UCL professors win The Brain Prize for 2017

The Brain Prize for 2017, worth '1m, has been awarded to Professor Peter Dayan (UCL Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit), Professor Ray Dolan (UCL Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research) and Professor Wolfram Schultz (University of Cambridge) for their analysis of how the brain recognises and processes reward. The capacity to link reward to events and actions is the foundation of human and animal survival, and problems with processing rewards can lead to neurological and psychiatric disorders. The Brain Prize, awarded annually by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark, recognises scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience. The research of this year's winners has far-reaching implications for understanding human behaviour, including decision-making, gambling, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour and schizophrenia. The sense of reward is influenced and determined by many things, such as taste and smell, as well as by fundamental motivations such as hunger or thirst. In turn, it influences choices, decisions and even attention. Many regions of the brain process information associated with reward, but a chemical messenger in the brain called dopamine is key the regulation of learning and performance.