Now why are these rewards so powerful? Why do people talk about things like obsession, like a moth to a flame, addiction when they're referring to these silly little badges or to something in a game that has no real or tangible value? The reason comes back again to psychology and specifically to brain chemistry. And it relates to something called the dopamine system. The structure in the brain that is associated with pleasure and interestingly also associated with learning. And our brains release and reabsorb the neurotransmitter dopamine in response to certain activities, and rewards. Things that we find rewarding or valuable, or sometimes just surprising tend to cause that dopamine release, and that gives you literally a shot of a drug. It's literally pleasurable, and that causes you to make that association of the activity and the pleasure. It causes that learning process and causes people to literally feel a, a little bit like they have to go back and engage in the activity. So you see here Samsung Nation, the PBL type gamification site that I've showed you a few times before. This is an example of one badge that you get, and the idea here is, when you unlock this badge, it says, sweet, you just unlocked a badge. And this one is just by hanging out. So, you didn't do anything, right? You're just hanging out on the site. And it says poof, you get a badge. All of a sudden there's something there. There's something that manifests, that, that you didn't necessarily expect in return for spending time on the site. And to the extend that that works. Again I caution you. This doesn't always work. It doesn't work for everyone, but the thing that is working there when it does work is that dopamine hit, that sense of ooh that comes about in your brain associating the reward with the activity. And so behavioral gamification tends to focus on creating rewards that maximize that engagement based on dopamine release, and based on that addictive quality that we also see in lots of social games like Farmville and so forth