Minderful Roundup: Triggering Motivation and Searching for Human Rights in the Brain
At last! A fresh selection of this week’s best psychological and neuroscientific articles.
They’re out there, cracking the code of Motivation
Did you know that the part of your brain responsible for motivating you is the same one that rewards you? It’s part of the evolutionary mechanism that controls risk taking and willingness to work in relation to the how much pleasure it expects us to derive from completing our goals.
A group of scientists at the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology in Japan was inspired to look deeper into the mechanism of reward after studying individuals with depression. These individuals lacked motivation and felt like doing things was too ‘costly’ compared to perceived rewards. It sounded like dopamine had to have something to do with it, but how?
In order to understand motivation gone wrong, Dr. Yukiko Hori and her team looked closely into how dopamine receptors influence the willingness to perform tasks for a reward. Using blockers that prevent dopamine from doing its job, they looked at how macaque monkeys reacted to being asked to perform tasks they knew yielded rewards when different dopamine receptors were affected by the blockers.
The apes preferred smaller immediate rewards to delayed larder rewards by default and the scientists have confirmed that both known types of dopamine receptors were needed to motivate the macaques—but only one of the receptors (called D2R for those of you interested) played a role in downplaying the perceived pleasure of a reward, thus diminishing motivation.
This means that further studies focusing on the specific receptor are needed, and maybe one day we’ll be able to better understand how our minds work. But just to be clear, dopamine research is part of a huge ever-evolving body of knowledge surrounding the role of neurotransmitters in the brain, so don’t splash out on supplements (at least not before consulting you doctor) quite yet.
Human Rights? They’re in the Brain!
The idea that humans thrive when they’re free, safe, and treated with dignity isn’t new. In fact, some of humanity’s oldest records (like the Code of Hammurabi) contain references to basic human rights, and unlike the dizzying variety of cultures and languages, the values differ little between modern and ancient civilisations.
This has inspired scientists to look at the brain for clues as to why humanity believes they deserve basic decency, and according to a pair of scientists at Brown University, it’s because all humans share the same nervous system.
Tara White and Megan Goncalves co-authored a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences earlier this month, introducing a new concept called ‘dignity neuroscience’. They argue that findings from developmental psychology and neuroscience support claims that the basic human rights cause humans to thrive physically and mentally, while the opposite has lasting negative psychological and neurological consequences.
“I think the average person on the street sees universal human rights as an international law concept that has more to do with trade than about individual lives,” White said. “But this stuff is not pie-in-the-sky, and it affects us all. We want to show people that ensuring universal human rights is a crucial foundation for a society that is healthy — not only socially and physically, but also psychologically and neurologically.”
Let’s revise what we’ve learned in the previous article to understand this better. We already know that motivation derives from a dopamine-led brain mechanism that looks at the perceived reward and decides whether it’s worth pursuing. This mechanism is often damaged in people who have been exposed to heightened stress levels or long-term physical danger, and they can rarely rise up to their highest potential even after the danger is long gone. Shielding people from war and violence is therefore an important part of helping humanity thrive.
White notes that she was inspired to coin the phrase of ‘dignity neuroscience’ when she joined a human rights conference filled with activists and realised that a lot of her training featured bits that contributed to the theory that human rights are part of the brain—but there just wasn’t a scientific field carved out for them yet.
The paper provides a comprehensive set of connections between universal rights law and brain science, which White and Goncalves hope will inspire more connections between people in vastly different fields of study.
Surprisingly, Bronze Medalists are Happier than Silver Medalists
We’ve already spoken about how our confidence takes a hit when we start associating with people at a similarly high level of skill, talent, and experience. But after hearing about a particularly strange phenomenon at the Olympics, Andrea Laungrath from the Iowa University wanted to have a closer look at why bronze medalists look so much happier than those with a silver medal.
“Silver medalists tend to think about, and compare themselves to, that gold medalist,” Laungrath explained. “So they think, ‘Maybe if I had only done something different, I could have won that gold medal.’ “ That sort of thinking can be especially pervasive when the top two positions can be separated by nearly imperceptible milliseconds.
For a bronze medal winner, however, the psychology is different. They’re on the podium! Top three!
Laungrath and her team started compiling photos of all recent Olympic podiums, running the pictures through a software analysing facial markers that determine who’s faking a smile and who isn’t. Yes, they went that deep.
They also presented a second theory: silver medalists were likely among the favourites to win, so they had higher expectations, while bronze medalists probably did better than they predicted.
The findings were picked up and published by the American Psychological Association, citing Laungrath’s closing remarks on her findings. She says that the bronze medalists outlook can easily be applied to our daily, non-Olympic lives because there will always be those we can compare ourselves to—but if we focus on ourselves and our performance instead, we’ll appreciate our personal achievements more.
Anxious? Do Nothing.
And now, this week’s favourite. Most people who struggle with anxiety will likely be able to remember plenty of times when their irrational fears prevented them from doing what they wanted or caused them to procrastinate. But some psychologists, like Michael Stein Psy.D., say that doing nothing at all is good. Kind of.
He explains that anxiety is the brain’s way of telling you that you’re in danger. Anxiety promotes action, and it wants you to do something to protect yourself from a threat. When faced with anxiety, most people will do exactly that—they’ll do something to make themselves feel better in hopes that the feeling will disappear.
Stein argues that taking any action when faced with anxiety reinforces it, meaning that taking action when you’re anxious tells your brain that anxiety is useful. As a result, the brain will deploy this mechanism again in the future, especially when faced with the same threat—like dogs, airplanes, or public speaking.
But if you do nothing and ignore anxiety, your brain is likely to phase it out. It will assume that the situation wasn’t actually that dangerous and gradually, the feeling will fizzle out.
Of course, everyone’s mind is different and this technique might not be useful to everyone. But this approach is actually part of exposure therapy, which tells you to face things even when you’re terrified of them. The difference is, facing fears implies a lot more courage than most of us think we’re capable of, but simple doing nothing to address anxiety when it appears? A tiny bit more doable.
Minderful is launching an app this autumn, and we can’t wait for you to see it. Until then, join us right here on our blog and listen to our 1-Minute Mental Fitness Podcast if you’re looking for things to do for your mind. Like Steven’s tip on the brain-gut connection:
