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<\/a>All of this bespeaks the competition for grades, school placement, and eventual careers that has transformed the normal impulse to do better into an obsession for students and their families. Much like the drive for perfection, an insatiable hunger to be quicker, smarter, and more acceptable to admissions officers is taking its toll in many ways.<\/p>\nWhat explains this obsessive behavior? Brain science has been proving what advertising long has known \u00ad\u2013\u2013 that wanting something is far more powerful than getting it. School admissions and other markers of success are part of an overarching mental wanting mechanism. That new iPhone might bring a thrill. But soon comes the yearning for an update, a newer model, another purchase. Neuroimaging shows that processes of \u201cwanting\u201d and \u201cliking\u201d occur in different parts of the brain, with the former more broadly and powerfully operating than the latter. This reverses the common wisdom that primal hungers and \u201cdrives\u201d underlie human motivation.\u00a0 Unlike animals, the motor force driving human beings is imagination \u2013\u2013 with anticipation of something more important than the experience itself. This partly explains why merchandizing deals more with feeling than facts. Slogans like \u201cJust Do It\u201d and \u201cThink Different\u201d bear no direct relationship to shoes or computers, but instead tingle feelings of desire. In the fuzzy realm emotion pleasure is a fungible currency.<\/p>\n
Especially in the contemporary world, anticipation is a bigger animating force than what follows. Researchers believe the dominance of wanting affects all manner of everyday behaviors, from reaching for a candy bar or playing a game to calling up a friend or striving for success.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 So powerful is this expectation mechanism that it gets people wanting things that give no benefit. As it turns out, brain mechanisms for \u201cwanting\u201d are bigger and more complex than the ones for \u201cliking,\u201d and they carry more unconscious baggage. This helps explain the addictive consumerism throughout American culture, as well as why money and achievement often bring little lasting meaning. It\u2019s also one reason why people eat to the point of obesity or habitually do things they don\u2019t really enjoy. Put another way, it’s a key to understanding the update impulse explored throughout this book.<\/p>\n In a broader sense this brain function can shed light on how major life decisions get affected by emotional desire. Economists generally assume that people work hard at their jobs so they can buy things.\u00a0 Neuroscience increasingly shows how chasing money and even work itself can be their own rewards. In a now famous experiment, researchers watched a certain region of the brain \u2013\u2013 the nucleus accumbens \u2013\u2013 as study participants reacted to the prospect of receiving money. As reported in Harvard Business Review<\/em>, the higher the potential monetary reward, the more active the accumbens became. \u201cBut activity ceased<\/em> at the time the subjects actually received<\/em> the money\u2014suggesting that it was the anticipation, and not the reward itself, that aroused them.\u201d[ii]<\/a> So just think about this. If people can be so misguided about something as fundamental as why they work, what other things might they be getting wrong?<\/p>\n \u201cThe brain seems stingier with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,\u201d stated Kent Berridge, the scientist primarily known for these findings.[iii]<\/a> Berridge\u2019s main discovery was that dopamine, the so-called \u201cfeel-good neurotransmitter,\u201d had little to do with the pleasure of eating sweets or winning a game. Instead, dopamine\u2019s real power lay in the expectation of enjoyment experienced in desires, unconscious thoughts, and even the memories of pleasure. Building on this, Berridge concluded that the brain\u2019s pleasure system also drove motivations for pursuing success, the good life, and well-being. Yet often these motivations rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of genuine pleasure \u2013\u2013 a failure to see that true joy was mainly a mental construct disconnected from actual experience. In this sense, achievement is more a matter of attitude than an objective reality. Just as importantly, the same process of wanting is the engine of anxiety \u2013\u2013 when people expect the worst or worry about bad outcomes.<\/p>\n These questions about wanting and liking have a lot to do with the will to improve \u2013\u2013 and why we invest so much of ourselves in school, work, relationships, and society. So often in life people simply assume they are on the right path, their goals rational and self-evident. Caught up in climbing to the next rung of the ladder, few ever take time to ask just why<\/em> they are climbing. But philosophers and psychologists have spent a lot of time on this issue, and some of what they say might surprise you. The topic of \u201cmotivation\u201d has a long history and has gone by many names: the will to live, the survival instinct, the competitive impulse, the drive for self-preservation, following God\u2019s plan, or striving, struggling, seeking pleasure or comfort. In future posts<\/span><\/p>\n , I\u2019ll review this history and then bring to topic up to date, ultimately discussing methods everyone can use to critically evaluate how to self-improve. <\/span><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Kent Berridge and John. P. O\u2019Doherty, \u201cFrom Experience Utility to Decision Utility,\u201d Neuroeconomics <\/em>(2014) p. 337.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> Gardiner Morse, \u201cDecisions and Desire,\u201d Harvard Business Review<\/em> (Jan. 2006) https:\/\/hbr.org\/2006\/01\/decisions-and-desire (accessed Feb 2, 2021).<\/p>\n