The presence of the buzzer blocks the ability of the light to be associated with the food.

basic Hebbian learning. Instead they follow a modified form wherein the firing of one neuron before another only strengthens their connection if it happens in the presence of dopamine.

But before a full resurrection was possible, one problem had to be solved: learning.

In the absence of clear prior knowledge, the likelihood dominates the decision.

The number of connections a neuron in the cortex makes peaks around the first year of life and gets reduced by a third thereafter.

Neurons tend to release the same neurotransmitter on to all of their targets, a principle known as Dale’s Law

just as columns could learn the shapes of literal objects, so too could they learn the shapes of abstract ones.

When people are promised more reward in turn for remembering something, their working memory is better.

‘associative strength’. This strength of the association between a cue and a reward is something that would exist in the mind of the participant, making it not directly measurable, but different experiments could try to read it out in different ways.