Key ideas from Read Montague

• Dopamine encodes temporal difference errors - the difference between successive predictions, not just expectation versus outcome
• Serotonin and dopamine work in opponent fashion: when dopamine goes up, serotonin goes down, and vice versa
• SSRIs push serotonin into dopamine terminals, potentially reducing rewarding properties of positive events
• Under extreme stress or hunger, dopamine can flip roles to encode aversive prediction errors for survival
• The same reinforcement learning algorithms in our brainstem power AI breakthroughs like AlphaGo and protein folding
• Dopamine fluctuations cycle with breathing patterns, observable through minimally invasive nasal electrode recordings
• Modern social media may strengthen ADHD-like circuits while weakening focused, goal-directed neural pathways