**The Addictive Brain** | **The Psychology and Neuroscience of Reward**

Discover the neural mechanisms that underlie the behaviors of addiction.

This course includes watching a lecture followed by a group discussion moderated by the facilitator.

Explore the brain’s mechanisms for learning from reinforcement. You’ll start with the psychological aspects, discovering the way humans learn by a series of trials and rewards. Then you’ll find out what parts of the brain process pleasure, self-control, and craving, and see how the psychology and neuroscience of reward processing converge.

**DISCUSSION QUESTIONS**

1. How did the Rescorla-Wagner model differ from co-occurence theories of classical conditioning?

2. What advance did temporal difference learning make relative to basic prediction error learning?

3. How would you describe the function of the nucleus accumbens, the prefrontal cortex, and the ventral tegmental area in motivated behavior?