Currents of Adaptation
Currents of Adaptation
Why do we play the same song over and over again, choose the familiar route to work, or revisit a restaurant where we once enjoyed amazing food? The answer lies in one of the brain’s oldest abilities: learning from rewarding experiences. Within fractions of a second after we experience something rewarding, and before we are even aware of making a decision, the brain has already linked the reward to the experience and used it to guide future behaviour.
In her thesis, Celina Pütz shows how these rapid neural processes unfold in the brain, and how they change as we grow older and accumulate a lifetime of experiences. She then goes a step further and asked whether humans are unique in learning from reward. Despite millions of years of evolutionary separation, mice also learn from rewarding experiences in remarkably similar ways, relying on past rewards to guide future choices. Moreover, for the first time, she shows that learning from reward engages multiple brain regions in the mouse brain working in concert to transform rewarding experiences into future decisions.
These findings show that the brain mechanisms that shape our everyday decisions are evolutionarily ancient and seem to be shared across species. The same biological processes that make us revisit a restaurant also guide the behaviour of mice. Understanding these shared mechanisms reveals not only how the brain adapts to a changing world, but also that many aspects of our daily lives are deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.