Motivation

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Most of what you see, read, and hear about "motivation" is pure horseshite. From Tony Robbins to Dan Pink to your motivational consultant, speaker, or psychologist of choice, most of the motivational industry is 99% scam and 1% truism with propagandist overtones.

What is motivation?

Using the online etymological dictionary, let's start with "move:"
late 13c., from Anglo-Fr. movir (O.Fr. moveir), from L. movere "move, set in motion" (pp. motus, frequentative motare), from PIE base *meue- (cf., Skt. kama-muta "moved by love" and probably mivati "pushes, moves;" Lith. mauti "push on;" Gk. ameusasthai "to surpass," amyno "push away"). Meaning "to affect with emotion" is from c.1300; that of "to prompt or impel toward some action" is from late 14c. Sense of "to change one's place of residence" is from 1707. Meaning "to propose (something) in an assembly, etc.," is first attested mid-15c. Related: Moved; moving. The noun in the gaming sense is from 1650s. Phrase on the move "in the process of going from one place to another" is from 1796; get a move on "hurry up" is Amer.Eng. colloquial from 1888.

Now, look at the root "motive:"
mid-14c., "something brought forward," from O.Fr. motif (n.), from motif (fem. motive), adj., "moving," from M.L. motivus "moving, impelling," from L. motus, pp. of movere "to move" (see move). Meaning "that which inwardly moves a person to behave a certain way" is from early 15c.

Now, "motivate:"
1885, "to stimulate toward action," from motive + -ate (2); perhaps modeled on Fr. motiver or Ger. motivieren. Related: Motivated; motivating.

Finally, "motivation:"
1873, from motivate + -tion. Psychological use, "inner or social stimulus for an action," is from 1904.

And ever since the invention of "social science", psychologists, consultants, public speakers, coaches, and other "motivators" have been milking and modifying the connotations and meanings of the word -- for profit, control, and personal power.

Let's take a step backward, and look at the word "motion:"
late 14c., from O.Fr. motion (13c.), from L. motionem (nom. motio) "a moving, an emotion," from motus, pp. of movere "to move" (see move). The verb sense in parliamentary procedure first recorded 1747; with meaning "to guide or direct by a sign, gesture, movement" it is attested from 1787. Related: Motioned; motioning.

Now let's go the extra mile and add an "e" to get "emotion:"
1570s, "a (social) moving, stirring, agitation," from M.Fr. émotion (16c.), from O.Fr. emouvoir "stir up" (12c.), from L. emovere "move out, remove, agitate," from ex- "out" (see ex-) + movere "to move" (see move). Sense of "strong feeling" is first recorded 1650s; extended to any feeling by 1808.

Psychology 101 Motivation
A person's motivations begin with basic needs and drives, which take firmer shape as the brain develops in early childhood. Social motivations come into the picture quite early, as well, with the need to convince others to take care of your young infant self. These motivations and their associated behaviours naturally grow more sophisticated with time and experience. According to Abraham Maslow (see chart above) a person's needs (and motivations) will climb a pyramid of sophistication (and enlightenment?) as he learns to satisfy each successive level of the pyramid.

Throughout our lives, we work toward achieving the top of the pyramid, self actualization, or the realization of all of our potential. As we move up the pyramid, however, things get in the way which slow us down and often knock us backward. Imagine working toward the respect and recognition of your colleagues and suddenly finding yourself out of work and homeless. Suddenly, you are forced backward and can no longer focus your attention on your work due to the need for finding food and shelter for you and your family.

According to Maslow, nobody has ever reached the peak of his pyramid. We all may strive for it and some may even get close, but no one has achieved full self-actualization. Self-actualization means a complete understanding of who you are, a sense of completeness, of being the best person you could possibly be. _Psychology101

Motivation is not a simple phenomenon. It is a fractal combination of the genetic, the social, the phsyiological, the psychological, and the experiential over a person's lifetime. Motivation is mixed up in in everything we do.

Let's pause a moment to take a look at a fascinating study done recently by psychologists at U. Penn. which makes an intriguing connection between IQ scores and the motivation of the IQ test taker.

They looked at 46 previous studies of more than 2,000 children to see if monetary incentives had any bearing on the result.

They found that on average a financial reward improved the score by 10 points but that higher values – above $10 (about £7) – could be rewarded with a 20 point increase. The size of the increase seemed to be proportional to the amount of reward offered.

A second study of 500 boys found that those who showed signs of boredom and lack of motivation – for example yawning or looking around during the test – scored lower test marks. Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist who led the study, said: "IQ scores may predict various outcomes in life, but in part for reasons that intelligence tests weren't designed for.

"I hope that social scientists, educators, and policy-makers turn a more critical eye to any kind of measure, intelligence or otherwise as how hard people try could be as important to success in life as intellectual ability itself."

The findings were reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. _Telegraph

It makes sense that someone who is more motivated during the taking of a test, will be more focused, and might perhaps score higher than he would otherwise have done. But it is also true that motivation is at least partially genetically determined -- just like IQ. Motivation is related to executive function (EF) of the frontal lobes of the brain -- which is claimed by researchers to be between 50% and 90%+ heritable. IQ itself is probably between 50% and 80% heritable, in modern affluent societies. So motivation is not separable from the genetics and brain function which underlie both IQ and EF.

But motivation, executive function, and (to a limited extent) IQ can all be improved with timely training. Here is a popular occupational overview of motivation:

1. Consequences – Never use threats. They’ll turn people against you. But making people aware of the negative consequences of not getting results (for everyone involved) can have a big impact. This one is also big for self motivation. If you don’t get your act together, will you ever get what you want?
2. Pleasure – This is the old carrot on a stick technique. Providing pleasurable rewards creates eager and productive people.
3. Performance incentives – Appeal to people’s selfish nature. Give them the opportunity to earn more for themselves by earning more for you.
4. Detailed instructions – If you want a specific result, give specific instructions. People work better when they know exactly what’s expected.

5. Short and long term goals – Use both short and long term goals to guide the action process and create an overall philosophy.
6. Kindness – Get people on your side and they’ll want to help you. Piss them off and they’ll do everything they can to screw you over.
7. Deadlines – Many people are most productive right before a big deadline. They also have a hard time focusing until that deadline is looming overhead. Use this to your advantage by setting up a series of mini-deadlines building up to an end result.

8. Team Spirit – Create an environment of camaraderie. People work more effectively when they feel like part of team — they don’t want to let others down.
10. Recognize achievement – Make a point to recognize achievements one-on-one and also in group settings. People like to see that their work isn’t being ignored.
11. Personal stake – Think about the personal stake of others. What do they need? By understanding this you’ll be able to keep people happy and productive.
12. Concentrate on outcomes – No one likes to work with someone standing over their shoulder. Focus on outcomes — make it clear what you want and cut people loose to get it done on their own.
13. Trust and Respect – Give people the trust and respect they deserve and they’ll respond to requests much more favorably.
14. Create challenges – People are happy when they’re progressing towards a goal. Give them the opportunity to face new and difficult problems and they’ll be more enthusiastic.
15. Let people be creative – Don’t expect everyone to do things your way. Allowing people to be creative creates a more optimistic environment and can lead to awesome new ideas.

16. Constructive criticism – Often people don’t realize what they’re doing wrong. Let them know. Most people want to improve and will make an effort once they know how to do it.
17. Demand improvement – Don’t let people stagnate. Each time someone advances raise the bar a little higher (especially for yourself).
18. Make it fun – Work is most enjoyable when it doesn’t feel like work at all. Let people have fun and the positive environment will lead to better results.
19. Create opportunities – Give people the opportunity to advance. Let them know that hard work will pay off.

20. Communication – Keep the communication channels open. By being aware of potential problems you can fix them before a serious dispute arises.
21. Make it stimulating – Mix it up. Don’t ask people to do the same boring tasks all the time. A stimulating environment creates enthusiasm and the opportunity for “big picture” thinking.
Master these key points and you’ll increase motivation with a bit of hard work. _PicktheBrain

Certainly some good ideas there, and more enlightened than the typical employer (or teacher or parent or government) to be sure.

Psychology Today articles on motivation

Dopamine, Learning, and Motivation (abstract)

Individual differences in extraversion and dopamine genetics predict neural reward responses (abstract)

Motivation is one of the prime pillars of life success. Along with self-discipline, executive function, cognitive strengths, and particular personality traits, motivation can make the difference between poverty and affluence, a full life or an impoverished one. Out of all the pillars of life success, motivation is probably among the most amenable to outside influence and reinforcement.

Motivation can be a strength -- or it can be a weakness if it is directed toward dysfunctional activities. Motivation can also be a "backdoor to the brain" for sophisticated persons who wish to control the individual's actions. Anyone who understands a person's deep motivations, will be able to control him to some extent.

The effect of motivational speakers is too often like the effect of Chinese food -- immediately filling, but all too quickly losing its effect. But when motivational sessions are combined with clever propaganda -- as in "consciousness raising," labour union action, classroom indoctrination, faux environmental brainwashing, strict religious training, or other political and quasi-political activity -- it is often the propaganda message which gets through and "takes," subliminally. Deep motivations penetrate below the level of conscious rationality, into the level of basic and mid-pyramid needs.

It is crucial for parents to give their children the keys to their own motivations as soon as it is practical, so that others will not be able to control them. If the parents are too immature to understand the why and how of doing that, the grandparents or uncles and aunts would be the next line of defense. If no one in the family or close circle of friends has risen high enough on the pyramid to be able to help the child -- if the child is at the mercy of popular culture, government schools, and society at large -- the Idiocracy is likely to have gotten yet another recruit.

Women Choose Their Destinies in Science

Since 1970, women have made dramatic gains in science. Today, half of all MD degrees and 52% of PhDs in life sciences are awarded to women, as are 57% of PhDs in social sciences, 71% of PhDs to psychologists, and 77% of DVMs to veter-inarians.* Forty years ago, women’s presence in most of these fields was several orders of magnitude less; e.g., in 1970 only 13% of PhDs in life sciences went to women (1). In the most math intensive fields, however, women’s growth has been less pronounced (2–4). Among the top 100 US universities, only 8.8–15.8% of tenure-track positions in many math-intensive fields(combined across ranks) are held by women, and female fullprofessors number ≤10%. _PNAS Ceci, Williams

Famous Women in ScienceIs the relatively low number of women professors in math-intensive fields due to discrimination, or do women choose their destinies in their field of choice? A recent study published in PNAS suggests that the choice depends on the woman, and how she interprets her ensemble of personal and professional needs.

It's not discrimination in instances of different hiring, but rather differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, professor of developmental psychology, and Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, both in Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

The "substantial resources" universities expend to sponsor gender-sensitivity training and interviewing workshops would be better spent on addressing the real causes of women's underrepresentation, Ceci and Williams say, through creative problem-solving and policy changes that respond to differing "biological and social realities" of the sexes.

The researchers analyzed the scientific literature in which women and men competed for publications, grants or jobs in these fields. They found no systematic evidence of sex discrimination in interviewing, hiring, reviewing or funding when men and women with similar resources – such as teaching loads and research support – were compared.

"We hear often that men have a better chance of getting their work accepted or funded, or of getting jobs, because they're men," Williams said. "Universities expend money and time trying to combat this rampant alleged discrimination against women in the hope that by doing so universities will see the numbers of women STEM scientists increase dramatically over coming years."

The data show that women scientists are confronted with choices, beginning at or before adolescence, that influence their career trajectories and success. Women who prioritize families and have children sometimes make "lifestyle choices" that lead to them to take positions, such as adjunct or part-time appointments or jobs at two-year colleges, offering fewer resources and chances to move up in the ranks. _WomenInScience

From the abstract to the study:

Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings. _PNAS

People tend to do what they are good at. A great deal of research demonstrates that at the most elite levels of math performance men outnumber women by as much as 7 to 1 or higher. Not only do math-proficient women tend to find themselves badly outnumbered by men in fields which are math intensive, but the higher testosterone levels of men in those fields tends to drive them to work harder over longer hours in order to achieve success -- even at the sacrifice of the men's personal and family lives. For men, it is a biological imperative to compete and excel.

For many women who happen to be good at math, other motivations and needs take precedence over the academic rat race. For women in fields dominated by other women -- such as psychology -- the competition is against other women who have lower testosterone levels like themselves. Stress levels are consequently not as high in terms of competitive performance anxiety -- although staff meetings may occasionally take on the ambience of a screeching cat fight. ;-)

Women who prioritize families and have children sometimes make “lifestyle choices” that lead to them to take positions, such as adjunct or part-time appointments or jobs at two-year colleges, offering fewer resources and chances to move up in the ranks. These women, however, are not held back by sex discrimination in hiring or in how their scholarly work is evaluated. Men with comparably low levels of research resources fare equivalently to their female peers. Although women disproportionately hold such low-resource positions, this is not because they had their grants and manuscripts rejected or were denied positions at research-intensive universities due to their gender.

Also, females beginning before adolescence often prefer careers focusing on people, rather than things, aspiring to be physicians, biologists and veterinarians rather than physicists, engineers and computer scientists. Efforts to interest young girls in these math-heavy fields are intended to ensure girls do not opt out of inorganic fields because of misinformation or stereotypes.

Also, fertility decisions are key because the tenure system has strong disincentives for women to have children — a factor in why more women in academia are childless than men. Implementation of “flexible options” to enhance work-family balance may help to increase the numbers of women in STEM fields, the researchers say. _SB

Women should be free to choose the nature of their careers, and not be pushed into career tracks which they feel do not suit them, by political feminists.

There is far too much denial of human biodiversity (HBD) inside politics, the media, and the academy. By denying the natural statistical diversity of human biology in the genders and other population groupings, these HBD deniers do untold amounts of damage to generation after generation of young people -- and to society at large.

The Unbearable Lightness of Constructive Change

Is there anything about yourself or your life that you've been wanting to change, but somehow just cannot get enough willpower together to make the change? You may be going about it the wrong way. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked at the difference between "willfulness and willingness", or the difference between "making it happen" and "letting it happen."

In twelve step programs, for example, participants must admit that they cannot make the needed change by themselves, and must be willing to let a "higher power" assist them in changing. The approach has worked for atheists and believers alike, for good reason, if the person is willing to let go, and let constructive change happen to him.

It’s a tricky concept for many and must be taken on faith. But now there may be science to back it up. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions. In short, he identified some key traits needed not only for long-term abstinence but for any personal objective, from losing weight to learning to play guitar.

...Here is how Senay tested this notion. He had a group of volunteers work on a series of anagrams—changing the word “sauce” to “cause,” for example, or “when” to “hewn.” But before starting this task, half the volunteers were told to contemplate whether they would work on anagrams, while the others simply thought about the fact that they would be doing anagrams in a few minutes. The difference is subtle, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves and their will. It is the difference between “Will I do this?” and “I will do this.”

The results were provocative. People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.

These findings are counterintuitive. Think about it. Why would asserting one’s intentions undermine rather than advance a stated goal? Perhaps, Senay hypothesized, it is because questions by their nature speak to possibility and freedom of choice. Meditating on them might enhance feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation, creating a mind-set that promotes success.

...Next, Senay ran still another version of this experiment, one more obviously related to healthy living. Instead of anagrams, he changed the goal to exercise; that is, he measured the volunteers’ intentions to start and stick to a fitness regimen. And in this real-world scenario, he got the same basic result: those primed with the interrogative phrase “Will I?” expressed a much greater commitment to exercise regularly than did those primed with the declarative phrase “I will.”

What’s more, when the volunteers were questioned about why they felt they would be newly motivated to get to the gym more often, those primed with the question said things like: “Because I want to take more responsibility for my own health.” Those primed with “I will” offered strikingly different explanations, such as: “Because I would feel guilty or ashamed of myself if I did not.” _SciAm

The exercise of willpower involves a tightening and pulling together of the person's resources. The "I", or ego, is fortified and solidified. This makes change -- for good or bad -- more difficult.

The exercise of a wondering willingness opens gaps in the ego -- places where the subconscious components of motivational change can slip in unnoticed, subtly altering the sub-surface dynamics.

Salesmen, propagandists, political operatives, drug dealers, and pickup artists know all about this -- and use numerous cues to get inside a person's mind in order to create manipulated change. But if more parents, teachers, supervisors, and counselors understood these inbuilt mechanisms of change better -- and were willing to call on them to aid the growth of the individuals under their care or instruction -- the everyday world would take on a more constructive appearance.

In the end, it is up to the person to choose the attitude he will adopt in facing the world and his life. And it is that attitude -- whether of willfulness or wondering willingness -- which makes all the difference.

The tricky part is that there is no one attitude which suits all situations. Human beings who attain a higher level of existence are more likely to possess a fuller toolbox of attitudes with which to approach a wide array of situations. Such persons are able to slip from one attitude to another as conditions warrant. This wide and easy adaptability of a full palette of attitudes is priceless, and is unlikely to be achieved automatically -- nor to be the result of indoctrination.

The leaked emails of JournoList and UAE Hadley CRU, provide two good examples of the destructiveness of groupthink and orchestrated indoctrination. Any society that breeds such perversity is in desperate need of constructive change on a societal level.

Like that's gonna happen. In lieu of that, focus on the personal level. Personal constructive change is more satisfying, regardless.

Easy Answer: Maybe They're Just Lazy-Assed Fockers

Average study time for university students has dropped from 24 hours a week down to 14 hours a week since 1961, according to researchers at California's UCSB and UCR. The question appears to be: "why are the little dears no longer studying like they once did?"

Well, of course, the little dears who once studied are not the same little dears who no longer study, of course. And the reasons why the little dears are not studying may be different for different schools and sets of students. Certainly if one's focus of study is "Ethnic and Queer Studies", or "Enlightenment Basket Weaving Studies", the need for study outside of class is less pressing than if one were to study in a relevant area -- such as math, physics, engineering, science, medicine, accounting, computer science, etc.

The foundation for learning has to be laid before the child arrives at university. If the parent expects the university to take a poorly raised, poorly prepared child and turn it into a rational, successful adult -- they are sailing down a river in Egypt.

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the

SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

“It’s not just limited to bad schools,” Babcock said. “We’re seeing it at liberal arts colleges, doctoral research colleges, masters colleges. Every different type, every different size. It’s just across the spectrum. It’s very robust. This is just a huge change in every category.”

The research, accepted to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, has already sparked discussions in faculty lounges and classrooms across the country. Some question whether college students ever could have studied 24 hours a week — roughly three and a half hours a night. But even if you dispute the historical decline, there is still plenty of reason for concern over the state of 21st-century study practices. In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.

But when it comes to “why,” the answers are less clear. The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them. _BostonGlobe

Al Fin edumacologists suspect that professors are demanding much less of students these days. Combine grade inflation, social promotion, and the greater ease of "faking it" with internet resources, and getting good grades may not require as much sweat as was once the case. Particularly if all the professor cares about is whether you can unthinkingly reflect back to her what she wants to see and hear. Here's more on the question:

Advent of Pass-Fail Classes, Fewer Language Requirements Mother Jones commenter hollywood writes, "Many colleges dropped foreign language requirements for degrees (languages require a lot of study time); schools adopted pass-fail courses with the natural response 'why knock myself out?' There was significant grade inflation--more people got better grades with less effort. Perhaps this lack of study by students reduced the motivation of profs to kill themselves prepping lectures and grading exams when there were journal articles to crank out."

Studying Methods Became More Efficient G. Powell theorizes, "While the amount of time that I spent on course work outside the classroom decreased, the quality of that time increased.... The Internet is also a huge productivity gain when it comes to tracking down information. What once took me hours in basement stacks to track down now often only takes seconds."

Rise in Publishing Requirements Means Professors Assign Less Work An anonymous college professor explains, "This time period does correspond with the increase in publishing expectations in Academia. I haven't been teaching long enough to see the trend, but I definitely weight the length of a problem set assignment against my research time in a way I don't think prior generations of professors did."

More Working Part-Time as Scholarships Decline Mother Jones commenter dob suggests, "I'm willing to bet that students working jobs while going to college accounts for at least a substantial fraction of that time. That characterized both me and at least half of my college friends in the 90's. Scholarships and student loans aren't what they used to be."

Students Less Comfortable With Long-Form Reading Mother Jones commenter sjw muses, "More and more students are uncomfortable with reading. They read less. They don't enjoy reading. Most of the homework that a professor assigns is reading or involves reading -- it's not just busy work, as a commenter above alleges -- so the 'collective mass' can't handle what professors would like to assign. Whether tv or the internet are to blame is not an argument that need be broached here; clearly, however, the time that a student would put into studying is now going elsewhere." _Atlantic

In reality, besides being intolerant indoctrinators, more professors are lazy shites, and their students learn sloppy habits of thinking and working from professors, to add to the sloppy habits they learned in high school.

College has become a place to go to binge drink, fornicate, and get a world-class indoctrination. It is becoming old-fashioned to think of university as a place to learn and to hone one's thinking and learning skills, developing the talents that allow one to make one's way in the world.

Today's child feels entitled to deferential treatment and top pay on the basis of not very much at all. But this feeling of entitlement has been growing for generations -- this sense that one can demand to be well taken care of by virtue of having a heartbeat, and certain scribbles on pieces of paper. The Obama Pelosi economy may disillusion some recent graduates of these delusions, and certainly as society demands more of a rapidly diminishing talent pool, certain individuals here and there will begin to catch on. But by then it will likely be too late.

Will this growing Idiocracy become an apocalypse? No. It will lead into an extended down period, during which a lot of violence and hardship will occur on a widespread basis. But the troubles will not obliterate all the progress that has been made, and that will continue being made beneath the veneer of problems.

It can be quite challenging, imagining the way through the obstacles. But the way is there, despite all the hard work being done in the Obama Pelosi regime to make sure that their hard-fought institutional changes have been made irrevocable. The decline is not irrevocable, however.

More on this later.

Dopamine Drives Risk Taking and Status Seeking

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a vital role in determining an individual's level of drive and ambition, as well as thrill seeking behaviours.  Two recent studies look at important behavioural effects of the monoamine neuro-molecule.

Our need for stimulation and dopamine's action upon the brain are connected, which explains why people who constantly crave stimulation are in danger of addictive behaviour such as drug abuse and gambling. _SD

People have typically viewed the benefits that accrue with social status primarily from the perspective of external rewards. A new paper in the February 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier suggests that there are internal rewards as well.

Dr. Martinez and colleagues found that increased social status and increased social support correlated with the density of dopamine D2/D3 receptors in the striatum, a region of the brain that plays a central role in reward and motivation, where dopamine plays a critical role in both of these behavioral processes. _Eurekalert

Both studies were collaborative, representing the work of neuroscientists from several research centers in Europe, Japan, and the US. The research is quite intriguing, as it suggests that dopamine may be a source of exquisite internal conflict -- between the drive to take risks, and the drive to achieve and hold high status. Of course, in a material world, the two drives can also work together.

Many individuals experience the urge to engage in new activities every day, and that's perfectly understandable. However, some are looking for more than that, experiences that will take their senses to a whole-new level. Other than extreme sports and gambling, there isn't very much else that can fulfill that and be legal. Psychologists have been aware of this type of behavior for years, but science has failed to pin down an underlying hormonal activity that triggers it, until now. The international group of scientists in charge of the recent study came from the University of Copenhagen, the University of Aarhus, and the University of Tokyo, in Japan. _Softpedia

Interestingly, patients who take dopamine replacement and dopamine-sparing treatments for Parkinson's Disease also often manifest strong tendencies to take risks -- including pathological gambling.

I wonder how one would program such drives into an artificial intelligence.

Why You Do the Things You Do

Do you ever stop to wonder why you are the way you are? Why you do the things you do, just the way you do them? Here's a hint: it has a great deal to do with the mysterious stew of chemicals roiling about inside your brain. One particularly interesting chemical is dopamine, which plays an incredibly important role in most person's choices and manners.

For a long time, dopamine has been misunderstood and misconstrued as a "pleasure" chemical. Al Fin neuroscientists have known that this was nonsense for a long time. But other neuroscientists are beginning to pick up the slack in order to clarify dopamine's role for the masses:

Enhancing the effects of the brain chemical dopamine influences how people make life choices by affecting expectations of pleasure, according to the new research from the UCL Institute of Neurology.

The study, published in Current Biology, confirms an important role for dopamine in how human expectations are formed and how people make complex decisions. It also contributes to an understanding of how pleasure expectation can go awry, for example in drug addiction.

...Lead author Dr Tali Sharot, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, said: "Humans make much more complex decisions than other animals -- such as which job to take, where to go on holiday, whether to start a family -- and we wanted to understand the role of dopamine in making these types of decisions. Our results indicate that when we consider alternative options when making real-life decisions, dopamine has a role in signalling the expected pleasure from those possible future events. We then use that signal to make our choices." _SD

Dopamine influences the "expectation of pleasure", rather than the pleasure itself -- a crucial difference. The health of the dopamine system determines the likelihood that a person will possess the persistent self-discipline for making long term plans which involve delaying present gratification for future success.

Gamblers, crack whores, petty criminals, and schizophrenics have a difficult time making detailed future plans and sticking to them. Similarly, persons who are depressed cannot hold the "emotional image" of a future reward in the mind, in order to create sufficient drive today to chip away at their long term projects.

This jigsaw piece is but one in the entire puzzle, but it is central, and connects to a lot of other important pieces. Intentionality and motivation are central to who a human being is, and what he will become.

If the dopamine centers and pathways are misused, abused, and stunted by unwise habits and poor educational and child-raising practices, a person may be disabled for much of his life. Genetic differences in functioning of dopamine centers and pathways can likewise handicap an individual over most of his productive years.

We are still in the dark ages of neuroscience, when sledge hammers are mistaken for fine shaping tools in neurology and psychiatry. Yet from the cloistered labs we see the glimmer of understanding that should bode well for the future minds of humanity.