Motivation is a deeply integral aspect of human behaviour and personality. Almost every decision you make is affected by motivation. Everything that we aspire to be is affected by motivation. All our daily activities are in some form affected by a certain goal in mind.
The definition of motivation, according to the Oxford Dictionary states is “A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”.
The source of our motivation boils down to our neurotransmitters, which are in charge or carrying chemical messages all around the body. The main one responsible for our topic is dopamine, and more importantly, the pathway it takes. The most important “reward pathway” is the mesolimbic pathway of which one of the stops is called the nucleus accumbens. An increased amount of dopamine at this stop is a major trigger for predicting rewards.
Contradicting popular belief that dopamine is generally produced as a sign of pleasure, many studies have shown that people who are under immense stress also produce a lot of dopamine as well. Since these are hardly pleasurable moments, we can gather that there is still a lot of research to be done on the neuroscience behind motivation.
It is true that we are often motivated with the promise of a reward or a punishment. There are two types of motivation that a person is driven by: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation doesn't involve any external factors and comes from within each individual to achieve the goal in mind. Extrinsic motivation involves external stimuli affecting the goal at hand. These mainly include incentives, curiosity and even fear. To understand these factors properly, we have to look at some popular applications used in our daily life.
Incentives can come in the form of many things and have been continually used in the majority of our lives. It can be a reward system placed at school for efficient schoolwork or prizes for places at sports competitions. These are effective at increasing productivity of not only the recipients but also “bystanders” - people who witness this positive reinforcement, to work harder and compete to get that same treatment. Furthermore, A level of competitiveness is also an effective strategy to encourage the individual to work harder and better to achieve the goal
A great example of extrinsic motivation is financial incentive. Money is a very effective way to increase motivation. This can be simply going to work every day, in order to earn that month's salary. However a routine pay check is not often effective long term, so there are different factors that companies introduce to keep their workers performance at optimum. This can come in the form of “bonuses” or promotion, with a basic concept: if you perform to a certain level, you will get this amount for extra cash. This is known as the incentive theory is routinely used by businesses to maintain a balance in their work environment.
However, while our salary encourages productivity, there are other factors to supplement motivation. These include a productive work environment, different approaches to learning within work etc.
Moving on, a prime example of intrinsic motivation is an individual's curiosity or creativity. These generally come from within a person's own initiative to learn. The human brain has a natural incentive to learn new things, as a way to “fill in the gaps” of our knowledge. So this motivation is coming from our basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. I.M. is a ripe topic for cognitive neuroscience because of the large amount of empirical data collected from previous studies and analysts. Neuroimaging studies indicate that intrinsically motivated states are subserved by neural regions that are central to dopamine systems. In other words, when we are intrinsically motivated, we are more interested in what we are learning, so the human brain is more active in absorbing the new information.
Hence why, being motivated by curiosity will almost always result in a higher quality product as the persons willing to explore new areas and ideas to achieve their goal. Having a detailed knowledge on the science behind motivation can help us build new ways to maintain optimum productivity and lead a healthier quality of life
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