I was surprised at how closely your experience (and a commenter's experience) mirror my own. During my life, I've had a few periods of a few months where I focus intensely and work nonstop, and the work does not feel like effort at all. For me, it also comes with a sense of complete confidence, a feeling like I am fulfilling my purpose in life and that everything is exactly as it should be. It is the best sustained feeling I've ever experienced.
Unfortunately I've only experienced this three times in my life; typically around major life events (once when starting a new job in a new industry, once when quitting that job to make my own stuff, and once in grade school: the summer between 10th and 11th grade, for some reason). I look forward to seeing more research, and hopefully one day can apply these learnings to manually trigger this intense focus and motivation.
buzzmerchant 12 hours ago [-]
When i was younger, i had intense bouts of what psychologists call intrinsic motivation.
As i get older, this happens less and less – which is a massive shame.
I wanted to understand whether there was any good evidence as to what intrinsic motivation is and how i might be able to cultivate it in my adult life. To do this, i did a massive deep dive of the scientific literature surrounding intrinsic motivation. This is the outcome of that research.
kridsdale1 2 hours ago [-]
Something I have been thinking about and experimenting with is the hypothesis that as I age, my neuronal mitochondria are simply producing less ATP per hour than they used to. Great health and sleep are the expected fixes, but I’m also now supplementing with enzymes and substrates for each phase of the Krebs Cycle, treating mito function like an Internal Combusikb Engine and my biochemical attempts like a Mech Engineer optimizing horsepower and efficiency.
Anecdotally (because I’m not going to syringe my brain) I am feeling a lot more enduring wakefulness and motivation than when I skip them in my morning routine.
I did a chatGPT dive to validate this but that’s not exactly a biochemical lit review.
scroogey 35 minutes ago [-]
Do you mind sharing what you're taking?
maj0rhn 26 minutes ago [-]
There is risk in this approach. Nobody has any real idea what supplements are doing in all of the bodily tissues, and sometimes the effects are not benign. "Folate acceleration" of cancer is just one such cautionary tale. Vitamin E and heart failure is another, though I'm not sure how that one ultimately settled out.
There is a wide list of other maneuvers to try first.
- Time in bed does not equate to "great sleep." Make sure you don't have sleep apnea. Practice good sleep hygiene.
- Delivery of oxygen to your brain is just as important as mitochondrial aging, if not more. Get some aerobic exercise (even walking is fine) -- it wakes me up and maybe will do the same for you. Heed your vascular risk factors, because crap in your cerebral vessels will not help.
- The one supplement exception is vitamin B12, which neurons must have. Deficiency can be very hard to judge by symptoms, so I'd get it measured and act accordingly.
mettamage 6 hours ago [-]
Ah fun! SDT is one of my favorite theories that I'm still actively using to this day to get myself intrinsically motivated on something. I've thrown a lot of theories away due to the reproducibility crisis and similar things concerning psychology. SDT isn't one of them :)
One of my other favorite theories is HEXACO. And personality does play into intrinsic motivation, to some extent.
Disclaimer: I skimmed the article.
Fun autonomy hacks:
1. Reframe the narrative. For example, when I studied CS at school, I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.
2. Listen to Spotify to get into a solo task. I usually turn it down if I happen to get focused.
Also a note: intrinsic motivation is tough when you're sleep deprived. I've had moments where I was motivated and sleep deprived but they often don't coincide.
This is all to say that stuff like this go onto a fundamental layer of physical health. Something I dind't quite get when I was younger.
efkiel 4 hours ago [-]
Could you share the methods you used to learn as fast as you could ?
taeric 6 hours ago [-]
I'm curious how you actively use it to build motivation?
mettamage 6 hours ago [-]
> I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.
That's an example
As for the Spotify example. I just like listening to my playlists, every task becomes more chill. Also, I like working on a Mac more than a Windows laptop. I've had one company restricting my choice there to Windows. Me sort of hacking their company policies such that I could work on a Mac made me feel a lot better.
taeric 5 hours ago [-]
This feels like answering a different question? That is, I'm asking how you increase motivation. If you are saying to just reframe the task, I guess that makes sense? Did you find specific framings that work for you? Did you stay quantitative on it?
mettamage 3 hours ago [-]
Well, I think autonomy specifically is in part in how you frame things. Just like in CBT, when you influence your thoughts it will influence your emotions.
Simple example: if you believe an action you did was a really bad thing, you will most likely feel negative emotions about it. However, if you can figure out a perspective that will reframe the information you have in a different light and therefore you now believe it was a positive thing, you will likely feel good about what you did.
Example (I'm improvizing so not fully according to the sketch outlined above):
Negative: I don't dare to talk to that person because they don't know me and it is not done to talk to someone you don't know without a context.
Positive: While it is unusual to talk to someone you don't know without a context, I give that person a chance to meet me. If I tend to do this often enough, then there will be people that are open to this.
taeric 3 hours ago [-]
I think I'm largely looking for what makes this different from telling someone to just not be depressed?
I can see approaching things in a different way. I was fond of a more Socratic approach for a while, as an example. But that is more than just reframing, that is using a different approach.
For your example, it looks like you are making sure to consider things in a way that does not assume the outcome?
adiabatichottub 2 hours ago [-]
Half-way through this and already my takeaway is: spend more time with people who have related interests are are supportive of your competence.
nuancebydefault 2 hours ago [-]
Motivation to accomplish things is good, but it should not be a goal on itself. IMO the goal should be fulfillment and contentment.
Now and then, evaluation points in life emerge, where you question the 'why'. Those periods can be quite loaded with emotions of feeling lost or being insecure of where to go next. They might greatly shift perspective and hence your course of life.
To me, everything is feedback loops: you pour in energy and you get positive energy back. In that sense, the system is self sustained. However it is fragile as well, because over time, you tend to need more and more back to provide feelings of contentment.
Motivation is like love and relationships, you need to work, sometimes very hard, to sustain them.
atoav 1 hours ago [-]
I play musical instruments for two decades now. And I still enjoy it, because it puts my mind into a state that is almost flow like. Same for programming. So I just like how it feels when I do it, for the most part at least. That means sometimes I just program for fun and open ended without any goal at all. Same goes for music. 90% of my playing outside my band is just playing without a plan.
This is why I am good at those things — I spent a lot of my time doing them and I did so because I enjoy it.
Let yourself play, find the aspects that interest you about a topic and go wild. No need for a goal, thiose will come eventually. First you need to find joy in what you're doing.
And if you don't find any of that, maybe your motivation is just money, fame or whatever and thst might be ok as well, if you're happy with doing a thing you don't like.
neogodless 2 hours ago [-]
Took me a bit of skimming + reading to get to it, but section 3 about causes (and blocking) of intrinsic motivation reflect what you'll find in Daniel H. Pink's book, Drive.
Video gaming seem to be down this alley on the study of self-motiviation.
Some games are made to burn time, like Thumper.
Some games are made to burn you neurons like Baba is You.
Minecraft has 2 modes. Creative and Zombie. Both equally powerful incentives.
I try to keep the plasticity of my brain. Not to let it crust and
crumble like Play Doh left outside the tub.
5 hours ago [-]
ChaitanyaSai 4 hours ago [-]
Great article! SDT has fascinating parallels in consciousness science that no one to my knowledge has actually explored. This is because in consciousness research, the experiencing self is a given, it just happens to be taken for granted that there's an "I" experiencing, and the wonder and magic is focused on the experience itself. What about the self that is experiencing? On the other hand, SDT operates at a level where a biological and even experiencing conscious self is taken for granted, and the focus is on how the cognitive self operates (in many ways). And this is also where the criticism comes from. This is all in the domain of the self and motivation and whatnot articulated in language. To go deeper, we need a bridge between these two that can explain how the self is constructed. And we do have a beautiful theory/framework for that
Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"
And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)
Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both?
If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind
This reminds me I need to add Douglas Hofstadter to my reading queue.
begueradj 4 hours ago [-]
Motivation is an emotional state.
Emotions are ephemeral.
spiderfarmer 6 hours ago [-]
I need to know how to dampen it. I can get truly obsessed with building things, to the point where I feel guilty for not working on it or thinking about it.
i_am_a_squirrel 4 hours ago [-]
Great read!
sameasiteverwas 7 hours ago [-]
This is impressive and interesting, thank you for creating and sharing it.
People with high intrinsic motivation and agency will rule the world of tomorrow, weilding AI to acheive their personal visions. Everyone else will be weilded by AI.
buzzmerchant 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks very much!
You may well be right. Interesting to think about the relationship between agency & intrinsic motivation...
bArray 5 hours ago [-]
From an AI perspective, I have a rough idea of what intrinsic motivation means to me:
To allow an embodied agent to perform actions within an environment that would generally be considered positive, without the definition of an objective function.
To break that down, to be embodied in this case is to act, sense and have some internal model that can be adapted, all operating within an environment that can be considered external to the agent.
An objective function is where there is some external push towards optimality that requires knowledge of the sensors, actuators, environment, etc. A good test for whether you accidentally baked in system knowledge is if you change the rules considerably and the agent will not operate.
Whether or not an agent acts positively can itself be measured by an environment specific objective function. A properly operating intrinsically motivated agent may perform well on some metrics, i.e. long time lived, reduced search time, etc.
Why do you want an intrinsically motivated agent? Almost all reward/objective functions are somewhat flawed, even if the problem is simple. I am reminded of a group training a robot to walk fast, measured by speed over time with a cut off. Simple enough? Well, they reviewed the trained agent and they immediately feel to the ground to be reset far away. In another test, the agents would purposely break the simulation environment, causing the agents to glitch and be launched far. One thing to note is that in each of those scenarios, the agent optimised for the reward, but made themselves "useless" after doing so.
For AI I have found Empowerment an interesting solution to intrinsic motivation [1]. Essentially agents choose actions to "keep their options open", and try to avoid actions that would reduce the action state space. The actual environment itself is not encoded into the algorithm and the state spaces are arbitrary and could be replaced with any symbol. As a result, you can make large changes to the environment and use the same motivation algorithm.
Unfortunately I've only experienced this three times in my life; typically around major life events (once when starting a new job in a new industry, once when quitting that job to make my own stuff, and once in grade school: the summer between 10th and 11th grade, for some reason). I look forward to seeing more research, and hopefully one day can apply these learnings to manually trigger this intense focus and motivation.
As i get older, this happens less and less – which is a massive shame.
I wanted to understand whether there was any good evidence as to what intrinsic motivation is and how i might be able to cultivate it in my adult life. To do this, i did a massive deep dive of the scientific literature surrounding intrinsic motivation. This is the outcome of that research.
Anecdotally (because I’m not going to syringe my brain) I am feeling a lot more enduring wakefulness and motivation than when I skip them in my morning routine.
I did a chatGPT dive to validate this but that’s not exactly a biochemical lit review.
There is a wide list of other maneuvers to try first.
- Time in bed does not equate to "great sleep." Make sure you don't have sleep apnea. Practice good sleep hygiene.
- Delivery of oxygen to your brain is just as important as mitochondrial aging, if not more. Get some aerobic exercise (even walking is fine) -- it wakes me up and maybe will do the same for you. Heed your vascular risk factors, because crap in your cerebral vessels will not help.
- The one supplement exception is vitamin B12, which neurons must have. Deficiency can be very hard to judge by symptoms, so I'd get it measured and act accordingly.
One of my other favorite theories is HEXACO. And personality does play into intrinsic motivation, to some extent.
Disclaimer: I skimmed the article.
Fun autonomy hacks:
1. Reframe the narrative. For example, when I studied CS at school, I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.
2. Listen to Spotify to get into a solo task. I usually turn it down if I happen to get focused.
Also a note: intrinsic motivation is tough when you're sleep deprived. I've had moments where I was motivated and sleep deprived but they often don't coincide.
This is all to say that stuff like this go onto a fundamental layer of physical health. Something I dind't quite get when I was younger.
That's an example
As for the Spotify example. I just like listening to my playlists, every task becomes more chill. Also, I like working on a Mac more than a Windows laptop. I've had one company restricting my choice there to Windows. Me sort of hacking their company policies such that I could work on a Mac made me feel a lot better.
Simple example: if you believe an action you did was a really bad thing, you will most likely feel negative emotions about it. However, if you can figure out a perspective that will reframe the information you have in a different light and therefore you now believe it was a positive thing, you will likely feel good about what you did.
Example (I'm improvizing so not fully according to the sketch outlined above):
Negative: I don't dare to talk to that person because they don't know me and it is not done to talk to someone you don't know without a context.
Positive: While it is unusual to talk to someone you don't know without a context, I give that person a chance to meet me. If I tend to do this often enough, then there will be people that are open to this.
I can see approaching things in a different way. I was fond of a more Socratic approach for a while, as an example. But that is more than just reframing, that is using a different approach.
For your example, it looks like you are making sure to consider things in a way that does not assume the outcome?
Now and then, evaluation points in life emerge, where you question the 'why'. Those periods can be quite loaded with emotions of feeling lost or being insecure of where to go next. They might greatly shift perspective and hence your course of life.
To me, everything is feedback loops: you pour in energy and you get positive energy back. In that sense, the system is self sustained. However it is fragile as well, because over time, you tend to need more and more back to provide feelings of contentment.
Motivation is like love and relationships, you need to work, sometimes very hard, to sustain them.
This is why I am good at those things — I spent a lot of my time doing them and I did so because I enjoy it.
Let yourself play, find the aspects that interest you about a topic and go wild. No need for a goal, thiose will come eventually. First you need to find joy in what you're doing.
And if you don't find any of that, maybe your motivation is just money, fame or whatever and thst might be ok as well, if you're happy with doing a thing you don't like.
https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
Presumably built off the same research.
Some games are made to burn time, like Thumper.
Some games are made to burn you neurons like Baba is You.
Minecraft has 2 modes. Creative and Zombie. Both equally powerful incentives.
I try to keep the plasticity of my brain. Not to let it crust and crumble like Play Doh left outside the tub.
Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"
And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)
Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both? If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind
Here is a short read on the idea of consciousness as a consensus mechanism https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
People with high intrinsic motivation and agency will rule the world of tomorrow, weilding AI to acheive their personal visions. Everyone else will be weilded by AI.
You may well be right. Interesting to think about the relationship between agency & intrinsic motivation...
To allow an embodied agent to perform actions within an environment that would generally be considered positive, without the definition of an objective function.
To break that down, to be embodied in this case is to act, sense and have some internal model that can be adapted, all operating within an environment that can be considered external to the agent.
An objective function is where there is some external push towards optimality that requires knowledge of the sensors, actuators, environment, etc. A good test for whether you accidentally baked in system knowledge is if you change the rules considerably and the agent will not operate.
Whether or not an agent acts positively can itself be measured by an environment specific objective function. A properly operating intrinsically motivated agent may perform well on some metrics, i.e. long time lived, reduced search time, etc.
Why do you want an intrinsically motivated agent? Almost all reward/objective functions are somewhat flawed, even if the problem is simple. I am reminded of a group training a robot to walk fast, measured by speed over time with a cut off. Simple enough? Well, they reviewed the trained agent and they immediately feel to the ground to be reset far away. In another test, the agents would purposely break the simulation environment, causing the agents to glitch and be launched far. One thing to note is that in each of those scenarios, the agent optimised for the reward, but made themselves "useless" after doing so.
For AI I have found Empowerment an interesting solution to intrinsic motivation [1]. Essentially agents choose actions to "keep their options open", and try to avoid actions that would reduce the action state space. The actual environment itself is not encoded into the algorithm and the state spaces are arbitrary and could be replaced with any symbol. As a result, you can make large changes to the environment and use the same motivation algorithm.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863