🧠Your Brain Is Lying to You (And That’s Why You’re Still Alive)

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I've been thinking about coffee shops lately. Not in the precious, writerly way where I romanticize the smell of roasted beans and the clatter of ceramic cups. I mean the moment right before you walk in—that electrical jolt when you round the corner and see the familiar sign glowing in the window. That tiny spike of pleasure that happens before you've tasted anything, before the caffeine has touched your bloodstream, before the reward has actually arrived.

That feeling? It's your brain time traveling. And according to new research from McGill University, it might be the most important thing your brain does.

The research discussed here is from "Predictive Coding of Reward in the Hippocampus" by Mohamed Yagubi and colleagues, published in Nature. For those interested in the technical details, the paper provides remarkable evidence for how biological neural networks implement reinforcement learning at the cellular level—a finding that bridges neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence in profound ways.

Predictive Coding of Reward in the Hippocampus

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