Brain chemistry and neuroeconomics with Read Montague

Read Montague joined Virginia Tech’s “Curious Conversations” to talk about the role of dopamine and serotonin in learning, motivation, memory, mood, and decision-making. He discussed his research on measuring dopamine and serotonin dynamics in the brain in real time using electrodes in epilepsy patients and explained the role neuroeconomics are playing  in that research.  About Montague Montague is the Virginia Tech Carilion (VTC) Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor and the director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. His lab’s work focuses on computational neuroscience – the connection between physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. Montague’s early theoretical work focused on the hypothesis that dopaminergic systems encode a particular kind of computational process, a reward prediction error signal, similar to those used in areas of artificial intelligence like optimal control.