As long as it works

“In the end, everyone dies anyway,” Boris Yelnikoff observes several times throughout Woody Allen's new film. Let's be rational: if the end is inevitable, what is the point of life? From a purely rational perspective, getting out of bed would not be worth the effort.

If, however, we get up every new day, it is either because we have some logical argument that justifies the endeavor, or because... it is not logic that drives life. I am fully convinced of the second alternative, but I left the theater mentally examining what I know about it.

We have a set of structures in our brains dedicated to signaling, as Woody Allen says, “whatever works” — that is, anything that works, anything that produces a positive result (the title of the film in Portuguese, “Tudo pode dar certo” [Everything can work out], was an unfortunate choice that distorts the meaning of the story, but what can you do?). If something works, we are rewarded with a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction that both serves as an immediate reward and gives us the encouragement to do whatever it takes in the future to achieve more. Anything that works compels us to keep getting out of bed.

What about other animals? Luckily, I had some fresh data in my head, as I had spent the last few weeks researching the nervous systems of a wide variety of species for a new course (and I was left with the impression that the main role of the nervous system is to allow us to eat and reproduce; anything else is a bonus—but that's another story). Jellyfish, anemones, and polyps, which have the simplest nervous systems, feed in a virtually passive manner: they swim around or move their tentacles seemingly at random, and whatever falls into the net is fish. In contrast, other animals actively pursue their prey—which must require some kind of motivation. And, interestingly, everyone I know already has some version of our reward system: if we have a few thousand dopaminergic neurons that give us pleasure when we do something that works, fruit flies, for example, have exactly four. But they are there, and they also serve to give positive value to anything that works.

Why do we get out of bed, then? Because we have a reward system, and we go in search of something that works for us: “any and all love you can give and receive, any joy you gain or bring to others, any act or temporary grace, anything that works.”

Excerpt from Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2025) Neuroscience of Everyday Life, originally published in Folha de São Paulo in May 2010.