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Dopamine is also part of the brain’s salience filter, its get-a-load-of-this device. “You can’t pay attention to everything, but you want to be adept as an organism at recognizing things that are novel,” Dr. Volkow said. “You might not notice a fly in the room, but if that fly was fluorescent, your dopamine cells would fire.”

In addition, our dopamine-driven salience detector will focus on familiar objects that we have imbued with high value, both positive and negative: objects we want and objects we fear. If we love chocolate, our dopamine neurons will most likely start to fire at the sight of a pert little chocolate bean lying on the counter. But if we fear cockroaches, those same neurons may fire even harder when we notice that the “bean” has six legs. The pleasurable taste of chocolate per se, however, or the anxiety of cockroach phobia, may well be the handiwork of other signaling molecules, like opiates or stress hormones. Dopamine simply makes a relevant object almost impossible to ignore.

Very realistic human-looking robots or computer avatars tend to elicit negative feelings in human observers. This phenomenon is known as the “uncanny valley” response. It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling is because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of “human,” but fail to live up to it. That is, this failure generates feelings of unease due to character traits falling outside the expected spectrum of everyday social experience. These unsettling emotions are thought to have an evolutionary origin, but tests of this hypothesis have not been forthcoming. To bridge this gap, we presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces.

A main focus in economics is on binary choice situations, in which human agents have to choose between two alternative options. The classical view is that decision making consists of valuating each option, comparing the two expected values, and selecting the higher one. Some neural correlates of option values have been described in animals, but little is known about how they are represented in the human brain: are they integrated into a single center or distributed over different areas? To address this issue, we examined whether the expected values of two options, which were cued by visual symbols and chosen with either the left or right hand, could be distinguished using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The two options were linked to monetary rewards through probabilistic contingencies that subjects had to learn so as to maximize payoff. Learning curves were fitted with a standard computational model that updates, on a trial-by-trial basis, the value of the chosen option in proportion to a reward prediction error. Results show that during learning, left and right option values were specifically expressed in the contralateral ventral prefrontal cortex, regardless of the upcoming choice. We therefore suggest that expected values are represented in a distributed manner that respects the topography of the brain systems elicited by the available options.

In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback). “I once talked to a pediatric dentist,” she says, “and he said, ‘A good day is when there are no screamers.’ And I’m sure half the people he was talking about were the parents.”

Longitudinal, comprehensive data on burnout is hard to come by, in part because the United States is not especially renowned for its sensitivity to workers. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics, an admirable organization with lots of dedicated economists, does not track worker satisfaction, for example.) One of the few countries that does keep comprehensive data on burnout is, not surprisingly, the Netherlands, where the government is sensitive to the workplace needs of its citizenry.

Because Cass is an executive coach, it’s his job to tell people how to assume responsibility for their own distress. But Maslach has always contended that burnout says more about the employer than it does about the employee. “Imagine investigating the personality of cucumbers to discover why they had turned into sour pickles,” she famously wrote in 1982, “without analyzing the vinegar barrels in which they’d been submerged!” The trouble is that corporate America has always been leery of the presence of burnout researchers. When Cass tried writing his dissertation about Wall Street burnout, he was turned away from every human-resources office downtown. Maslach’s not surprised. “Anything that might suggest that something is not working well in a company or an organization of some kind, people then worry, This could be used for a lawsuit,” she says. “So doing research is fraught with peril.”

This next generation open environment has been developed by a team of researchers from the UC San Diego to connect members of the worldwide neuroscience community to facilitate solutions for today’s intractable challenges in brain research. We welcome you to read more about it, participate in the Catalog’s forums, keep abreast of recent developments, and subscribe to our mailing list. Enjoy your journey into the brain!

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Javed Alam

Engineers are not Scientists. They use Science and Math to design and Engineer systems. Another quote to tell the difference between two:

"Scientists study the World as it is. Engineers CREATE the World that never has been.”- Theodore von Karman

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