The Sweet Spot: Where Technology Meets the Motivational Brain-Nir&Far

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question of future episodes. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

The sweet spot where technology meets the Motivational Brain this guest post is by Dr. Mark Lewis. You've just obliterated the last seven or eight zombies. It was a narrow escape and you're flushed with satisfaction. But you didn't see that horrendous creepy the weeping sores and oozing pus because he was hidden behind that dustbin in the shadow of that bombed out building. You get slimed, you're dead. Or worse than dead. So you touch the play again bar at the bottom of the screen. Now you start further ahead than last time. You know you're going to meet that slime master again soon. Be prepared. Or you've crossed the desert and scaled the abandoned fortress nearly to the top, moving along pathways that require hair trigger adjustments on your joystick. But the wind is getting stronger by the second. It keeps pushing you back along the path, dangerously close to the edge. You make a daring dash between gusts, but you miscalculated and the force of the wind blows you right off the edge. Down you plummet to the plateau you crossed minutes ago. Now you have to make the climb again. But do it better. Get it right. The enormous appeal of video games can be captured by a single phrase, a phrase I've heard bandied about by game designers, psychologists and other professionals who need to know how video games work. It's a sweet spot. The sweet spot is a unique place that games take you to and keep you in, where you're winning enough rewards, points, pineapples, distance travels, or zombies killed to feel good, but also losing enough to keep trying hard because you really want to go all the way. If video games could just let you win, win, win, they would get boring pretty quickly and you'd stop playing. But if you kept losing repeatedly, the disappointment and frustration would get you to quit just as soon. The genius of game designers consists partly of recognizing this fundamental duality in Human nature and capitalizing on it creatively. The sweet spot where satisfaction and motivation are perfectly balanced. And it's what makes video games irresistible. I study the neuroscience of addiction. I write books about addiction. And in those books, I try to wrap the scientific picture inside rich real life narratives. The experience of addiction, the thrill, the loss, the compulsion to do it again. My first book was about my own addiction to drugs, which was a bit of a large chunk out of my 20s. And my nearly finished next book uses the biographies of other addicts. X recovering or still working on it. In the process of writing it, I talked to a lot of addicts and I continued to be amazed by the parallels among addictions to very different things like heroin, methamphetamine, coke, alcohol, cigarettes, and the behavioral addictions, gambling, sex, porn, food, and of course, gaming. The brain changes that take place with addiction are also remarkably similar, regardless of what you're addicted to. At a recent conference, I gazed at an FMRI brain scan image that showed excessive activation in exactly the same spot for addicts anticipating their next hit, whether of potato chips, heroin, or roulette. This was in the nucleus accumbens, which also glows with activation in people with ocd. And that's revealing the compulsive nature of addiction. The feeling that you just can't stop makes it look like a spin off of ocd, a long recognized psychiatric disorder. So what's that all about? Our brains compute three things about reward. How much we will get, how soon we will get it, and how certain are we that we will in fact get it. All that computation goes on the nucleus accumbens and its neural neighbors. The fuel that activates the nucleus accumbens is dopamine. The bigger and more immediate the expected reward. The more dopamine gets sucked up into the nucleus accumbens and the more charged we feel as a result. Wanting, reaching, straining towards an all consuming goal, whatever it is. But here's a catch. You might think that the more probable the reward, the more dopamine gets released as well. Well, you're wrong. It's actually when the probability of the Reward hovers around 50% that the dopamine flow is maximum. When the probability of getting it is as high as the probability of not getting it. The point of maximum uncertainty. That's what turns us on the most. In that sense, the sweet spot is a perfect technological reflection of the brain's fundamental formula for achieving motivation. We try hardest when the game is hard enough, but not too hard. But why are video games so addictive? Start with the notion that most addictive drugs and most addictive activities are products of technology. Heroin comes from opium, but it passes through a lot of chemical manipulations. First, booze comes from distilleries and breweries. Porn comes from cameras. Gambling requires, at the very least, a deck of cards and a pair of dice. And the rows of slot machines in Vegas or Tokyo. Simple technological upgrades. Technology finds ways to make things more efficient and more effective. Technology evolves as an outcropping of human evolution, serving its needs and desires with an ever more refined version of what we want. Video games are really just another step in the evolution of games. And games are enticing because you want to win, but you might not. Games have been around for millennia, but video games do it so well, so efficiently, because they ride the tide of computer technology. The balance between winning and losing is continuously adjusted according to how well you're doing, as measured in hits and misses, gains and losses, moment by moment. If you lose too much, the game gets easier. If you win too much, it gets harder, incrementally. That's how it's programmed. You hardly notice this insidious trick because you were so drawn in, so absorbed by it. And you were so absorbed because you were in the sweet spot. The sweet spot knows you. It finds you. It adjusts to you. In fact, the sweet spot adjusts to what's going on in your nucleus accumbens, the flow of dopamine molecules in and out of that intimate structure. As with heroin, meth, whiskey, porn, Technology serves the workings of the motivational brain. We desire winning, getting, achieving, but not constantly. Even drug addicts get utterly bored when they have unlimited supplies of whatever it is. The hunt is more thrilling than the act itself. The momentous feeling of moving forward from the present to the immediate future. The next scene, the next screen, the next belt hit, shot, snort or rush is really what we're after. And the sweet spot keeps us going for it. As a last word, I want to emphasize that attractive and addictive don't equal evil. The surging wave of video game developments keeps finding new ways to help people. Rocket math uses the sweet spot to launch children through math instruction. Sims games help kids understand the mechanics of evolution. As a psychologist, I'm particularly drawn to the power of video games for improving the lives of people and personal problems. Some games are geared towards the learning deficits of people with adhd. And a new generation of games is aimed at those suffering from depression or anxiety disorders, Enticing users through well placed challenges and rewarding them with skills that pay off in the real world. Mindlight draws children with anxiety disorders through real fears, the ones they go to bed with at night, and then rewards them with skills for relaxing, refocusing, and persevering skills that allow them to enter the schoolyard with more confidence the next day. Mechanisms of motivation churn away at the center of the brain, and as with other elemental forces, the manipulation of those mechanisms can serve to help rather than hurt people. The sweet spot does not have to be the brain's velvet prison. It can also be its wellspring of growth.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog, nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.