical dopamine influence our behaviour and survival, playing important roles in decision-making, gambling, drug addiction, psychopathic tendencies, and schizophrenia.


“This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work,” says Wolfram Schultz, at the University of Cambridge.

Wolfram Schultz www.thebrainprize.org

Schultz discovered through experiments on monkeys 30 years ago that when the animals receive a reward, specialised brain cells become more active and make dopamine. Subsequently, he showed that this could be triggered through learned cues, even without a reward.

Peter Dayan, at University College London, took Schultz’s work further by showing how we constantly update our goals through a dopamine-driven phenomenon called “reward prediction error”. Dayan showed how our future behaviour is dictated by daily feedback on whether anticipated rewards and pleasures either fail to materialise or are more generous than anticipated.

Reward and punishment

“Nature has endowed us with a fantastic system for optimising our behaviour,” said Dayan at a press briefing in London. Dayan is now working on applying the logic of decision making seen in the dopamine system to artificial intelligence algorithms. “That’s how you get computers to make predictions,” he said.

Peter Dayan www.thebrainprize.org

Ray Dolan, of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing in Berlin, Germany, has further explored the influence of dopamine on decision making.

As we age, people lose around 10 per cent of their dopamine-producing neurons, which can deplete a person’s ability to predict future rewards accurately. Dolan has shown that this ability can be restored by giving older people extra supplies of dopamine.

Ray Dolan www.thebrainprize.org

After the advances they have made in understanding rewards, the researchers are now exploring how the brain responds to punishment. Dayan says the smart money is on another brain signalling chemical, serotonin. “That may be involved in punishment, but it’s fairly speculative at the moment.”