The Effort-driven Rewards Circuit

Dr. Kelly Lambert on how motivation, pleasure, movement and thought are linked to physical activity

Last week, I wrote about how passive learning predominates in education, even though no one thinks that it is very effective. Sitting and listening doesn’t engage students the way that making and doing can. Being active physically, moving around, using your hands are all ways of engaging the brain and body as an active learner.

A recent Medium article by Danish Fikri, “This Unfamous Reason May Be The Root Of The Soaring Rates Of Depression” mentioned the work of Kelly Lambert studying depression and the concept of “effort-driven rewards.” Fikri writes:

Our brains are programmed to derive a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure when our physical effort produces something tangible, visible and meaningful.

Kelly Lambert calls this emotional payoff “effort-driven rewards.”

She found that “movement — and especially hand movements that lead to desired outcomes — plays a key role in both preventing the onset of and building resilience against depression and other emotional disorders. Furthermore, we are predisposed to preferring hand movements that our ancestors needed for survival — those necessary for nurturing, cleaning, cooking, grooming, building shelter and farming.”

In my book, Free to Make, I talked about Kelly Lambert’s work in a chapter on the Maker Mindset. Dr. Lambert, a neuroscientist, had seen me talk about the maker movement on CNN and she sent me her 2010 book, “Lifting Depression.”

As mentioned above, she talks about the effort-driven rewards circuit in the brain, and how “depression is activated and alleviated.” What’s critical to well-being is physical activity, particularly using our hands and producing a tangible result. When I read her work, I realized that what she described as the experience of depression was the opposite of what I was writing about as the maker mindset.

Let me share what I wrote about

Her interest in depression began following her mother’s death with her own sadness and experiencing the symptoms of depression that made her feel that her world was falling apart.   After weeks of feeling that none of her “efforts made any difference in the world,” she found relief in vacuuming her house, something she normally did not like to do.  The physical work made her feel better.   “Each time I saw tangible evidence of the dirt and grime I’d physically removed from my house, I felt my efforts were valuable.”   She said it gave her a sense of control over her environment.  That experience led Lambert to explore the neuroscience behind depression in her lab, exploring the correlation between hands-on work and how we feel about ourselves.     

“What I’ve discovered is that there’s a critical link between the symptoms of depression and key areas of the brain involved with motivation, pleasure, movement and thought.  Because these brain areas communicate back and forth, they are considered a circuit, one of many in our brains.  In fact, the rich interactions along this particular brain circuit, which I called the effort-driven rewards circuit, provide us with surprising insights into how depression is both activated and alleviated.”

I love that she calls it a circuit, something makers can understand.   When all the parts are linked together properly, there’s a flow of energy through this circuit.   We feel engaged by our actions, alive in our minds, and interacting easily with others.   Our brain is giving us positive feedback that comes a result of our effort.   When the circuit is disengaged, we feel blue, as though it wouldn’t matter what we do.    “What revs up the crucial effort-driven rewards circuit, the fuel” Lambert writes, “is generated by doing certain types of physical activities, especially ones that involve your hands.    It’s important that these actions produce a result you can see, feel, and touch, such as knitting a sweater or tending a garden.   Such actions and their associated thoughts, plans and ultimate results change the physiology and chemical makeup of the effort-driven rewards circuit in an energized way.   I call the emotional sense of well-being that results effort-driven rewards.” 

Lambert can’t emphasize enough how central the hands are to this circuit.  “Our hands are so important that moving them activates larger areas of the brain’s central cortex than moving much larger parts of our bodies, such as our back or even our legs.”   Our hands are uniquely connected to our brain and hand movements are “the most effective way to kick start the circuit in to gear.”   This runs counter to our usual separation of manual and mental labor, of physical and mental, of hand and mind.   We should appreciate how our hands activate our brains.   What if the phrase “hands-on” were to be associated in our minds with a heightened mental state?   We know of people who talk with their hands but makers are people who think (and communicate) with their hands.

The harder the work the more rewarding it is.  It needs to be possible, not impossible.  Yet, if it too easy, there is little reward.  Similarly, if it is too difficult, we will just give up.   It may be that the sustained effort is what matters, not simply exertion.   Prolonged efforts to make things are deep experiences that not only activate our brain, as we might turn on a light bulb, but change it, initiating growth, creating new connections that can be used again.    Actions that we see as meaningful “likely stimulates neurogenesis – the production of new brain cells,” writes Lambert. We are changing our minds as we change the physical world around us.   

The symptoms that Lambert associates with depression – loss of meaning, loss of pleasure, sluggishness, poor concentration, slow motor responses – might be considered the opposite of the maker mindset – purpose, joy, engagement, focus and flow, and resilience.   The maker mindset could be the product of repeatedly engaging the effort-driven rewards circuit with activities that use our hands as well as our brain. If you enjoy making, you’ll do more of it – your brain tells you it wants more. 

 

What if the increase in depression and anxiety in children today is related to the passivity of the learning environment in school, which doesn’t require much of them. Dr. Lamberts believes (and she has confirmed the theory by testing with rats) that we settle for a “low-effort, low-reward” cycle, which demands less of us and also produces a much lower level of satisfaction. It is what happens when school is boring.

Hands-on learning can be so rewarding because students produce results through their own real efforts.

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Makerspace tours

Where I live, they often have farm tours as well as art studio tours. These are in-person events that have become popular for many years. What if we take that idea and create a virtual tour of educational makerspaces?

If you work in an K-12 or library makerspace, would you be willing to give us a virtual tour of your space and talk about the programs you run in your space? If so, contact me, dale@make.co, and I’ll follow up with you.

I’d like to set up a couple of sessions online in which we visit makerspaces in K-12 schools or after school settings. Please let me know if you’d like to participate.