24 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
0:03:24 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsit was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy.
0:09:31 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWe find that everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards. Apathetic people are more inclined to say, "Nah, I don't think this is worth the effort, so I won't do that option."
0:23:12 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWe were talking about reward versus effort. And essentially that's a very important way I think that we make a decision. Much of that could be subconscious.
0:27:03 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIt's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
0:31:04 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsYou can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.
0:33:51 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsEvery decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.
0:34:57 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIt would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
0:38:10 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd I think what you've said is within the individual, you can change your subject evaluation of the same effort you're running on the Gobi Desert, right? It's the same effort you've been putting in for miles and miles. And suddenly you have subjectively valued this thing as less effort
0:48:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsYou have to persevere. And that's the other really important part of motivation. You know, we know a lot of people who start things and then we also know the non-competers, the people who are always so energetic but actually don't finish, right? So, it's almost as important to be able to finish and complete as initiate actions.
0:49:40 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsif you do for some reason generalize maladaptively to thinking this didn't work and I tried this, this didn't work, and I tried this and I'm really bad at this. That can lead not only to loss of motivation, but what we might call clinical depression.
0:50:23 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsthere are some people who have pure apathy, no depression like David. And there are other people who can be depressed, they can be sad, they can be hopeless about the future, but they don't necessarily lose motivation. They can have pure depression.
0:55:47 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.
0:56:54 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf I had thought in those ways, it probably wouldn't have happened. I just didn't think that we should have these boundaries to what you can do.
1:02:38 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo, I think the key point here is the self is not immutable. It's something that can change. People might think my personality is this way. It can never change. Well, your personality is the product of your society of mind.
1:15:02 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsOne is yes, I agree with you that this sort of behavior, doom scrolling, etc. occurs, but I think the evidence that there are dopamine hits when you're doing this isn't really very strong.
1:16:28 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd the evidence suggests that wanting pursuit of a goal is mediated or modulated at least by dopamine whereas actually the liking the pleasure you might get from an outcome is not that seems to be related to uh opioid neurotransmitters in the brain.
1:22:32 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo it's a different way of framing why is there a reduction of action? Why is there bradicynesia, a slowing of movement in people with Parkinson's disease? That's really interesting. It doesn't just have to be about motor control. It could be the motivation to act just as we said with David, right?
1:23:09 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsDopamine in the human brain isn't all about motivation to action. There's dopamine in other parts of the brain. We know from some really classical work by Patricia Goldman Rakit, for example, that dopamine is important for working memory, short-term memory.
1:46:59 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf you start from a low baseline of performance, you might get some positive boost. It's quite small, but you might get it. But if you are actually quite a high performer, then you risk getting worse. with this is called the inverse U-shaped curve.
1:50:13 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut I also think that this is not mutually incompatible with the view that there's also overdiagnosis. And I think we need very careful ways of making diagnosis because the conventional way is you take a history from a person about what the problem is.
2:00:09 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAlzheimer's disease does not necessarily equal dementia. people can have Alzheimer's disease and not get dementia. So, we found this out from post-mortem studies. People have been followed as they age. Uh they've donated their brains and it turns out that perhaps 20 to 30% of these individuals who never had dementia have Alzheimer pathology.
2:02:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThose include that having that sense of purpose, making sure that you have a network of people, that you're socially connected as your age, and also remaining curious, open to new ideas. Those factors turn out to be almost as important as some of the physical things we do.
2:03:40 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWhat we find is that those individuals who score highly on just self-reported questionnaires for motivation, if they score highly for apathy, they have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.
2:12:50 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo I think although there might not be a great deal of evidence that you can intrinsically train your attention to do better generally what you could do is to cut out things that are distracting for you.