Mindfulness and Wanting

Arguably, the primary cause of human distress is when our deeds do not measure up to our desires, or when our short term behavior does not correspond to our long term goals.  Put another way, a major source of our unhappiness is that we often ‘want’ something that has long term or predicted utility, yet end up ‘wanting’ something that has utility only in the moment, or ‘decision utility’ (e.g., when we surrender to distraction rather than complete a more valuable task). To remedy the emotional discomfort this creates, we can rationalize why we should not want something (like the fox disparaging the unattainable grapes), or not appraise what we would otherwise have wanted (just avoid thinking about the grapes). Thus if we reduce the value of what we want by reappraising it or being merely mindful of it, we will be less desirous of it and far less upset at its prospective loss.

This latter concept of ‘mindfulness’ reduces wanting and the emotional problems that ensue due to wanting not by reappraising events, but by not appraising them at all. Although rooted in religious (Buddhism) and philosophical tradition (Stoicism), contemporary explanations of mindfulness are based upon cognitive psychology and the complementary perspective of cognitive neuroscience[i]. Cognitive psychology implies that wanting correlates with non-affective mental processes, and this idea conforms to the emphasis in cognitive neuroscience on the cortical structures that comprise the rational or ‘rationalizing’ aspect of the brain.  Because wanting is a uniform concept, the practice of mindfulness (as well as meditation for that matter) uniformly reduces all wanting through eliminating or reducing the continuous appraisal that is an elemental aspect of wanting. Thus in mindfulness everything in the perceptual field is observed and not appraised. Because of this, mindfulness practice generally occurs outside of one’s working day.

The problem with this approach is that when the perspective of ‘affective neuroscience’ is considered that gives far greater prominence to the mid-brain systems that modulate affect, ‘wanting’ always contains an affective component that represents the activity of sub-cortical structures, namely midbrain dopamine systems that are activated by the cognitive elaboration of the novel discrepancies between acts and outcomes, and do not intrinsically predict the long term utility of outcomes (i.e., as 'gut level' feelings they do not predict the future) [1]. Because of the ‘pleasure’ attendant with dopamine release, the value, ‘incentive salience’, or decision utility of behavior increases, and may conform or dis-conform with the long term logical or predicted utility of behavior[ii]. If they conform, then we have productivity, creativity, relaxation, and ‘happiness’, but if they do not conform, we have non-productivity, non-creativity, stress, and ‘unhappiness’. Because wanting is comprised of cognitive and affective components whose ends may mutually conform or non-conform, wanting is never a purely cognitive event, and some types of wanting may be good for you and others not so good. Hence, it would be more logical to be mindful towards those wants that lead you astray than those that keep you on the straight and narrow. In other words, it is best to be mindful of our irrational wants than our rational ones. The problem is not to avoid appraisals that may lead us to want, but to avoid those appraisals that lead us to ‘mis-want’[2]. Thus a mindfulness strategy must focus on non-elaborative awareness of the short term wants that dis-conform with long term goals[3]. In other words, to be not just effective but practical, mindfulness must entail not the mitigation of wanting, but of mis-wanting.

By non-appraising what we should be mindful of rather than what we could be mindful of, we can expand the applicability of mindfulness to all our working day, and finally make mindfulness a mainstream procedure that is universally embraced.  By being mindful of distraction or distractive thoughts but not our workaday behavior as well as avoiding useless elaborative thinking or rumination, we can gain the benefits of mindfulness without constraining our rational wants that populate our day. Thus mindfulness can be expanded in scope to encompass all of our daily activities without losing its therapeutic power to reduce and control harmful emotions.

Because the activity of dopamine systems is determined by anticipation and/or experience of unexpected changes in the perceived or elaborated relationship between act and outcome rather than the outcome itself (e.g. think of the 'pleasure' in anticipating opening a present on Christmas and of opening it), if follows that non-elaborative awareness will necessarily reduce dopamine activity, and therefore reduce the decision (i.e. momentary) but not predicted utility of objects or events[4]. Hence it is argued that the ‘mechanism’ of mindfulness is the cognitive inhibition of the rapidly changing and virtualized relationship of act and outcomes that elicit the positive affect that for good or ill always distorts judgment, and simultaneously engages cortical and midbrain structures. Thus, mindfulness ‘works’ by reducing dopaminergic activity through the inhibition of the elaborative cognitive behavior that elicits it. Or in other words, mindfulness reduces not the rational but the affective component in judgment or ‘wanting’.

The advantages of a dopaminergic based explanation of mindfulness are numerous and compelling.

It is logical

In its essence, mindfulness changes what we want by modifying how we want, therefore it follows logically that any explanation for mindfulness must be rooted in the neuropsychology of wanting.

It is simple

The neuroscience of wanting is detailed and complex, but the description of its logical entailments is quite simple, and requires but rudimentary knowledge of neural structures and processes.

It is concrete

Instead of a metaphorical description of mindfulness that depends upon abstract cognitive behavior or the complex and indeterminate interplay of myriad cortically centered neural processes, a dopaminergic explanation of mindfulness is rooted in specific mid-brain structures whose behavior is determinate and clear.

It informs procedure

By distinguishing between wanting and mis-wanting, mindfulness procedure can be centered on mitigating those wants that pull us in directions contrary to our long term interest, and result in regret, stress, un-productivity, and unhappiness while keeping those wants that  add zest, pleasure, and meaning to life.

It explains

Mindfulness research almost exclusively follows inductive principles, wherein mindfulness practice correlates with specific emotional, neural, or behavioral states. But because mindfulness is still without an adequate explanation, it is far more difficult to justify mindfulness, specifically when posed against the equally inductive conclusions derived from personal experience, popular media, and even academic research that argue that a distracted and mindless lifestyle is good for you or at most a necessary evil.


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A Note on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: MBSR


A truism in psychology is that if you are faced with a continuous dilemma between two alternative choices of equal value, your muscles will tense and you will be stressed. Specifically, if the affective value of a choice can be raised through its cognitive elaboration (imagining or looking forward to an email, a slice of cake, or other temptations) then it can create an artificial or affective dilemma that elicits tension, as you have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the dumb thing (e.g. doing your work rather than checking your email 40 times an hour). Contrariwise, if one can reduce the affective value of an alternative choice through being mindful of it (e.g. a email being just email or a cake just being a cake), then affective dilemmas can be reduced or eliminated, and you will become less stressed. Because an ever distractive world is full of affective dilemmas, mindfulness is a unique and sensible strategy to reduce stress, and demonstrates the predictive power of a dopaminergic theory of mindfulness. 

For a formal interpretation of MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) from a dopaminergic theory of mindfulness, go here.

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[1] For example, we become incented to eat cake, go on a date, buy a car, etc. not only because of the utility of doing such things, but also due to the cognitive elaboration of the novel implications of doing such things. However, these novel implications do not predict the intrinsic value of the events they predicate.

[2] Mis-wanting represents distractive, addictive, or obsessive behavior (e.g., excessive rumination) in which the momentary affective ‘urge’ to perform mis-matches the objective or predicted long term value of that behavior.

[3] As an example, if you want to eat cake, the urge to do so may conform to the predicted utility of eating if it is your birthday, and dis-conform with the predicted utility of eating if it is not. Hence to be mindful of a ‘cake only being a cake’ reduces regret when you do so to stay on a diet, but ironically would increase regret if eating a cake was a cause for celebration.

[4] As an example, suppose you accidentally run over my cat. That of course is a bad thing, but as I ruminate on all the novel ways I will take my revenge, dopaminergic activity will increase, thus making the decision utility of taking vengeance a whole lot more important than the long term utility of getting even. After all, a cat is just a cat.

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[i]Holzel, B., Lazar, S., Gard, T.,Schuman-Olivier, Z. Vago, D., and Ott, U. (2011) How Does MindfulnessMeditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and NeuralPerspective. Perspectives onPsychological Science, 6(6),537–559

[ii] Berridge, K. (2009) Wanting and Liking: Observations from theNeuroscience and Psychology Laboratory, Inquiry,52: 4, 378—398  (Kent Berridge web site, including this article)




More references:




My e-book on the psychology of the internet, including discussion of mindfulness on pp. 143-151 and pp. 271-276




Below: video of presentation by Richard Davidson and Kent Berridge on the neuro-psychology of happiness.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsis Motivation: The Phony Controversy (2001)

A. J. Marr

The concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are cardinal concepts in social and humanistic psychology, and represent distinctive mental processes that interact in specific ways that can in turn be observed through observation of individuals in work, school, and other institutionalized settings. Various academic viewpoints posit how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation add to one another or disrupt one another, yet there is still no consensus as to how these motivational events interact, or for that matter what they are. In particular, well-researched ‘meta-analyses’ (Deci et al., 1999; Cameron et al. 2001) that summarize the copious literature on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have come to starkly different conclusions as to how intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors influence behavior. Indeed, the literature on this topic, like passages in the Bible, can be quoted to serve one’s purposes. Thus, the literature on intrinsic/extrinsic motivation can be interpreted as supporting the idea that external rewards disrupt intrinsic motivation, boost intrinsic motivation, or have no effect whatsoever.

The resolution to this seemingly eternal conundrum is not served by yet another study, but by recognition of the fact that intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes represent nothing more than metaphorical artifacts that bear not the slightest similarity to the neural processes that actually govern motivation. In other words, the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation controversy is a sham because distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes simply do not exist. The metaphorical identification of the facts of human motivation (and presumably, human happiness) with the attainment of mental or physical objects as represented by intrinsic and extrinsic motivators is an overarching premise that has encompassed nearly the whole of western philosophy since the days of the Greeks. It is simple, seemingly effective, and generally matches the facts of behavior as represented by common sense. It is also entirely wrong. Within the last ten years, the neuroscientific analysis of the reward mechanisms in the brain has revealed that an entirely different mechanism underlies reward or reinforcement. In this radical new interpretation of reinforcement, mental or physical objects do not reinforce, but rather the prediction error of the perceptual connotations of physical or mental objects. These connotations may reflect the unpredicted sensory attributes of those objects (e.g. the novelty of listening to a Chopin Etude for the first time), or the unpredicted contingent aspects of those objects (e.g. a last minute field goal that wins a football game). This positive and unexpected prediction error in the timing and quality of an event is scaled to the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, a neurochemical that activates or modulates global states of the brain. Dopamine is responsible for fixing attention, increasing the effectiveness of attention (i.e. increases synaptic interconnections and speed of neural activity), and also bestows an appetitive value on behavior that is often perceived as pleasurable. The fact that the unexpected time and content variability of contingent events is critical to the estimate of the quality of reinforcement means that objects per se do not reinforce, but rather the prediction error and the accompanying neural changes that are denoted by objects.

The concept of reinforcement as reflected in the activity of dopamine neurons represents a particular challenge to the canonical metaphorical representation of a reinforcer or reward as a discrete event that controls or motivates behavior as the consequence of a fixed response pattern or contingency. Rather, discrepancy theories of reinforcement assign reinforcement to the prediction error that derives from an individual’s moment-to-moment perception of prevailing response contingencies. That is, reinforcement is a continuous and not intermittent event, and is relative to the quality of prediction error perceived at any moment in time. This view, which is presently the dominant interpretation of learning in neuroscience proposes (Hollerman and Schultz, 1998) that: "Learning depends on the extent to which behavioral outcomes are different than predicted, being governed by the discrepancy of ‘error’ between outcome and prediction. Outcomes that affect learning in this way are termed ‘reinforcers.’…"Learning proceeds when outcomes occur that are not fully predicted, then slows down as outcomes become increasingly predicted and ends when outcomes are fully predicted." Furthermore, "the magnitude of dopamine responses to reward reflect the degree of reward predictability during individual learning episodes…". A dopaminergic based discrepancy theory was first ventured by Donahoe’s Unified Reinforcement Principle (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), and the fact that dopamine production co-varies with the quality of prediction error, as well as marks prediction error, impacts not just the quality of reinforcement, but also the attendant quality of subjective experience. In other words, the phenomenology of intrinsically rewarding states, or their subjective feeling, can now be rooted to actual physiological processes that can be simply conceived.

Mind Experiments

Take a simple piecework task, such as pulling a lever many times a minute to stamp out buttons on an assembly line. The reward for performing this task, namely a salary, is wholly predictable in its timing and its amount. However, if the timing of the reward as well as its size radically varied over time, then although the average weekly salary would remain the same, the worker could be rewarded substantially, marginally, or not at all after each lever pull. The latter example, which makes the button machine into a slot machine, will result in the otherwise tired and bored worker becoming suddenly animated, interested, excited, and ironically, indifferent to the reasonable expectation that he or she may likely have a net loss at the end of the week. The manipulation of prediction error alone therefore transforms an onerous ‘extrinsically’ motivated task into a highly desirable ‘intrinsically’ motivated task.

As another example, consider a non-rote task that requires an individual to figure out a puzzle or other problem. The solution for a novel problem-solving task also involves unpredictable prediction errors, when progress towards solving the problem occurs intermittently and surprisingly as different options are considered. If the prediction errors are positive, rapid, and high, then we have a lot of dopamine produced and a corresponding enjoyable, flowing, peak, or otherwise pleasurable experience. Similar activities that involve high, rapid, and positive prediction error are creative, sporting, gaming, or other tasks. (In corroboration of these findings, dopamine has been demonstrated to scale up or down with changes in the probability and importance of expected events (Breiter et al, 2001) and with the frequency of cognitive set shifting between unexpected events, such as in creative behavior (Fried et al. 2001) and video game playing (Koepp et al. 1998).

As a final example, let us consider the exemplar of all intrinsically motivated individuals: Shakespeare. If the fanciful movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’ is to be believed, Shakespeare’s genius was spurred by a confluence of motivators, including girlfriends, competitors, fellow actors and investors, not to mention the approval of the crowd, the Queen, and posterity. It was indeed a volatile matrix of uncertainty that excited the imagination and the pen, giving us a play, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a sublime mixture of pratfalls and poetry that appealed to crowd and Queen alike. But what indeed motivated Shakespeare, uncertainty or contingency? Simple, remove the uncertainty (but not the contingency) and the edifice collapses, and Shakespeare then knows all the right moves, and would likely become bored to tears. He would be no more inspired than a baseball player who knows the final score beforehand, or a gambler who knows the impending face of each card. Shakespeare in Love would become Shakespeare in Hell, a presumption that has at least literary precedent. (See note below for some of the circumstances of the real Shakespeare)

In an episode of the classic TV series ‘The Twilight Zone’, a burglar gets shot and killed, and is met by a jovial fellow who introduces him to a world where he can have anything he wants, from women to power to fame. Unfortunately, everything is totally predictable, from the role of a die to a woman’s sigh. He protests that everything has become boring and dull, and requests to be shipped off to hell, where at least he could play chess with the devil. The man laughs, and says to the shocked burglar, "What made you ever think that you were in heaven?"



Extrinsic and Indivisible for All!

As was previously stated, in contrast to the implicit view that an extrinsic reward is an indivisible event, a discrepancy theory of reward holds that the prediction error signified by 'extrinsic' or objectified reinforcing events is not integral to or fixed by objects, but is dependent upon individual discriminative contexts and histories. For example, although a monetary reward signifies all the things you can imagine you can now buy, which is of course a positive prediction error, that same reward may also signify negative prediction errors as well that are dependent upon contextual cues deriving from present and historical (learning history) events. The well cited example of children losing interest in activities because of a reward is a case in point. If I were to receive a $500 reward for drinking Pepsi, the informative context of the Pepsi and not the Pepsi itself would produce a negative prediction error (is this Pepsi ok to drink?). However, the same $500 reward given for an athletic or creative (e.g. winning the Super Bowl, or a piano competition) accomplishment would likely not result in a negative prediction error, since tradition dictates monetary reward as a validation for and not denigration of accomplishment. Indeed, in such cases, the absence of a monetary reward would likely signal negative prediction error, as it would signify that such accomplishment is taken lightly by society.

Prediction error is dependent upon information that is mediated by the reward, the performance, the environmental context of the behavior, and how it is interpreted due to the personal history of the individual. Unfortunately, because of the near exclusive use by social psychologists of ‘between group’ experimental designs that statistically compare groups of individuals, idiosyncratically perceived informative events are averaged across individuals, and this important data is lost. Hence, the very methodology used by social psychology engenders a self-fulfilling prophecy. By blurring the individual and salient aspects of an individual's experience, homogenized individual variations in behavior are instead relegated to ad hoc motivational causes such as self-actualization, psychic energy, needs for achievement, and of course, intrinsic motivation that have reality only in the imagination.



The unsociable implications for social Psychologists

Social and humanistic psychologists have a penchant for deriving ever-new motivational constructs, from flow states to extrinsic/intrinsic motivation that presumably reflect unique mental processes. In contrast to this top down approach that starts with hypothetical or inferred molar motivational events, a bottoms up approach that begins with real or observed molecular motivational events can remarkably constrain the promiscuous theorizing of unique motivational states that has served to obfuscate much of the science of psychology. The unified principle of reinforcement that is emerging from neuroscience casts doubt on many widely accepted categories of motivation due to the simple fact that they have no distinctive neural correlates, and can be more parsimoniously explained as the emergent properties of very simple neural processes that underlie all behavior. Thus there is no such thing as distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic, operant or respondent, spiritual or materialistic motivating systems. Likewise, there are no distinctive flow states, peak experiences, needs for achievement, or other compartmentalized motivational processes.

Neuroscience has the capability to remove much of the conceptual clutter of psychology, but careers and egos hinge on such theoretical flotsam. Whether of not psychologists have the courage to prune their copious and confusing subject matter will determine if they can actually address the pressing issues that confront society, or if they are merely condemned to debate into infinity and beyond such simple matters as the efficacy of giving gold stars to children. (And of course all this gives wonderful grist for satire, to which I am personally thankful).



Note: (Oh yes. And the real Shakespeare? Consider an environment full of external motivators for a pastime as addictive to its age as our time is for television. To quote Daniel Boorstin’s book ‘The Creators’ (pp.307-310): "The theater had risen in London during Shakespeare’s youth. "The suddenness with which the new pastime had appeared raised the alarm of the learned and the pious. Like television in our time, theater acquired its frightening popularity within a half century." "…..In two weeks during the 1596 season a Londoner could have seen eleven performances of ten different plays at one playhouse, and on no day would he have had to see a repeat performance of the day before."…."Of the twelve hundred plays offered in London theaters in the half century before 1590, some nine hundred were the work of about fifty professional playwrights." (It should be noted that the London of 1590 had about the population of present day Jackson, Mississippi!!) This author wonders what a Vesuvius of inspiration would follow if present day authors had such willing ears, and what any of us would trade for such extrinsic motivation!)



Bibliography:

There are three major sources of information on unified reinforcement or discrepancy theory, and one that is a bit odd.

The first represents the work of the bio-behaviorists John Donahoe and David Palmer. Their Unified Principle of Reinforcement is the first systematic presentation of a discrepancy theory of reinforcement, and scholarly articles on their work can be found on the web site of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB).

The most lucid and up to date accounts of discrepancy theory are also found on the web. The Google web directory contains quite a few PDF files on articles by the neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz that are lucid yet rigorously argued. Schultz is presently the major figure in neuroscience who has comprehensively examined the neuro-psychology of reward.

The third major source of information on unified reinforcement theory is found in the 1998 book, ‘Affective Neuroscience’, by the distinguished neuro-psychologist Jaak Panksepp. Panksepp is also well represented in the web. His comment (from chapter 8 of his book) is instructive as to the untenability of the concept ‘extrinsic reward’. "From the behaviorist perspective, the incentive properties of a reward were traditionally defined in terms of attributes such as the quality, quantity, and delay of reward rather than in terms of any conception of what the nervous system experiences and undergoes when it is confronted by highly desirable objects. In fact, the high incentive state, from the nervous system perspective, may be the arousal of an emotive process that invigorates search and foraging behaviors. In other words, the unconditional incentive state within the brain may largely consist of the arousal of a psycho-behavioral integrative system (e.g., seeking) of the brain. An increased number of studies measuring DA (dopaminergic) cellular activity, as well as dopamine release in the pathways emanating from the VTA (e.g. a midbrain structure-my note), now indicate that this system is highly tuned to stimuli that predict rewards, rather than to rewards themselves."

Also, the superb web site of the behavioral neuroscientist Kent Berridge is strongly recommended as a primer on incentive motivation processes as instantiated in the human brain.



References:

Breiter, H. C., Aharon, I. Kahneman, D., Anders, Dale, and Shizgal, Peter (2001) functional imaging of neural responses to expectancy and experience of monetary gains and Losses, Neuron, 30, 619-639

Cameron, Judy, Banko, Katherine M, and Pierce, W. D. (2001) Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: the myth continues, The Behavior Analyst, (24), 1-44 (article is available entire at behavior.org)

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., and Ryan, R. M. (1999) A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627-668.

Donahoe, J.W. and D. C. Palmer (1993). Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

Fried, Itzhak, Wilson, C. L, Morrow, J. W., Cameron, K. A., Behnke, E. D., Ackerson, L. C. and Maidment, N. T. (2001) Increased dopamine release in the human amygdala during performance of cognitive tasks, Nature Neuroscience, 4(2): 201-206

Hollerman, Jeffrey R., and Wolfram Schultz (1998) Dopamine neurons report an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning, Nature Neuroscience, 1(4): 304-309

Koepp, M.J., Gunn, R.N., Lawrence, A.D., Cunningham, V.J. Dagher, A. Jones, T., Brooks, D.J. Bench C. J., Grasby, P.M. (1998). Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature, 393: 266-268