Your Brain's “Motivation Machine”
By Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler
Pioneer Brain/Mind Researcher
© 2006 All Rights Reserved

The possibility of getting a raise, a good grade, or a new love affair has a wonderful tendency to get one’s attention, and researchers have now identified exactly why we learn better when motivated to gain a possible reward. It’s the brain at work!

University of California San Francisco researcher Alison Adcock and her colleagues at Stanford and MIT recently completed brain-scan studies on the topic. Their research identified the specific brain regions that signal the brain's learning and memory regions to promote powerful reward-related memory formation.

The researchers had volunteers participate in two types of reward-related tasks as they scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique uses harmless magnetic fields and radio waves to detect regions of higher blood flow in the brain, which indicates higher activity.

The researchers first identified the region involved in reward anticipation. The subjects were presented with symbols indicating they could gain or lose from zero to $5 by rapidly pressing a button. The subjects were immediately notified if they had received the reward. The researchers found that the anticipation of a reward lit up certain portions of the “mesolimbic” brain region, part of the brain’s emotion-focused limbic system.

The researchers then measured how this reward center promoted memory formation. First they showed the subjects a “value” symbol signifying whether the image of a scene that followed would be worth $5 or ten cents if the subject could recall the scene on the following day, and then briefly showed them the scene.

The next day the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to pick the scene out of a group. The subjects were far more likely to remember high-value scenes than low-value scenes. (No surprise!)

The researchers found that cues related to an “impending” view of a high-reward scene also activated the learning-related hippocampus in the brain’s medial temporal lobe ( MTL). Such activation prior to seeing the scene implies that the brain prepares in advance to filter incoming information that could be related to a reward, rather than simply waiting and reacting.

MTL activation occurs with such higher brain functions as learning and memory – and the subjects who showed greater activation in these regions also showed better reward performance, the researchers reported.

The researchers concluded that the learning mechanism they identified “may let … expectations and motivation interact with events in the physical world to influence learning (and) may help translate motivation into memory.”

The conclusion: Put your brain’s “motivation machine” to work. Attach a meaningful reward to something you want to learn to “increase” your focus and the probability you will remember. Click Here!

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