Michael Platt Quotations

As we increased the riskiness of a target, the neurons' activity would go up in the same way the monkey's frequency of choosing that target would go up. It was amazing the degree to which the activity of these neurons paralleled the behavior of the monkeys. They looked like they were signaling, in fact, the monkeys' subjective valuation of that target.

There was no rational reason why monkeys might prefer one of these options over the other because, according to the theory of expected value, they're identical.

Some people are impulsive, some people are not; some people think through their decisions while others don't, and sometimes this can become pathological. Impulsive behavior can be associated with all sorts of mental disorders like addiction or problem gambling. If it could be demonstrated that we could change the way people perceive risk and ambiguity by introducing a medication that could influence brain chemistry, someday we might be able to alleviate some types of pathological decision making.

We found that they still preferred the risky target. Basically these monkeys really liked to gamble.

It took about 10 days. It's the only fight I ever won.

It seemed very, very similar to the experience of people who are compulsive gamblers, ... While it's always dangerous to anthropomorphize, it seemed as if these monkeys got a high out of getting a big reward that obliterated any memory of all the losses that they would experience following that big reward.