[HN Gopher] How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the s...
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How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science
Author : buzzmerchant
Score : 129 points
Date : 2025-04-29 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erringtowardsanswers.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erringtowardsanswers.substack.com)
| buzzmerchant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you mind sharing what you're taking?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| PQQ, CoQ10, NAD+, Creatine.
|
| NAC to clean free-radical oxygen damage to dna.
| maj0rhn wrote:
| 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.
| sameasiteverwas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks very much!
|
| You may well be right. Interesting to think about the
| relationship between agency & intrinsic motivation...
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| 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.
| mettamage wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious how you actively use it to build motivation?
| mettamage wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| efkiel wrote:
| Could you share the methods you used to learn as fast as you
| could ?
| sheepolog wrote:
| 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.
| bArray wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863
| javier_e06 wrote:
| 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.
| i_am_a_squirrel wrote:
| Great read!
| begueradj wrote:
| Motivation is an emotional state. Emotions are ephemeral.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| 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
|
| Here is a short read on the idea of consciousness as a consensus
| mechanism https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-
| consensus-me...
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| This reminds me I need to add Douglas Hofstadter to my reading
| queue.
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| Half-way through this and already my takeaway is: spend more time
| with people who have related interests are are supportive of your
| competence.
| neogodless wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
|
| Presumably built off the same research.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Internalized/chronic shame easily lessens motivation. Sometimes
| healing comes first.
| GabriDaFirenze wrote:
| Good timing, I actually mentioned the SDT research for a piece
| about naysayers. Thank you for sharing your experience and you're
| definitely not alone. A constant battle!
| https://open.substack.com/pub/leadwithkindness/p/rising-abov...
| Nevermark wrote:
| I have an interesting experience related to this "discussion"
| point:
|
| > For another example, consider the Marinek and Cambrell (2008)
| experiment where they compared the effect of token-rewards, e.g.
| a gold star, with task-related rewards, e.g. a book, on reading
| motivation.
|
| > Would the reward of a book really be experienced as less
| controlling than the reward of a gold star?
|
| > Instead, I think the token reward was probably more distracting
| than the task-related reward - which makes sense, since the task-
| related reward was really just a means of spending more time
| doing the task at hand anyway.
|
| My experience would suggest another effect is happening. A reward
| of a book aligns with the activity more than just being less
| distracting. It makes the activity less of an event, and more of
| a path. I.e. reading gets framed as not something they did, but
| something they are beginning, that they can look forward to.
|
| I think we are attracted to learning things more, if the learning
| has a forward path, if the forward path is made more visible, or
| the forward path is more enabled. A book reward emphasizes those
| intangibles, while tangibly enabling another step. Enablement
| rewards are increased autonomy rewards.
|
| Contrast that to if they were given a book reward and told that
| they were going to be required to read it! It would suddenly
| represent anticipated control instead of anticipated autonomy and
| competence increases.
|
| --
|
| Ok, here is the "psychological experiment" which worked out
| really well with my young children. (Grown up now.)
|
| Every night, I or my partner would read them a bedtime story. We
| usually read one or two short stories, after which we asked them
| to get ready for bed. Invariably, they would beg for another
| story, which we would read, then put them to bed.
|
| But children don't give up, so they of course begged for another
| story. No matter how many stories you read, their is the
| inevitable disappointment of story time ending. Getting them into
| bed represented the enforcement of that ending, and often
| required some degree of over "control" to get them settled. And
| settled again! Until they really did settle down.
|
| So we tried something, by random instinct one night, and it
| worked so well it became a staple of their young lives.
|
| Instead of ending the book session, we started telling them that
| stories were over, but they could pick a book to sleep with. It
| is the funniest thing. They would get quite excited and enjoy
| choosing "a favorite book" from their selection. We would say
| just pick one, but then "give in" and let them pick two if they
| couldn't decide.
|
| All this autonomy of what books they were going to take to bed,
| including talking us into letting them have more than one, really
| motivated them into bed.
|
| Then lights went out. They couldn't read the books. They couldn't
| look at the pictures. Nevertheless less, they could feel them and
| it made them very happy going to sleep!
|
| Other factors played a part, but I am convinced that part of the
| reason they are lifelong habitual book readers, something getting
| rare, is how much they fell in love with the literal physical
| feeling of books.
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