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.

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.

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.

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.

Half-way through this and already my takeaway is: spend more time with people who have related interests are are supportive of your competence.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

Internalized/chronic shame easily lessens motivation. Sometimes healing comes first.

Motivation is an emotional state. Emotions are ephemeral.

Really great essay.

I have an interesting and truly successful experience related to one "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.

Path continuation/enablement rewards are higher level increased autonomy rewards.

Contrast that to giving a book reward and also being told they were going to be required to read it the next day! It would suddenly represent an anticipated continuation of control instead of an anticipated path of more autonomy and competence. I would suspect it would has an even greater inhibiting effect, by projecting control instead of potential autonomy/competency into the future.

--

Ok, here is the related "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 "control" to get them settled. No time for autonomy! And settled again and again! Until they gave up their valiant struggle against the night and actually settled 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 focus abruptly, we told them that stories were over, but they could pick a book to sleep with. It was 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, 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 already getting rare in their generation, is how much they fell in love with the literal physical feeling of books, for eight hours a night.

And their parents have heartwarming and still funny memories of checking on them, seeing them sleeping happily with favorite books in their arms, under pillows, tucked into the covers with them, or on top of the covers with one of their hands or feet sticking out still touching a book's cover.

Great read!

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.

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