![]() ![]() So if you get an email from your boss with a new assignment, dopamine hits up the nucleus accumbens to form a prediction of what will happen if you do the assignment or not, or if you do it well or poorly. As Kimberly Schaufenbuel, program director of UNC Executive Development, explains, this prediction prompts us to respond in ways that either "minimize a predicted threat (the bad) or maximize a predicted reward (the good)." ![]() The nucleus accumbens is an area of the brain that mediates reward behavior: So when dopamine reaches the nucleus accumbens, it solicits feedback on whether a good thing or a bad thing is about to happen. ![]() Over the years, neuroscientists and psychologists have established that we generally experience motivation when dopamine-a neurotransmitter that relays signals between brain cells-is released and travels to the nucleus accumbens. In order to understand each motivator's relationship with the brain, we turn to neuroscience and psychology. There are all kinds of motivators for productivity, but here we're going to focus on four common types of professional motivation: So instead of wishing for motivation or hunting for _more _motivation, it might be more helpful to think about the different types of motivators we experience and what's going on in our brains when we experience them. Different stimuli trigger different parts of the brain and motivate us toward productivity in different ways. Motivation is a response to stimuli, and that response isn't always the same. "If only I had _more _of it," we think.īut motivation isn't a resource-at least not in the way the language surrounding motivation suggests. There's always another task, another project, another objective-and any motivation you manage to scrape together for one thing is absent for the next. ![]()
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