How to Turn on the Part of Your Brain That Controls Motivation - Growth Mindset

   

How to Turn on the Part of Your Brain That Controls Motivation 

A man on the floor fixing a big brain this illustrates us trying to wire and fix our brains 

This was an interesting article I came across that dives into the scientific background on how the brain works and controls motivation. This article is written by someone named Angus Chen. Something I already knew before reading this article was that I always had this question I had in my head, especially in secondary school, 

How do I become motivated? 

How do I get to work?

How does motivation actually work? 

These are questions I asked myself and this article goes into detail about how it goes down.

In this article, Angus explains how there are neurons in the middle of our brains called the ventral tegmental area. And to put it simply this is something that controls things like motivation. 

The one thing I learned I didn't know before was how my brain really works when it comes to motivation. And these articles that I found and read are something that is worth a read.

The thing I was curious to explore was maybe even trying to find videos about this topic which show diagrams and animations of the brain on how it stimulates and controls motivation. 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2019.00078/full

I found a great article which goes into more detail about the VTA which is really scientific.

Here is a piece of what some researchers did to experiment stuff about the brain and motivation :

Researchers stuck 73 people into an fMRI, a scanner that can detect what part of the brain is most active, and focused on that area associated with motivation. When the researchers said "motivate yourself and make this part of your brain light up," people couldn't really do it.

That changed when the participants were allowed to watch a neurofeedback meter that displayed activity in their ventral tegmental area. When activity ramps up, the participants see the meter heat up while they're in the fMRI tube.

Two of the researchers, Kathryn Dickerson and Jeff MacInnes, tried the system out on themselves. Not everything worked. Dickerson said she tried thinking about different memories that left the feedback meter cold. "Zip lining was super fun, but [thinking about that] was just terrible and not effective at all."

So she switched strategies and tried giving herself a pep talk in the scanner. "I was like, 'Come on Katie. Move the thermometer. Just do it and move it.' And I just pumped myself up. That was very effective," she says. "It was exhilarating."