Need Motivation to Achieve a Goal? Imagine Its Usefulness
"Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution." —David Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big (1959)
In his colossal bestseller, The Magic of Thinking Big, published originally in 1959, David Schwartz posits that if you "believe you can succeed, you will succeed." Of course, we've all grown weary of the unrealistic, empty promises held in motivational quotes and self-belief tropes that encourage us to "just believe in yourself, and anything is possible."
That said, most of us know from life experience that sustaining one's motivation to accomplish a challenging task or achieve lofty goals often requires some magical thinking. If you adopt a "Who cares?" attitude and don't believe that achieving a goal serves a purpose or has value, it's almost guaranteed that you won't feel inspired to go for it with wholehearted gusto.
Conversely, if you "really believe" that achieving a goal will be rewarding and that your goal-directed behavior serves a valuable purpose as the means to an end, inspirational pixie dust often follows.
Yet, for those who feel uninspired or unmotivated to engage in goal-directed behavior, the million-dollar question remains: How can you trick your brain into "thinking big" and truly believing that the pursuit of a challenging goal or finding a solution is worth the effort?
Neural Representations of Value
A new University College London study addresses the question, "How are value representations in the brain reshaped under different behavioral goals?" This paper (Castegnetti, Zurita, & De Martino, 2021) was published on April 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
When the human brain is making value-based decisions about goal-directed behavior, the value of an option has neural representations that are visible during fMRI neuroimaging.
For this study, the UCL researchers investigated if changing the value of something's perceived usefulness triggered changes on a neural level. Among other findings, the researchers discovered that using one's imagination to create a perceived sense of usefulness activated neural networks in the prefrontal cortex associated with context-dependent valuation and goal-directed behavior.
Could Imagining That Something "Worthless" Has Value Inspire Goal-Directed Behavior?
The researchers found that when study participants were asked to make value-based decisions in fictional scenarios they'd never encountered before, top-down remapping of neural representations occurred rapidly as the brain reassigned value to desired outcomes. As the authors explain:
[In] most real-life situations, the value of an action is strongly tied to the behavioral goal that an agent seeks to achieve. This should be independent from the hedonic nature of value, and it has to rapidly change when the goal changes. In this study, we test whether changing a goal triggers a reorganization of perceptual information even in the absence of an explicit evaluation or choice. Furthermore, we show that this remapping happens on a rapid time scale (i.e., the goal switches repeatedly during the task), under a top-down control (i.e., participants actively switch goals), and that humans can perform this flexibly for very abstract scenarios never encountered before (e.g., imagine using a pair of shoes to light a fire).
These findings suggest that the human brain has the cognitive flexibility to adapt neural representations of usefulness based on how the decision-maker chooses to assign value to an abstract goal using his or her imagination.
This study could help to explain how assigning value to personal goals that may seem of no real value to others can influence an individual go-getter's passion for pursuing goal-directed behaviors that may involve blood, sweat, and tears.