Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Pleasure Is Transient
but Wanting Persists

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Liking is the pleasure you experience from something. The source of that pleasure is the liking—or Here and Now—neurochemicals released in your brain: serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids. The same pleasure-generating areas in the brain are activated for all pleasures, from gustatory and sensual to musical, artistic, and altruistic.

Life’s intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than intense desires. —Dr. Kent Berridge, University of Michigan

Because the pleasure circuit is considerably smaller and far more fragile than the “wanting system,” it can be elusive; more importantly, it is always transient. Liking something doesn’t always motivate you to go after it. Dopamine is what generates motivation, so you also need to want what you like.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

While liking (pleasure) and wanting (desire) are separate systems, wanting actually enhances and, in a sense, prolongs liking. It’s said that the brain likes to want because it releases liking neurochemicals along with dopamine. On the other hand, instant gratification quickly dissipates pleasure. That’s how you end up on the hedonic treadmill where you are continually in pursuit of more and more of the things or experiences that initially brought you pleasure in an attempt to maintain a steady state of pleasant feelings.

When you work toward a reward and earn it, rather than simply treating yourself to it because you can, you actually enhance your enjoyment of it. But you have to be intentional about it. You have to make a connection between your actions and the reward so your brain gets the message.

Dopamine is a powerful motivator. It carries signals for both rewards and for the muscle movements needed to go out and get them. So when dopamine levels are diminished, you will still like what you like, but you will be less inclined to take action to get it. And when dopamine levels are elevated, you will be more inclined to take action to get something, whether or not you actually like it.

Liking and wanting usually do work together in your brain, but when they become uncoupled, you can want something without liking it. And according to Stanford University researchers, if you don’t get something you want, you desire it more while liking it less.

If you don’t clearly identify what you want—and determine how you’re going to get it—you’re liable to end up going along for the ride of getting what your brain wants. What you want needs to be compelling enough to you to activate the amygdala, thus creating a sense of urgency. Amygdala activation is critical in getting you to act on your desires. It settles down when you receive or achieve them.

In the case of long-term goals, once you’ve identified a reward and begin taking steps toward it, your brain gradually and steadily releases increasing bursts of dopamine the closer you get to the reward. And the bigger the reward (the more your brain craves it), the more dopamine will be released.

Reward systems integrate liking, wanting, and learning. Our pleasures help us learn and change our behavior, and what we learn alters the pleasure we experience. Our reward system has a built-in flexibility in which cognitive and pleasure systems interact and modulate each other. Anything can be a source of pleasure as long as it taps into reward systems embedded in our brains. –Anjan Chaterjee, author of The Aesthetic Brain

Wanting has a purpose. It is critical to any focused effort. It motivates you to pursue both long-term and short-term goals. But, as Chris Berdick says, once that goal’s been achieved, wanting moves along.

Unsurprisingly, liking neurochemicals have a close relationship with stress neurochemicals—adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, etc.—which I also call disliking neurochemicals. I’ll talk about how that relationship can hamper our ability to create change next time.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Which Path Are You On?*

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As we know, dopamine is involved in many different aspects of our lives, including sleep, memory, mood, learning, and movement. Dopamine is also a significant component of the brain’s reward system and, as such, it’s the source of motivation. That’s why it’s so important in regard to behavior and behavior change.

There are four major dopamine pathways in the brain. The two that matter most to us here are the mesolimbic pathway and the mesocortical pathway. While both pathways motivate us, they motivate us in different ways and in different directions, indicated by the nicknames given to them: desire dopamine and control dopamine.

While dopamine is distributed throughout everyone’s brain, the amount and pattern of distribution is not the same for everyone. As a result, some of us have more dopamine in the control pathway and some of us have more dopamine in the desire pathway. And of course not everyone who has more dopamine in the control pathway has the same amount, which is also the case for dopamine in the desire pathway. Still others may have similar amounts of dopamine in both pathways.

Here’s a comparison of what a predominance of dopamine in one pathway compared to the other pathway looks like:

Desire dopamine generates craving for things, substances, people, situations—whatever is salient (important) to you. You desire (want) what you like and what matters to you.

Control dopamine generates a craving for achievement or accomplishment, which can range from completing multiple years of education in order to attain a degree or checking off boxes on a to-do list.

Having more desire dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to have unrestrained appetites or develop addictions. And having more control dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to make better judgements or be a better critical thinker.

Our genetics play a role in our neurochemistry, including dopamine distribution, as does our experience. We all have dopamine in both pathways. One of the things about neurochemicals is that while they affect us, we can also affect them. So if we have lots of dopamine in the desire pathway but not enough in the control pathway to actually get what we want, we can use contrivances to take actions that alter our neurochemistry. Likewise, if we have lots of dopamine in the control pathway but not enough in the desire pathway to identify what we really want, we can use contrivances to help us increase desire dopamine.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

As with the Meta Mindsets, in which Production mindset is most effective in the service of Experiment mindset, control dopamine is most effective in the service of desire dopamine. Otherwise the functions and processes of the mesocortical pathway have to operate without salience, meaning without your direction. You have nothing to process but the exteroceptive or interoceptive situations or stimuli you happen to encounter and no context within which to process it.

One of my favorite quotes from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is: You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. With too much control dopamine and not enough desire dopamine, it’s more like: The world tweaks you, and you attempt to manage the effects.

We happen to live in a world where control dopamine is held up as the gold standard, whether it’s labeled as such or not. People are very busy pursuing completion for its own sake without having determined whether or not there is anything meaningful to them in the pursuit. This has negative implications for individuals, societies, and the world. In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD and Michael E. Long write:

Some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement but are unable to experience H&N [Here and Now] fulfillment. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between dopamine, the wanting neurochemical, and the liking (aka Here and Now) neurochemicals.

*Hat tip to Pete Seeger

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Everything Everywhere
Is in Motion All the Time

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What would we do without dopamine? The answer is: nothing. We can’t do anything without dopamine, which is the literal source of all motivation—all movement—whether physical or psychological. Why then are so many people going on and on about how we all need a dopamine detox? Why are we advised to be wary of substances or activities that provide us with “hits” of dopamine, as if dopamine were a drug?

Considering popular, and even some scientific, perspectives on dopamine tends to put me in mind of the lyrics of a song by the Animals straight out of the wayback machine:

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

While dopamine’s functions* are wide and varied, its role in regard to the brain’s reward system has been clarified. Dopamine is not the source of pleasure in the brain. That role is played by the liking neurochemicals, such as serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioids. Dopamine is called the “wanting” neurochemical because it is the source of…wanting, which is really just another word for motivation.

Dopamine is released when the brain expects to experience a reward, meaning it expects to experience something it likes. It causes us to take action by moving toward the reward.

Let’s say you notice you’re thirsty and you consider getting up from your desk to get a glass or bottle of water. Do you want the water enough to stop what you’re doing and take an action to get it? In other words, how motivated are you? How enticing is the water? How rewarding do you think it will be? How much pleasure do you think you’ll get from it? (Of course, it’s your brain that makes the choice, but you get to experience both the wanting and the liking.)

Although dopamine is not one of the liking neurochemicals, the brain “likes” to want. It likes to be motivated, to get us to move. So liking neurochemicals are released along with dopamine, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how rewarding the brain expects the experience or substance to be. The so-called wanting system in the brain is considered to be robust, while the liking system is fragile. That’s because the liking neurochemicals don’t stick around for long, so the brain moves on to wanting something else. Liking comes and goes but wanting persists.

Those who believe we should not want simply don’t understand how the brain works. Wanting is essential for being awake and for living an awake life, as was illustrated in the 1990 movie Awakenings. Robin Williams played neurologist Oliver Sacks, who in the early stage of his career dosed catatonic patients with levodopa, the precursor to dopamine in an attempt to literally wake them from their unresponsive states.

Going on a dopamine detox (conceptually, anyway, since the idea is nonsensical), would be like deciding to stop eating altogether in order to avoid sugar. It would be like advising someone not to pursue something they’re passionate about because that would generate “too much” dopamine.

Although dopamine plays a role in compulsive or addictive behavior, it is neither a drug, nor does it function like a drug. Instead of trying to manage dopamine—which is not a game for amateurs—we ought to focus on identifying better targets. We could learn how to use the wanting system to pursue the things we think would provide us with a more satisfying and meaningful life.

Next time I’ll talk about two important dopamine pathways in the brain and how they affect our ability to create change.

*Dopamine plays a role in your brain’s reward system, which includes feeling pleasure, achieving heightened arousal, and learning. Dopamine also helps with focus, concentration, attention, memory, sleep, mood, and motivation. And it is involved with decision-making, movement, working memory, and learning. It is one of the most extensively studied neurochemicals, mainly because it plays such diverse roles in human behavior and cognition. Dopamine is also a factor in Parkinson’s disease, addiction, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

12 Years After

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Twelve years ago this month, I headed off on the path I came to call Farther to Go! I was on a path of sorts at the time—well, on a sidewalk, anyway, heading west on Academy, into what I tend to refer to as the (expletive deleted) New Mexico wind—when I experienced a profound moment of ferocious dissatisfaction. It’s true that the wind had something to do with it, but the wind was also emblematic of my then current state of affairs and my feeling about it.

I wasn’t entirely sure where the new path would lead, I had no idea what I would find out along the way or who I would encounter, and there was certainly no inkling of Farther to Go! on the horizon.

During the past 12 years, I’ve read an insane amount of information about the brain and behavior. Many, but not all, of the books are identified on the Reading List page on my website. That list doesn’t include all the articles and other materials I’ve accessed. All my bookshelves and file drawers are maxed out. There’s been a lot of input into the system (me, that is; into my system).

In addition to applying what I learned to my own life, I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, articles, and newsletters, produced countless handouts and exercises, and created workshop and course materials galore. The 36 3-ring binders lined up on the desk behind me can attest to my output.

I was armed with a small amount of knowledge about the brain and behavior when I managed to look up at exactly the right moment to take advantage of the explosion of research in this arena. It was serendipitous to a great extent.

What kind of surprises me now is how well what I’ve learned has held up. Over the course of these 12 years, I have significantly revised my perception of only the four key elements outlined below.

Dopamine

Dopamine was long considered to be the pleasure neurochemical. A “hit” of dopamine was thought to be like a hit of a drug such as cocaine or heroin (more metaphorically than factually). This was still the prevailing view when I first learned about the brain’s reward system. Many people haven’t yet let go of this mistaken idea, which has led to some really silly concepts like dopamine detoxing.

Fortunately, I encountered the work of Kent Berridge early in my exploration and research. He’s an expert on dopamine and rewards and his work set me straight and helped me understand how essential rewards are in regard to behavior, whether we’re aware of them or not.

Dopamine is the wanting neurochemical. It’s associated with anticipation or craving or desire. When we attain what we anticipate, crave, or desire, other neurochemicals referred to as liking neurochemicals are released. Liking neurochemicals such as serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin generate feelings of pleasure.

Dopamine motivates us to move (physically as well as psychologically), to pursue what we want, to take action. This wanting system is considered to be robust, while the liking system is considered fragile. Our experience of pleasure waxes and wanes, but wanting is always with us. This isn’t a personal problem or a design flaw; wanting is absolutely essential for both surviving and thriving.

Rewards

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg described what he calls the habit loop, which consists of a cue, a behavior, and a reward. This was a bit of a revolutionary idea because we tend to think of a habit strictly in terms of behavior. Duhigg’s research led him to see that all three parts of the habit loop had to be in place in order for the brain to initiate, run, and end the habit.

That means that if we want to create a new habit, we need to determine what the cue will be, what the behavior will be, and how we will reward ourselves. I think this is accurate.

But Duhigg says that if we want to change a habit, we have to identify the reward we’re getting from the current behavior and substitute a new behavior that will give us the same reward. He makes a compelling case in his book. The problem, though, is that as far as the brain is concerned, liking neurochemicals are the reward, while to us a reward is something tangible or meaningful or perhaps symbolic.

Trying to identify a reward we’re getting for an existing behavior is like trying to figure out why we have a tendency to react the way we do to rain or a particular type of music or stray dogs or umbrella thorn trees. We can’t possibly figure that out with any degree of certainty—and even if we could, it wouldn’t make any difference.

In the case of changing a habit, what’s important is to be consistent about providing a reward for the new behavior until the brain takes over the job of releasing liking neurochemicals without the added stimulus.

Berridge is helpful here, too. He points out that our conscious perception of the reward we’re getting is essentially a story that may or may not have anything to do with what’s going on in the brain. The purpose of a reward is to get the brain to pay attention to a desirable behavior we just engaged in to increase the likelihood we will do it again. It’s positive reinforcement, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if the reward we supply is related in any way to the behavior. It just has to be something we like so the brain will release liking neurochemicals. (I’ve done two consecutive 30-Day Challenges based on the same behavior, each with a different reward. Neither reward has anything to do with the behavior; both rewards have been extremely motivating.)

System 2

Although he didn’t come up with the terms—and dual-process theory was not a new idea—Daniel Kahneman did popularize the concepts of “System 1” and “System 2” in his best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

According to dual process theory, the unconscious part of the brain, System 1, is “fast,” meaning it processes 11 million bits of information at a time, while consciousness, System 2, is “slow” by contrast, as it can only process 40 bits of information at a time. There are many other significant differences between conscious and unconscious processing.

Kahneman, who died recently, won a Nobel Prize. He was considered a genius. I think that’s why it didn’t initially occur to me to question this binary division of thinking processes. But doubts started creeping in quite a few years ago. The characteristics attributed to System 2 thinking simply cannot be applied across the board to conscious thought. (There are even some researchers who question whether or not there is such a thing as “conscious thought.”)

After grappling with the problem for a while, I concluded that System 2 is a part of consciousness—a very, very small part of it, one that we access quite infrequently, possibly never. If we use Freud’s iceberg to represent consciousness and the unconscious, with consciousness being the tip of the iceberg, then System 2 is the tip of the tip. I’ve come to refer to the rest of conscious thought as ordinary consciousness. It has some attributes in common with System 1 and some attributes in common with System 2. Most of the time the stream of consciousness just flows through our minds, carrying us along with it.

Ordinary consciousness can be extremely useful and it has a role in creating transformational change, but accessing System 2 is essential for it. If we believe we’re accessing System 2 thinking just by being awake, we’re missing the boat entirely.

Autopilot

It seems hard to believe that the scientific estimate for how much of our behavior is outside conscious control was once a mere 40%—and that 40% was hard for a lot of people to swallow. Neuroscience has now concluded, logically, that 100% of our behavior is generated by our unconscious.

“Autopilot” is the short-hand term for this. It’s somewhat of a misnomer, though, because it was intended to contrast with the supposedly conscious “pilot” that makes intentional rather than automatic choices. But consciousness can’t and doesn’t make moment-to-moment choices.

Accessing System 2 can provide us with some ability to steer our personal ship in terms of determining direction and affecting future outcomes. But it can’t affect the choices we’re making now or the outcomes we’re getting as a result.

Duhigg’s conception of what happens at the end of a habit loop is that the brain is returned to conscious control. This is a perspective from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. It implies, first, that the brain is normally under conscious control, which it isn’t. Second, it fails to take into consideration that the unconscious is attending to multiple things at the same time, which means it is generating multiple action sequences, not just one. So the idea that the brain is “on autopilot” for the duration of a habit and then returned to the control of the pilot is both inaccurate and simplistic.

Habits are a bit different than the rest of our so-called autopilot behavior, but the fact remains that all of our behavior is initiated by the unconscious. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t survive long enough to get to the point of contemplating thriving.

Provisional Assessments

There are bound to be other conclusions that will be overturned by the ongoing research into how the brain works. So it’s useful to consider the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far as provisional assessments. Provisional assessments are essential because they give us something to work with and to test, and they indicate new directions for further examination.

I’m excited to keep learning in this area. I don’t think there is any other exploration as challenging and potentially rewarding as this: humans investigating our own internal operational systems from the perspectives of our internal operational systems. Some contortionism required!

Here’s to many more years of learning—and of overturning.

Motivation: The Condensed Version

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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.

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