“Are you unhappy or depressed?” Dr. Strub asked.
“No,” Robert said. “I feel good.”
“Can you tell me how you spent yesterday?”
Robert described a day of watching television.
“You know, your wife tells me your employees are concerned because they don’t see you around the office much,” said Dr. Strub.
“I guess I’m more interested in other things now,” Robert replied.
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Robert said, and then went silent and stared at the wall.
Dr. Strub prescribed various medications—drugs to combat hormonal imbalances and attention disorders—but none seemed to make a difference. People suffering from depression will say they are unhappy and describe hopeless thoughts. Robert, however, said he was satisfied with life. He admitted his personality change was odd, but it didn’t upset him.
Dr. Strub administered an MRI, which allowed him to collect images from inside Robert’s cranium. Deep inside his skull, near the center of Robert’s head, he saw a small shadow, evidence that burst vessels had caused a tiny amount of blood to pool temporarily inside a part of Robert’s brain known as the striatum. Such injuries, in rare cases, can cause brain damage or mood swings. But except for the listlessness, there was little in Robert’s behavior to suggest that he was suffering any neurological disability.
A year later, Dr. Strub submitted an article to the Archives of Neurology. Robert’s “behavior change was characterized by apathy and lack of motivation,” he wrote. “He has given up his hobbies and fails to make timely decisions in his work. He knows what actions are required in his business, yet he procrastinates and leaves details unattended. Depression is not present.” The cause of this passivity, Dr. Strub suggested, was the slight damage in his brain, which had possibly been triggered by Bolivia’s altitude. Even that, however, was uncertain. “It is possible that the hemorrhages are coincidental and that the high altitude played no physiologic role.”
It was an interesting but ultimately inconclusive case, Dr. Strub wrote.
Over the next two decades, a handful of other studies appeared in medical journals. There was the sixty-year-old professor who experienced a rapid “decrease in interest.” He had been an expert in his field with a fierce work ethic. Then, one day, he simply stopped. “I just lack spirit, energy,” he told his physician. “I have no go. I must force myself to get up in the morning.”
There was a nineteen-year-old woman who had fallen briefly unconscious after a carbon monoxide leak and then seemed to lose motivation for the most basic tasks. She would sit in one position all day unless forced to move. Her father learned he couldn’t leave her alone, as a neurologist wrote, when she “was found by her parents with heavy sunburns on the beach at the very same place where she laid down several hours before, under an umbrella: intense inertia had prevented her from changing her position with that of the shadow while the sun had turned around.”
There was a retired police officer who began waking up “late in the morning, would not wash unless urged to do so, but meekly complied as soon as his wife asked him to. Then he would sit in his armchair, from which he would not move.” There was a middle-aged man who was stung by a wasp and, not long after, lost the desire to interact with his wife, children, and business associates.
In the late 1980s, a French neurologist in Marseille named Michel Habib heard about a few of these cases, became intrigued, and started searching archives and journals for similar stories. The studies he found were rare but consistent: A relative would bring a patient in for an examination, complaining of a sudden change in behavior and passivity. Doctors would find nothing medically wrong. The patients scored normally when tested for mental illness. They had moderate to high IQs and appeared physically healthy. None of them said they felt depressed or complained about their apathy.
Habib began contacting the physicians treating these patients and asked them to collect MRIs. He then discovered another commonality: All the apathetic individuals had tiny pinpricks of burst vessels in their striatum, the same place where Robert had a small shadow inside his skull.
The striatum serves as a kind of central dispatch for the brain, relaying commands from areas like the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made, to an older part of our neurology, the basal ganglia, where movement and emotions emerge. Neurologists believe the striatum helps translate decisions into action and plays an important role in regulating our moods. The damage from the burst vessels inside the apathetic patients’ striata was small—too small, some of Habib’s colleagues said, to explain their behavior changes. Beyond those pinpricks, however, Habib could find nothing else to explain why their motivation had disappeared.
Neurologists have long been interested in striatal injuries because the striatum is involved in Parkinson’s disease. But whereas Parkinson’s often causes tremors, a loss of physical control, and depression, the patients Habib studied only seemed to lose their drive. “Parkinsonians have trouble initiating movement,” Habib told me. “But the apathetic patients had no problems with motion. It’s just that they had no desire to move.” The nineteen-year-old woman who couldn’t be left alone at the beach, for example, was able to clean her room, wash the dishes, fold the laundry, and follow recipes when instructed to do so by her mother. However, if she wasn’t asked to help, she wouldn’t move all day. When her mother inquired what she wanted for dinner, the woman said she had no preferences.
When examined by doctors, Habib wrote, the apathetic sixty-year-old professor would “stay motionless and speechless during endless periods, sitting in front of the examiner, waiting for the first question.” When asked to describe his work, he could discuss complicated ideas and quote papers from memory. Then he would lapse back into silence until another question was posed.
None of the patients Habib studied responded to medications, and none seemed to improve with counseling. “Patients demonstrate a more or less total indifference to life events that would normally provoke an emotional response, positive or negative,” Habib wrote.
“It was as if the part of their brain where motivation lives, where élan vital is stored, had completely disappeared,” he told me. “There were no negative thoughts, there were no positive thoughts. There were no thoughts at all. They hadn’t become less intelligent or less aware of the world. Their old personalities were still inside, but there was a total absence of drive or momentum. Their motivation was completely gone.”
II.
The room where the experiment was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh was painted a cheery yellow and contained an fMRI machine, a computer monitor, and a smiling researcher who looked too young to have a PhD. All participants in the study were welcomed into the room, asked to remove their jewelry and any metal from their pockets, and then told to lie on a plastic table that slid into the fMRI.
Once lying down, they could see a computer screen. The researcher explained that a number between one and nine was going to appear on the monitor. Before that number appeared, participants had to guess if it was going to be higher or lower than five by pressing various buttons. There would be multiple rounds of guessing, the researcher said. There was no skill involved in this game, he explained. No abilities were being tested. And though he didn’t mention this to the participants, the researcher thought this was one of the most boring games in existence. In fact, he had explicitly designed it that way.
The truth was, the researcher, Mauricio Delgado, didn’t care if participants guessed right or wrong. Rather, he was interested in understanding which parts of their brains became active as they played an intensely dull game. As they made their guesses, the fMRI was recording the activity inside their skulls. Delgado wanted to identify where the neurological sensations of excitement and anticipation—where motivation—originated. Delgado told participants they could quit whenever they wanted. Yet he knew, from prior experience, that people would make guess after guess, sometime
s for hours, as they waited to see if they had guessed wrong or right.
Each participant lay inside the machine and watched the screen intently. They hit buttons and made predictions. Some cheered when they won or moaned when they lost. Delgado, monitoring the activity inside of their heads, saw that people’s striata—that central dispatch—lit up with activity whenever participants played, regardless of the outcome. This kind of striatal activity, Delgado knew, was associated with emotional reactions—in particular, with feelings of expectation and excitement.
As Delgado was finishing one session, a participant asked if he could continue playing on his own, at home.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Delgado told him, explaining that the game only existed on his computer. Besides, he said, letting the man in on a secret, the experiment was rigged. To make sure the game was consistent from person to person, Delgado had programmed the computer so that everyone won the first round, lost the second, won the third, lost the fourth, and so on, in a predetermined pattern. The outcome had been determined ahead of time. It was like betting on a two-headed quarter.
“That’s okay,” the man replied. “I don’t mind. I just like to play.”
“It was odd,” Delgado told me later. “There’s no reason he should have wanted to continue playing once he knew it was rigged. I mean, where’s the fun in a rigged game? Your choices have no impact. But it took me five minutes to convince him he didn’t want to take the game home.”
For days afterward, Delgado kept thinking about that man. Why had this game interested him so much? For that matter, why had it entertained so many other participants? The experiment’s data had helped Delgado identify which parts of people’s brains became active as they played a guessing game, but the data didn’t explain why they were motivated to play in the first place.
So a few years later, Delgado set up another experiment. A new set of participants was recruited. Like before, there was a guessing game. This time, however, there was a key difference: Half the time, participants were allowed to make their own guesses; the rest of the time, the computer guessed for them.
As people began playing, Delgado watched the activity in their striata. This time, when people were allowed to make their own choices, their brains lit up just like in the previous experiment. They showed the neurological equivalents of anticipation and excitement. But during those rounds when participants didn’t have any control over their guesses, when the computer made a choice for them, people’s striata went essentially silent. It was as if their brains became uninterested in the exercise. There was “robust activity in the caudate nucleus only when subjects” were permitted to guess, Delgado and his colleagues later wrote. “The anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions, particularly the ventral striatum, involved in affective and motivational processes.”
What’s more, when Delgado asked participants about their perceptions of the game afterward, they said they enjoyed themselves much more when they were in control of their choices. They cared whether they won or lost. When the computer was in charge, they said, the experiment felt like an assignment. They got bored and wanted it to end.
That didn’t make sense to Delgado. The odds of winning or losing were exactly the same regardless of whether the participant or the computer was in control. Allowing someone to make a guess, rather than waiting for a computer to make a guess for them, shouldn’t have made any real difference in the experience of the game. People’s neurological reactions should have been the same either way. But, somehow, allowing people to make choices transformed the game. Instead of being a chore, the experiment became a challenge. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.
III.
In recent decades, as the economy has shifted and large companies promising lifelong employment have given way to freelance jobs and migratory careers, understanding motivation has become increasingly important. In 1980, more than 90 percent of the American workforce reported to a boss. Today more than a third of working Americans are freelancers, contractors, or in otherwise transitory positions. The workers who have succeeded in this new economy are those who know how to decide for themselves how to spend their time and allocate their energy. They understand how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue. People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.
Self-help books and leadership manuals often portray self-motivation as a static feature of our personality or the outcome of a neurological calculus in which we subconsciously compare efforts versus rewards. But scientists say motivation is more complicated than that. Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
“The need for control is a biological imperative,” a group of Columbia University psychologists wrote in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2010. When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.
One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. “Each choice—no matter how small—reinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,” the Columbia researchers wrote. Even if making a decision delivers no benefit, people still want the freedom to choose. “Animals and humans demonstrate a preference for choice over non-choice, even when that choice confers no additional reward,” Delgado noted in a paper published in the journal Psychological Science in 2011.
From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. That’s one of the reasons why your cable company asks all those questions when you sign up for service. If they ask if you prefer a paperless bill to an itemized statement, or the ultra package versus the platinum lineup, or HBO to Showtime, you’re more likely to be motivated to pay the bill each month. As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along.
“You know when you’re stuck in traffic on the freeway and you see an exit approaching, and you want to take it even though you know it’ll probably take longer to get home?” said Delgado. “That’s our brains getting excited by the possibility of taking control. You won’t get home any faster, but it feels better because you feel like you’re in charge.”
This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. If you are struggling to answer a tedious stream of emails, decide to reply to one from the middle of your inbox. If you’re trying to start an assignment, write the conclusion first, or start by making the graphics, or do whatever’s most interesting to you. To find the motivation to confront an unpleasant employee, choose where the meeting is going to occur. To start the next sales call, decide what question you’ll ask first.
Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control. It’s this feeling of self-de
termination that gets us going. That’s why Delgado’s participants were willing to play again and again when they felt like they were in charge.
Which is not to say that motivation is, therefore, always easy. In fact, sometimes simply making a choice isn’t enough. Occasionally, to really self-motivate, we need something more.
IV.
After Eric Quintanilla signed his name to the form that officially made him a U.S. Marine, the recruiter shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said he had made the right choice.
“It’s the only one I see for myself, sir,” Quintanilla replied. He had meant the words to sound bold and confident, but his voice quavered when he spoke and his hand was so sweaty that both of them wiped their palms on their pants afterward.
Quintanilla was twenty-three years old. Five years earlier, he had graduated from high school in a small town an hour south of Chicago. He had thought about going away to college, but he wasn’t certain what to study, wasn’t positive what he wanted to do afterward—wasn’t sure about much, to be honest. So he enrolled at a local community college and got an associate’s degree in general studies. He had hoped it would help him get a job at a cellphone store in the mall. “I filled out, I don’t know, like ten applications,” Quintanilla said. “But I never heard back from anyone.”
He found part-time work at a hobby supply shop and occasionally drove an ice truck when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. At night, he played World of Warcraft. This wasn’t how Quintanilla had envisioned his life. He was ready for something better. He decided to propose to the girl he had been dating since high school. The wedding was fantastic. Afterward, though, he was still in the same place. And then his wife got pregnant. He tried the cellphone stores once more and scored an interview. He rehearsed with his wife the night before his appointment.
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