Finding What You Want Archives

Motivation: The Condensed Version

March 5, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Rewards can be intrinsic or extrinsic, but there’s no such thing as extrinsic motivation.

I’m more often than not the one attempting to make distinctions when it appears that others are conflating or confusing concepts. But when it comes to motivation, there is no distinction to be made between intrinsic and extrinsic because what motivates you 100% of the time is dopamine, which is generated in your brain based on what you want and like and your interpretations. That’s about as intrinsic as you can get.

That means that you are intrinsically motivated to do every single thing you are currently doing, even if you don’t want to want to do it, or don’t like the outcome of doing (or having done) it, or want to do something entirely different.

If you’re doing something to get someone else’s approval, it’s your brain that desires that approval. If you’re doing something because you feel obligated to do it, it’s your brain that sees meeting obligations—in general or in particular—as desirable. If you’re doing something because it feels good, it’s your brain that generates liking neurochemicals for that activity.

Motivation is a functional process that’s mediated by the brain, which cares about what you’ve trained it to care about regardless of how you’ve trained it or why you’ve trained it. Among the things the brain cares about are things you don’t even want it to care about because you weren’t paying attention when you were training it. But train it you did. And now you are intrinsically motivated to pursue those things. There’s nothing at all complex or mysterious about this process.

Threat or Reward?

What you are training, every day in fact, is your unconscious, which is the part of your brain that makes moment-to-moment choices—all moment-to-moment choices. Those choices are aimed at ensuring your survival. The brain is always asking the question what should I do next? at a speed you can’t hope to comprehend. Any time it encounters a bit of sensory information to process—whether interoceptive (internal) or exteroceptive (external)— the first “sort,” so to speak, is always: threat or reward?

The brain’s interpretation of threat or reward determines whether the action will be to avoid (the potential threat) or approach (the potential reward). To put it in the words of a neuroscientist:

At any point in time, your brain (as well as the brain of any living system) is only ever making one decision: to go toward or to go away from something. —Beau Lotto, Deviate

That is motivation in a nutshell. It may be the most basic fact of life.

Since we can’t directly access the unconscious, we are mostly unaware of its processes and how they impact us. When we ponder what motivates us to take an action, we’re looking for cause-and-effect threads, explanations, or sometimes just a good story, and the left hemisphere (the narrator, as Michael Gazzaniga refers to it) complies. As is the case with almost all of the left hemisphere’s stories, the ones explaining our behavior are necessarily based on incomplete information. But we’re predisposed to believe our own stories and explanations.

If you’re interested in psychologizing or narrating a process that is neurochemical in nature, go for it, but that approach will not assist you if change is what you’re after. Of course, you have beliefs that play a role in determining whether you view something as a threat or as a reward (and the type of threat or reward). Your personality, mental model, and experience insure that your interpretations of the world are specific to you.

Life’s Navigational System

But the fact remains that in the moment of choosing, what motivates you and everyone else is the release of dopamine by your brain. And dopamine is released when your brain expects a reward—which is the answer to the question, what should I do next? Avoid or approach? Should you get yourself out of the way of harm or put yourself in the way of pleasure? You can think of motivation as a navigation system that operates at the unconscious level because if you had to rely on consciousness for your navigational needs, your life would be very, very short.

Since motivation operates at the unconscious level, you are not normally aware of the release of these neurochemicals, which include the wanting neurochemical (dopamine), so-called liking neurochemicals (serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids), and stress neurochemicals (adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol).

Kent Berridge, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan says:

Both wanting and liking can exist without subjective awareness. Conscious experience can distort or blur the underlying reward processes that gave rise to it. Subjective reports may contain false assessments of underlying processes, or even fail at all to register important reward processes. The core processes of liking and wanting that constitute reward are distinct from the subjective report or conscious awareness of those processes.

Disrupting the Status Quo

Since you’re already motivated to do what you’re currently doing, your brain is already releasing dopamine—and more importantly, liking neurochemicals—when you do it. Which means it’s already getting intrinsic rewards. If you want to be doing something other than what you’re doing, you have to train your brain to do something else. As I wrote in this recent issue of lucidwaking, if you want your brain to do something other than what it’s already doing, you need to make it a better offer, which means you need to up the reward ante with an extrinsic reward.

You use extrinsic rewards intentionally to train your brain to become intrinsically motivated to do what you want it to do—meaning take an action in the future that it is not taking now.

As one of my favorite clients said just the other day, “That’s where the power is!”

My perception is that belief in the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is actually harmful not only to the process of behavior change but to people’s sense of efficacy and agency. So I plan to elaborate on that in a future post.

Stairs to Nowhere:
False, Hidden, and Perceptible Affordances

September 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Stairs are an example of an affordance. They provide “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.” The action possibility they provide is the ascent or descent of an incline in order to gain access to another floor or level: moving between the sidewalk and a porch, between the first floor and the second floor, between the ground floor and a basement, or in some airports, between the tarmac and a plane.

Stairs to nowhere, however—of which there are more head-scratching examples than you might imagine—suggest an action possibility, but they do not allow access to anything. That makes them a “false” affordance.

As William Graver, who came up with the concept, put it:

A false affordance is an apparent affordance that does not have any real function, meaning that the [agent] perceives nonexistent possibilities for action.

While in many cases you could climb a staircase to nowhere, you would not actually get anywhere by doing so.

In addition to false affordances, Graver also identified what he called “hidden” affordances:

A hidden affordance indicates that there are possibilities for action, but these are not perceived by the [agent].

Graver appears to be talking about alternative uses you are not aware of for objects in the environment. Recently I used pliers to extend my reach so I could lift a chain link over a hook in the ceiling. My first thought was to use a bamboo stick like the ones I stake plants with, but they’re out in the garage. The pliers are in the kitchen. That isn’t really among the tool’s intended uses, but I use pliers for a lot of things so it wasn’t much of a stretch. There may have been other objects I could have used, but any other possibilities for action stayed hidden. If I hadn’t thought of the pliers, that possibility for action would have been hidden, too. Instead, the pliers in this case actually became a “perceptible” affordance.

Perceptible refers to the actions you think an object affords, whether or not those actions were intended and whether or not they are, in fact, available. In A Tale of Two Kitties, I described my cats’ apparent perception that bookcases afford an opportunity for climbing, while my perception is that they are a place to store books, which is what I use them for. (A sturdy staircase to nowhere could afford you the possibility for cardiovascular exercise if you were so inclined and perceived it as such.)

Affordances can—and have been—more extensively categorized. “Real” affordances are another distinction that is sometimes made. But given that affordances are relationships rather than properties of objects in the environment, the categories of false, hidden, and perceptible are sufficient for our discussion.

Creating Transformational Change

If you want to create significant, sustained change—which requires ongoing and repetitive action—you will have a greater chance of success if you find effective affordances to assist you.

As I said in the last post on affordances, everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. You are a process that’s already in progress, on a trajectory with a great deal of momentum behind it. The only way to create change is by modifying your trajectory. And the only way to modify your trajectory is by modifying your mental model, which consists primarily of your beliefs and your operating system. How do you make those modifications? Essentially, how do you change your brain? You change it via the ongoing and repetitive actions you take. That’s neuroplasticity in a nutshell.

The impetus for change is your dissatisfaction with the status quo: an outcome you’re getting that is not the outcome you want. Your desire for change is to a very great extent determined by the level or extent of your dissatisfaction with the outcome in question. Low or moderate dissatisfaction will not motivate you to make significant, sustained change.

What is the most likely source of the outcome you’re getting that you don’t want (or an outcome you want that you’re not getting)?

If you’re like most people, you probably fail to identify the source correctly, which then leads you to look for solutions in all the wrong places. You may believe that if you are not getting the outcomes you want, something is wrong or broken. So you attempt to figure out what is wrong and fix that.

But Nothing Is Wrong

That’s right: nothing is wrong. The source of most problems you’re attempting to solve can be found in your operating system, which is to say that your operating system is working just fine to get you precisely the outcomes you’re getting.

If you want to get a different outcome, you need to determine and undertake a course of action that differs from the autopilot actions you have been taking.

You will most likely gravitate toward actions (solutions) that appeal to your operating system/mental model, but that will only serve to maintain the status quo. It’s a variation on the theme of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. You may experience some temporary relief of psychological tension just because you’re doing something, but that will almost invariably be followed by a return to the previous behavior once the tension is relieved.

Whatever action you do identify to change your current trajectory and get a different outcome, it won’t be as appealing as the actions you normally take. In fact, it will probably feel contrived, which is why I call such actions—or sets of actions—contrivances.

Contrivances fall into the category of hidden affordances. They afford you the opportunity to modify your mental model and your trajectory and get the outcomes you want. But before they can do that for you, you have to perceive them as such—like I did with the pliers—so they become perceptible.

Third post in a series on affordances. Still to come: the allure of false affordances and our resistance to contrivances.

You Are Here. What Do You Want?

August 20, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Imagine if you will a store directory at any shopping mall. Imagine you are at the spot marked “You Are Here.” Why are you here? Are you going to a particular store? Or are you here to meet someone, just to browse, or to “kill time”? Is it cold or warm? Are you in a hurry? It’s not a covered mall; what happens if it unexpectedly begins to rain?

Loud music is coming through the open door of the record store. People swarm past you and might accidentally bump into you. You smell coffee brewing. The colors and shapes in some windows attract you; perhaps you stop to look at things you weren’t intending to buy. And everywhere you go, “You Are Here.”

Someone figured out that we process about 126 bits of information per second or 7,560 per minute or almost half a billion per hour. [Note: The current estimate is closer to a third of that, or 40 bits per second.]

Who is the “You” who is here processing these bits of information? As near as I can tell, you’re a somewhat chaotic conglomeration of elements that fall into two categories: 1) what you came in with and 2) what’s been added since [aka nature and nurture].

The first category includes things like gender, birth order, ethnic orientation, basic human instincts, and your own individual abilities and handicaps.

The second category is comprised in part of what you have learned, your social conditioning, your religious or spiritual convictions [or lack thereof], various thoughts and feelings you’ve had, and the particular beliefs you’ve evolved [or that have evolved you].

Some of your parts are probably operating smoothly, some are undoubtedly a mess, and there are many others of which you are more or less unaware.

Now here “You” are, in the middle of the shopping mall of life, bombarded with more stimuli than you can ever hope to process, trying to get what you came here for. What’s a poor shopper to do?

Well, there are many techniques available to help you get “what you really want in life.” One method specifies that you don’t have to “get better” to get what you want. But another claims to only be effective when “used in alignment with [your] highest goals and purposes.” A book titled You Can Have It All reminds us that the universe is perfect and that whatever you have you must want or you wouldn’t have it. Therefore, to have something else, you must change what you want.

What Do You Want?

Some people seem to know right off, while others freeze at the very question. You can simply make up what you want. Or you can work through exercises that help you sort through all your layers to find out what you really want.

Once you decide what it is, there are various approaches you can take to get it.

But the juice here is not the “what” in what you want. It’s that identifying what you want enables you to set goals, and goals are an excellent tool [an affordance, one might say] to help you focus your awareness and make some sense of all the bits of information coming at you.

I’m inclined to agree with those who say the universe doesn’t have the slightest interest in what we want.* So even if you do all the right things to get what you want, you might get it or you might not get it.

*In fact, I’ve said that if the universe cares about my personal affairs, it needs to get a job.

This is an article I wrote exactly 33 years ago (the bracketed text indicates an edit or editorial comment) for a column called Random Access.

I knew almost nothing about the brain and behavior because most of what I know now hadn’t been discovered yet. Farther to Go! wasn’t even a pipe dream, and I had no concept of being on a quest of any kind. Yet the concerns I had then are the same concerns I have today. Am I…are you…up to something? Or are we hanging around the mall trying to “kill time”? Are we on the aspirational superhighway or are we still window shopping?

What do you want? The shopping mall directory can tell you where you are, but if you haven’t identified a destination it can’t tell you how to get anywhere else.

Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops

August 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.”

This doesn’t deviate radically from other definitions, but it does explicitly identify the three most salient aspects of the concept as it pertains to creating sustained change. An affordance offers or suggest a possible action that an agent—you or I—might take within an environment.

Affordances are like obstacles in that it is an agent with a goal or a desired outcome, preferably both, who interprets something in the environment as either an affordance or an obstacle. A boulder in the middle of a road is just a boulder in the middle of a road. It isn’t an obstacle unless there’s something you really, really want on the other side of it.

Similarly, a fitness center located across the street from where you live is simply one of several businesses in the area unless you have a strong desire to increase your own fitness or level of vitality, in which case you identify it as an affordance. (If it’s occupying the space where you want to establish a hair salon, well then it’s an obstacle.)

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. —Don Norman, researcher, professor, author

Affordances, like obstacles, are interpreted as such by your brain and brought to your attention based on their salience (importance) to you. If you get hungry while on a long drive, food becomes salient, and restaurants you might otherwise ignore become affordances. After you’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, food becomes less salient, and restaurants—if you even notice them—are once more just restaurants. But salience isn’t only based on your immediate internal state or external conditions/circumstances.

It’s (Always) All about the Action

The nature of reality is that everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. The brain continuously interprets both internal and external sensory data in order to determine what action to take next. It bases its interpretations on our mental model of the world, which it has built up over our lifetime largely as a result of our actions—especially the actions we repeat.

Let’s say you regularly frequent a chain of coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Maybe you’re particularly fond of iced vanilla lattes. And maybe the coffee shops are also places where you get together with friends or groups. (When I was in various writers’ groups, we tended to hold our meetings in either bookstores or coffee shops.) Repeatedly spending time in Starbucks increases its salience. It’s an affordance that offers you the possible actions of getting the coffee you enjoy or meeting and connecting with other people.

So you are much more likely to notice a Starbucks—and by “you,” I mean your brain—and its potential affordances than someone for whom Starbucks doesn’t have the same importance. Your brain has paid attention to your repeated past actions, and as a result, it focuses your attention on current or future possibilities for action in your environment by identifying affordances.

I like to use the image of an infinity loop to distinguish between “you” (the agent) and “not you” (your environment) to illustrate the dynamic and ongoing engagement between you and your environment.

Each of us is engaged in this continuous interaction; it’s anything but static. But our tendency to perceive the world as being far more fixed than it is prevents us from being attuned to the dynamic nature of our relationship with the world and can easily blind us to the possibilities—both positive and negative—within it.

Everything Is an Interpretation

The affordances described here and in my previous post are generally positive. But in and of themselves, affordances are neither positive nor negative. Given that they describe relationships, they can not only be interpreted differently by different people, they can also be interpreted differently by the same person at different times or in different circumstances. While a smartphone, for example, offers access (to others, to information, to assistance, etc.), it can also offer unlimited distractions that may provide immediate gratification but divert you from more substantive or satisfying activities.

But maybe, in the moment, a distraction is what you want (say, cat videos or a game) while you’re waiting to board your plane or for a friend to show up. Or maybe you need to get your car towed. Or you want to find out if the yarn store has the specialty yarn you need to complete an important knitting project. A smartphone can help you get what you really want (a desired outcome) or it can get in the way of you getting what you want. That knitting project won’t complete itself while you’re playing Wordle.

A purse left unattended in a shopping cart suggests an action to a thief—or a would-be thief—that it hopefully doesn’t suggest to you or me.

It Was Never Just about the Butterflies

Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, among many other books, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published last month. He says:

[O]ne thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk.…I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars…but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly.

The butterfly net, when used intentionally to generate a specific state of awareness—and likewise the binoculars around one’s neck or the pencil (in my case, pen, highlighter, and Post-It® flags)—are what I call contrivances. Contrivances are affordances—generally positive in nature. Next time I’ll describe the three different types of affordances and where contrivances fit into that scheme.

Chronic Happiness
Is Not Good for You

July 22, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I recently came across a video of a mental health professional disparaging the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The loudest contingent of the DMN-bashing bandwagon tends to be the mindfulness folks, but it’s not an exclusive club.

This particular person cited a study I’m familiar with and have mentioned previously. Researchers contacted study participants at random times to ask them (1) what they were doing right then and (2) how happy they were.

The results supposedly revealed that people were happier when their attention was focused on what they were doing (accessing the brain’s attention network) than they were when their minds were wandering (accessing the brain’s default mode network).

My first question now would be who were these people? Specifically, I would want to know something about their personalities, given that we are all so dissimilar from each other. That is just one of many reasons why you cannot simply lump a group of people together, average their responses to some questions, and come to a sound conclusion about…anything.

Happiness was, in fact, the subject of the research, so I can’t fault the researchers for asking people to evaluate their level of happiness. But I question the ability of people in general to gauge their degree of happiness or of any other emotion. And I definitely can fault the assumption that happiness is a worthy topic of research.

The study in question was really focused on transient happiness—or acute happiness, if you will—which most people experience to a greater or lesser extent, anyway. By that, I mean we don’t all experience an equal amount or intensity of happiness. And who knows if what I label happy is the same emotion you label happy.

An inability to experience any happiness is definitely an indicator of a problem; the inability to be happy all the time—not so much.

The Pursuit of Happiness

A recent Facebook post advertising a Buddhist-oriented program asserted that anger is a “delusion” and it’s bad because it makes us unhappy. This is both simple-minded and wrong. The relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional and destructive than the experience of anger.

I have a handout with a list of 136 positive emotions (along with a similar list of negative emotions). Happy is but one of them. Yet somehow people have gotten the idea that it is the best or most important emotion. And somehow people have concluded that a steady state of happiness is both desirable and achievable. (This seems to be a peculiarly American take.)

One of the other emotions on the list is excited, which is far more appealing to me than happy but far less acceptable to pursue. For one thing, people who pursue excitement are often advised that it is just a poor substitute for happiness. Pursuing excitement is also associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking.

In the Five Factor Model of Personality, it’s related to extraversion and openness to experience. (Full disclosure: those are the two factors I always score highest in, in that order.) Introverts and ambiverts tend to view extraverts with some degree of suspicion if not outright aversion, so the negative association to excitement is not surprising.

The short-term side-effects of excitement (acute excitement), however, include anticipation, alertness, increased energy, and motivation. Good stuff! But the side-effects of attempting to maintain a constant state of excitement—chronic excitement—are altogether different: impaired concentration, sleeplessness, restlessness, elevated blood pressure, increased adrenaline and noradrenaline, racing heart. The body would react to a constant state of excitement essentially the same as it would to chronic stress.

Furthermore, one would have to continually up the ante, so to speak (seek more novelty, take greater risks), to maintain the same level of excitement. Someone who was chronically excited would likely become a source of annoyance to friends, family, and coworkers.

Chronic happiness is no better for us than chronic excitement. Here’s why:

Sometimes things are not going well, there is a real threat, and vigilance is required.

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert

Pursuing happiness is likely to keep you stuck on the hedonic treadmill, where you’ll need to keep moving to acquire more and more of the things or experiences you think will bring you pleasure—to each of which you will adapt surprisingly quickly.
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Happiness won’t increase your lifespan. In the final analysis, death comes in equal proportion to the happy and the sad. The result of research conducted by Oxford University with nearly 720,000 women is that “happiness and related measures of wellbeing do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality.”
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If you’re simply here for the party, you should be aware your body processes “empty positive emotions” the same way it processes chronic adversity, which is by activating the pro-inflammatory response to prepare for bacterial threats. (Inflammation is associated with many major and minor diseases, including heart disease, various cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.) A diet of too many empty positive emotions seems to be a lot like a diet of too many empty (sugar-, salt-, alcohol-, or fat-laden) calories.
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Happiness may make you feel good in the moment, but pursuing it by avoiding negative thoughts and feelings and difficult or painful situations can stunt your personal development. That can lead to decreased resilience, greater susceptibility to stress, and reduced creativity and problem-solving abilities.

You’re less likely to become depressed if you regularly experience a range of emotions instead of aiming exclusively for the positive ones.

Research indicates that if you pursue happiness, you may get it (just not all the time), but you’re not likely to feel satisfied. On the other hand, if you focus on meaning, instead, you’re extremely likely to feel satisfied and you may also get happiness as a bonus.