If you're hungry it's not a deterministic Drive it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that that suit that goal and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so to think about it as a personality is a much it's a much more intelligent way to look at it one other thing about Skinner's rats you know Skinner could get rats to do almost everything and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model but his rats were starved down to 75 percent of their normal body weight so not only were they not social gregarious rats like rats or because they were isolated they're genetically altered from wild rats but they also weren't as complex as a real rat because they were starving and so but you know what starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat and a rat is a pretty good model of a person but are a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats so anyways how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation doesn't set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm going to use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you're going to aim so if you're hungry you're going to aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that's serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk downstairs and I don't know the contracting company said a wrecking ball through your kitchen it's like that's going to be disappointing you're not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up it instead and you know one of the things we're going to try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated one so anyways we're going to work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's a little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they're they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one might maybe it's 90 percent of the personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off ma-maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more good it's more short-term powerful that I would say than an alcohol addiction they'll say anything and then the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're going to say motivations one way of thinking about if they set goals but it's not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we're going to think about that framework of interpretation and and emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and inactions track progress so positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do so we should stop because we don't know where we are what we're doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that's your emotions within that motivated frame so and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know motions are like they're they're offshoots of action tendencies that's that's the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary right you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might pop find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don't go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong so okay so basic motivations hunger thirst pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus that's a different circuit anger slash aggression thermal regulation panic and escape affiliation and care sexual desire exploration play and you can kind of break those in you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self maintenance Godby your survival ingested and defensive see I've sort of coded them there so the self maintenance there's an ejective set of basic motivations that go with self maintenance you say that's hunger thirst there's a set of defensive motivations paying anger thermoregulation patek and escape and then there's there's motivations that are associated with reproduction affiliation care and sexual desire and then I put exploration in place sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally
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