00:02
Now, what is another way to
look at motivating behavior?
Well, we’ve come up with something
called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
and this is a very fancy looking
pyramid here and it’s layered.
00:15
And at the bottom are what we would call
your basic needs and at the very top
are kind of dream top needs
that aren’t really needs,
they’re things that you would like to do if
possible, so kind of walk through this.
00:29
So the bottom one is something
simple like low-level needs,
breathing, food, water,
shelter, clothing, sleep,
all the things we basically
need to survive.
00:37
So as humans, our number
one driver, the thing that
motivates us is to achieve these
basic physiological needs.
00:43
Think about it, if you’re hungry,
tired, and extremely thirsty,
are you really going to be
productive at doing anything?
No.
00:51
So we need to take care
of those basic needs.
00:54
The next are things like
safety and security.
00:56
You want to have your health.
00:57
You would like to have a job.
00:58
Maybe you would like to have property,
your home, family, social stability.
01:03
These are all great.
01:04
The third is having friends, family, being
intimate, having a sense of connection.
01:09
These are all great.
01:10
So those top three are where the bulk
I would say of the population is at,
they’ve achieved all
these things and you’re
considered to be actually
pretty, pretty lucky.
01:19
Now, if you can
escalate that one level
and bolster things like self-esteem by being
confident, achieving, getting a degree,
going to medical school, having a
great job, others respect you saying,
“What a smart guy he is.
01:30
He’s published all these papers,”
or “He’s so successful in life,”
and it makes you feel unique
and you want to be unique
and this continues to
bolster your self-esteem.
01:40
This is sort of a great place
that you want to be and you’re
thinking you would love to be a
little bit later in your life.
01:46
Now, we would be lucky
if we get to that point.
01:49
Not a lot of people get to
get there, but you hope.
01:52
That’s for most
people your goal.
01:54
So the next step is the ultimate
goal and that is self-actualization.
02:00
And so here were saying morality,
creativity, spontaneity,
acceptance, experience, purpose,
meaning, and inner potential.
02:07
So all fancy ways of saying that
you’ve become so self-cognizant
and so aware of yourself that all
those things that are lower in the
hierarchy of needs have been achieved, are
no longer of paramount interest to you
and you can now focus on the
bigger picture, the bigger things.
02:27
So is it really important to have tons
of food and tons of expensive clothes
and overly successful or is it more
important to find a higher purpose?
So examples I can give
you are, say, you know,
the Mother Teresas of the
world or the Gandhis.
02:40
They didn’t need to have all the
beautiful things in life because they
had already achieved that point and
said, “I’m here to help people.
02:46
I’m here to help my people.
I’m here to make a change.”
So that is something that most
of us will never achieve,
but again, that’s probably
the ultimate goal.
02:55
You would be lucky of most
of us if we achieve that
self-esteem portion of
the hierarchy of needs.
03:04
Okay, now,
let’s take a look at
some of the biological
factors that are going
to regulate motivation.
03:09
So these are things that are going to
push us to achieve that homeostasis.
03:14
So for physiological
processes, our bodies have
that ideal set point to
achieve homeostasis.
03:19
We’ve mentioned that already.
03:20
But our bodies have mechanisms to detect
these deviations from that ideal set points.
03:25
And now we’re getting into biologically
speaking there are structures in the brain,
receptors in the brain, systems
in the brain who are designed
to look at how much have you deviated from
that physiological homeostatic balance,
that set point, and this motivates
us to modify our behavior.
03:43
So our friend who’s on this
teeter-totter, when he shifts away from
what he should be in terms of,
say, hunger or sleep or thirst,
our body will say, “Hey, go get a drink,”
or “Go take a nap,” or “Go get some food,”
and they get you back to
where you want to be.
03:55
So biologically speaking
we’re going to talk about a
couple of structures that
are of relevance to us.
03:59
So let’s start with body temp.
04:01
So the hypothalamus is the primary control
center for mediating your body temp.
04:05
And it’s funny because it’s a
very, very small structure
and our ideal set range
of where we want to be is
very, very small and we
have a very narrow window.
04:13
So it doesn’t take much for
us to actually experience
overheating or to become
freezing from our set point.
04:22
There’s looking at fluid levels,
so how much water is in your body.
04:26
And we are basically
walking water balloons
and we don’t have a lot of wiggle room
in terms of our osmotic balance and
that shapes our blood concentration,
it shapes so many different things.
04:39
And so as soon as we’re off
a little bit with water,
the fluid levels change, the
amount we urinate or don’t urinate
or want to consume liquids
changes very, very quickly.
04:49
Hunger, this helps control the
amount of energy we have in our body
and this another thing that is actually
controlled by portions of the hypothalamus,
and this another thing that is actually
controlled by portions of the hypothalamus,
the ventral, medial, and
the lateral hypothalamus,
and they cause the release
of different factors.
05:03
So for example, ghrelin is
released, which is a hormone,
and it causes you to feel hungry,
and then there’s leptin,
which is also released in
response to starting to get full
and you feel that sense of
satiety or feeling full.
05:18
When we look at, say, body temp
we’re looking at vasoconstriction,
this is when your blood
vessels actually constrict.
05:24
The analogy I’d like to use is
if you think of a water hose
or a straw and you squeeze it,
that would be vasoconstriction,
and as a result, you limit and decrease
the amount of blood flow and therefore,
you’re trying to conserve energy and
maintain and retain heat versus
vasodilation and that’s going from,
say, a small garden hose to a fire hose
and now we have a nice big opening,
we have a lot of blood flow
and that allows there to be
a good exchange of energy.
05:52
In this case, we’re overheating,
so you want to cool off
and that allows you to
dissipate some of that heat.
05:57
And you also have some of the behavioral
responses to being overheated.
06:00
So when you’re really,
really hot, what do you do?
You rip off all your
clothes, you walk around in
your underwear saying,
“I’m so hot right now,”
versus vasoconstriction because you’re
really, really cold and you start shivering
and that motion of shivering
actually increases heat.
06:13
You might want to go for a now nice
fur coat, anything to warm you up.
06:18
So these are some examples of different
drives and biologically how they’re mediated.
06:24
The last one is sex drive and this is
mediated by different sex hormones
including estrogen and testosterone, and
varying levels of this will initiate
wax and wane your
levels of sexual drive.
06:34
So when you hit puberty, levels of
these two sex hormones increase
very, very rapidly,
very, very quickly,
which is why you go from 12 years old playing
your toy trucks, and when you’re 13,
all you can think about is girls and
how you can get one to kiss you.
06:50
So a lot of that is
dictated by the hormones.
06:53
Now, another thing that can
actually regulate motivation is
something that might not
automatically come to the
top of your head and that’s
sociocultural factors.
07:02
So what we’re referring
to here is what does
society say or what
does your culture say?
And some of those things
may drive your motivation.
07:10
So first example,
North America, I would say for lots of
the world, being slim is in, right?
So we have this cultural
set point of this should be your ideal
body shape, body weight, right?
So, you know, if you look at the States,
the US, Canada, even most of Europe,
it’s being lean and mean
and being in great shape,
and so that kind of pushes people to
say, “Well, that’s where I should be.”
And so that motivates you
to perhaps change your
behaviors in order to achieve
that body weight, right?
So I got to go to the gym, I need
to do this, I need to do that.
07:47
It also might change your
taste preferences, right?
So normally, we have things like
wanting to have fatty foods.
07:55
We all love our burgers, we love our
shakes, we love our McDonald’s, right?
And so part of the reason that
that’s there is because of the taste
and the things that it stimulates
and the way that it makes you feel.
08:06
In our culture, in our society kind
of has furthered that mentality of
fast and yummy and tasty, and as a
result, that now motivates us to eat.
08:15
Now, that can be counterintuitive to
some of the sociocultural drivers around
body shape and body weight, and that will
also then have to balance itself out.
08:24
The last point is exercise.
08:27
So, say, wanting to look good is important,
then, it’s important to have to exercise.
08:32
Society has really embraced
the idea of physical health
and that you know you
should be exercising.
08:38
They’ve made it a part of our
culture, and so, again, this might
motivate you because you see it on
TV, you see your friends doing it.
08:45
Socioculturally, you’re now kind of
being, I don’t want to say pushed,
but you’re being urged or motivated
to do some of these things.
08:52
So you can see now all the different
things that we’ve talked about,
biologically speaking, socioculturally
speaking that have impacted your motivation,
which will then go on to
influence your behavior.