A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (2011)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/

by jeremynixon • 11 years ago

102 8 11 years ago

vlokshin• 11 years ago

Thank you.

The piece is a bit too long to keep the attention of most, but it's one of the most important things someone can and should understand about themselves: how they get things done, how they make decisions to get things done.

I wish this is how the brains behind Asana, Wunderlist, Calendars, etc really thought about the end-user-human.

jjoonathan• 11 years ago

If only I could motivate myself to read the lengthy article about motivation maybe I could understand how to better motivate myself in other aspects of my life. But it really is a long article and I have other things to do, so... chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken.

DanBC• 11 years ago

Here's an article about procrastination which is so long many people put off reading it until they have more motivation and time.

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/procrastination/

DenisM• 11 years ago

Undivided attention is a skill, and it can be developed.

Make it a habit to read literature, something you actually enjoy, for an hour at a time, each day. In six weeks you will have trained yourself to stay focused for extended periods of time.

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

My startup[0] is building a tool kit for to make it easy for developers to build apps that work with what really motivates users.

[0] www.useDopamine.com

joe_the_user• 11 years ago

A lot of "neuropsychology" and related approaches are questionable. The combination of some current machine-learning methods and some neuroscience results doesn't add up to anything like a global theory of how the brain works - such a global theory is just not yet in [1]. It's simpler to stick with established psychological theory if you want a theory of what makes people do thing on average.[2] But oppositely, if you're interested in how naive utility functions and the neoclassical economic view of human behavior, "homo economicus", fails to account for much of human behavior, take a lot at evolutionary game theory. [3]

[1] Learning How Little We Know About the Brain http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/learning-how-littl...

[2] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini, Harper Business

[3] Game theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis, Princeton

charles2013• 11 years ago

agreed. interesting read, yet far from complete, and certainly questionable.

a couple that jumped out to me as questionable:

the "discounting" section reminds me of the stanford marshmallow experiment (itself questionable iirc). i'm not convinced a marshmallow is worth an additional 5 minutes of delayed gratification, and i'm even less convinced an additional 0.07ml of juice (or a whole 0.002oz) is worth waiting at all.

the "Relative and Absolute Utility" section, and particularly the quoted section of Glimcher's example, fail to acknowledge a fundamental component of human motivation: context.

for example, strand someone on a remote, uninhabited, desert island (with no way to escape, etc.), and offer her a choice of $1,000,000 worth of goods or $1,000 worth of goods. her choice at this point is uninteresting because currency is arguably worthless in the absence of trade; she assigns value based on what these goods can do for her rather than what they would fetch at auction back home.

for example, let's say the $1,000,000 worth of goods is a lifetime supply of jello, and the $1,000 is a safe ride home on a fishing vessel. the safe ride home is arguably the better choice despite its lower monetary value. this is why i believe it's silly to blindly apply the transitive property of inequality (in terms of monetary value) as a predictor of human motivation while ignoring context.

A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (2011)

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