I've heard you talk about attaching the reward to the effort itself and how that can help you and your system sort of value more the effort, right, rather than the end reward. Do you have some examples of like how would you attach a reward to the effort itself? Okay, so there's the psychology and then there's the physiology. The idea of attaching a reward to the effort process itself is kind of the holy grail of learning anything and being human, in my opinion. And here we can look to the beautiful work by my colleague Carol Dweck on growth mindset. You know, this notion of attaching the word yet, you know, that somebody isn't good at something and they can tell themselves yet that they can be, that there's a capacity for growth, and so on.

There's also the beautiful work of another colleague of mine, Dr. Alia Crum at Stanford, and David Yeager, who's down at University of Texas Austin, which has combined a lot of the discoveries about growth mindset with the stress can be performance-enhancing mindset, and to great success, in my opinion, in terms of cultivating better academic skills and so on. So we'll get to that in a moment. But the idea here is that the dopamine system, even though it's down in the midbrain and it's involved with, and it's also communicating with the striatum, and it's communicating down to the spinal cord, and it's involved in all this stuff that's evolutionarily pretty old, Reward exists in— reward mechanisms and movement exist in other animals too.

But the amazing thing about these pathways is that they are highly subject to context-dependent learning. So the prefrontal cortex, the neural real estate behind our forehead, it's a bunch of different areas of the prefrontal cortex, but it's essentially a context-learning machine. It learns what's appropriate in one situation and not another, and it learns rules. It can teach and learn rules, but it doesn't just teach and learn rules to you. The circuits involved in motivation and reward can learn those rules, even so much to, even so far as to say accurately that if you are in a process of trying to learn something and you can't do it, you're like, oh, like, I can't figure this out, I can't figure this out, but you have the knowledge, the cognitive knowledge that that feeling of what I call limbic friction, you know, I made that term up, but this feeling of friction, like, this is tough, this is agitating, I can't do it.

If you are aware of the reality, which is that that reflects the release of neurochemicals involved in attention and alertness, and it's changed the milieu of your brain to allow plasticity to occur, then you can tell yourselves in those moments, the challenge that I'm experiencing right now is the gate to neuroplasticity, which it is. It's a way that my brain knows this is different than everyday life, 'cause I can't do what I'm trying to do. Pay attention, do something differently, keep drilling. And that process, if you tell yourself, The simple, you know, self-talk of, I'm on the right path, the fact that it's difficult means I'm on the right path as opposed to the wrong path.

What that means is that the dopamine system can start to recognize those general themes of thinking, general themes of internal arousal state in the body and brain, so that in the future, when you encounter those states, you know, this is good, this is good for me. In other words, we can, it's not just that the dopamine is released when we are in pursuit of heat when it's cold, cool when we're too hot, food, sex, et cetera. The dopamine system can also learn based on knowledge that we are told and that we believe. And there's actually a beautiful paper in Neuron published a few years ago that actually attaches beliefs to the dopamine system.

It can get a little scary because what it essentially showed was that people who get confirmation of their preexisting beliefs get dopamine release under those conditions. This explains a lot of what we see out in the world, both online and elsewhere. But the important point here is that what we believe believe about how dopamine works, what we believe about effort, those things can be merged in a way that indeed we can start to attach reward to the effort process itself. As we are striving, as we are trying to go from flat-footed to forward center of mass, if you will, or from back on our heels to flat-footed to forward center of mass, as we're doing that, if we tell ourselves, okay, this is supposed to be painful, hopefully in a non-traumatic, non-physically or psychologically traumatic way, but that I'm doing this, this is it.

horrible day that was so difficult, this is part of growth. This is part of the growth. I'm on the growth curve. That knowledge can shape and will shape the neural circuitry associated with dopamine and reward so that in the future, when you encounter it, it's like, oh yeah, this is how this works. And, you know, people hear this and they go, well, wait, how do I do that? How many times do I have to tell myself I got it right? You know, there hasn't been a deep exploration of that, but everything we know about the psychology of growth mindset, and then I mentioned the stress is enhancing mindset, it's worth just noting the stress is performance enhancing mindset, is one in which it's beautiful experiments where people watch a movie about how stress diminishes performance, causes challenges in immune system function, et cetera, et cetera.

It's all true. A different group watches a video about how stress can enhance performance, sharpens focus, sharpens memory for specific things, et cetera, and it improves performance. So what it basically boils down to is that what you believe about a certain state in your brain and body has very much to do with how your dopamine and other neurochemical systems react, and that carries forward into other activities. That's what I love so much about the dopamine system or these other systems is that they generalize. Dopamine is the currency for all of this. There are other currencies in there too.

I want to be fair to the biology, but dopamine is the currency of motivation, reward, and pursuit, but mostly reward, but mostly motivation and effort, and then additionally reward under certain conditions. So I guess if that was, you know, too word dense, when things get hard, tell yourself the fact that they're hard means you're on the right path. You might not be on the exact right path, but think of yourself as cutting a wedge through a map to get to a certain destination. Sure, as you gain more knowledge of right and wrong aspects of your pursuit, you can sharpen up or narrow up that wedge so that you nail the location like a Google Maps trajectory. But understanding that as you are in pursuit, you are tapping into the dopamine system.

Now, if you hit a node, if you will, in your pursuit, and it's like, oh, you got the wrong thing, it was like you didn't get the You didn't meet the goal, it didn't go the way you wanted. It's also useful to understand that that is valuable knowledge. The lack of reward, the disappointment you feel will also reinforce not doing many of the things that led up to that. We just have to be careful that we don't generalize too much, right? There were exams that I studied for in university that I didn't do as well as I would have liked. In fact, one course in particular, and I still remember the course, and I still remember exactly what went wrong, but that's exactly the point. We have a heightened memory for where effort led to the thing we didn't want.

And we can use that to make sure that we remember that information going forward, we apply that information going forward. In fact, as you know, on a qualifying exam, they keep asking the graduate student questions until you say what? Until you say, I don't know. And at that point, they've found your limit. And the answer to that question, inevitably, people go look up, and it's the one thing from your qualifying exam that you never forget. So in any case, that's— That's the best sort of topical description I can provide. And some of it really sounds very much like the placebo effect too, right? I mean, the placebo effect where you believe something is going to be positive, it's going to happen, and I believe you also release dopamine, right? Absolutely.

So I mean, placebo effect is amazing. I mean, and scares certain people, but I don't think it should. I think that we should look at the placebo effect as, proof positive that the circuitries in the brain that are involved in primitive things, dopamine release, temperature regulation, hunger, et cetera, are highly prone to contextual learning. You know, this drink is going to do blank, and it does. Give someone else the same drink, again, Alia Crum's work, the milkshake study, right? Give people a milkshake, tell them it's high calorie, very nutrient— or tell them it's very nutrient dense, you get more satiety than if you tell them it's nutrient sparse. Right. I mean, it's just like, and it's the same calorie drink.

But you can look at the level of ghrelin secretion and see that it's pure placebo/belief effect. And I think that makes sense if you are in the middle, like if you're wanting to reward effort, then while you're in that, when you're doing it, when you're in the effort part where you're like in motion, right? Then thinking about like, this is working, like this is like, you can, then there's the dopamine, right? Attached to the effort. I mean, am I thinking about it right? Absolutely right. You described it far better and more succinctly than I ever could. It's important to pay attention to what effort feels like in the brain and body and to remind ourselves in those moments, I'm on the right path. I might not be on the exact right path, but I'm headed in the right direction.

And sure enough, when you hit a milestone, whatever that milestone is, you should pay attention to that milestone, the reward, the grade, et cetera. I'm a big believer of also sometimes, not paying too much attention to that. I'll never forget in graduate school, we got our first paper published and I thought we would go celebrate. And I asked my PI, my lab head, I said, you know, are we gonna celebrate? And she said, I don't know, wasn't the celebration doing the experiments? I was like, well, those are a lot of fun, yeah. And then she said, well, I guess we could get a pizza or something, but how about just go do more experiments? And so that's what I did.

And at the time I remember thinking, oh, that's no fun, but she had a long commute home and, you know, maybe, who knows, she didn't have the time But looking back, it's like, what a great gift, because it was like, no, you do the— it was the doing of the experiments that was the reward. The paper, yeah, that's super cool, it's fun. You know, first paper is always a thrill, but no, the real thrill is in doing the experiments, doing science. And so let's not introduce anything to this picture that doesn't map onto that. And I don't know to what degree it played a role in my pursuit of goals, but I really enjoy effort. In fact, I love building stuff as much or more than I do indulging in the final product. And you do an excellent job.