Evolution of Motivation

All through the history, the typical motivational approach is as short term as "carrot to rabbit" ot "bone to dog".  All we have to suggest now is that this typical approach works only for mechanical tasks and in fact this short term motivational approach works against us for cognitive tasks.


Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker is credited for devising candle problem in 1945. The assignment was to fix and light a candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won't drip onto the table. 

In a further experiment, it was found that when rewards were arranged for such cognitive intensive problems, participants with option of rewards came up with solution 3.5 minutes longer than the participants who were in control group(without any offering of rewards). This clearly shows that rewards clearly overburden your mind and leads to bad performance. 

The same experiment as shown below with simpler and straight forward goal resulted in faster execution. This now clearly suggests that only with mechanical and simple task do such rewards work.

Somewhat similar results were achieved by Dan Ariely in India where offering more rewards at top for the more cognitive tasks resulted in worst performance. Though, the point to be noticed is that people who performed with least or medium or no rewards were equal in performance.Here is the link for the study.
http://danariely.com/2008/11/20/what%E2%80%99s-the-value-of-a-big-bonus/

So what should be the way ahead. According to Dan Ariely, motivation is not just about money. It is more about 
1) evoking competition, 
2) evoking a feeling of achievement or feeling of creation, 
3) evoking a feeling of conquering, 
4) feeling meaningful, 
5) acknowledging and 
6) give an option to pursue a goal.

The above list is picked from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfcro5iM5vw

V Nice Concluding Excerpt from the talk: If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps,and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.
And I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx, but the reality is that we've switched and now we're in the knowledge economy. And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them, how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees, I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier.

After this revelation of Dan Ariely, there is theory of intrinsic motivators, because they matter more. 
To add to this there are 3 other important factors :
1) Autonomy - The urge to direct own life (Utilized in gamification by providing options in games)
2) Mastery - To become better and better at something
3) Purpose - Yearning to do a piece of work which is part of larger than we do individually

An Australian company Atlasian gives opportunity to employees to do 20% of time autonomously now. This is on par with google and thus, providing Autonomy hs helped them to improve their products amazingly.
Content from : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

To add to this, one must find what makes one happy. Now, what makes one happy is subjective and personal. But, one thing is sure that such work should subsume and immerse one person in the activity itself. This has been talked as effortless FLOW by famous psychologist "Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi". But, this may take a long time as long as 10 years in physical or mental training.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs

Important Takeaways:
1) Carrots and Sticks will remain inferior to Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
2) Follow your intrinsic motivation.
3) Go for something which leads you to ecstatic state on regular basis.

Evolution of Emotions

Mathematics of Emotions

ANGER
How Anger happens?
Whenever there is a desire and an obstacle comes, the anger arises.
The more intense the desire, the more anger towards the obstacle comes.

Mathematically, ANGER = k* Intensity(DESIRE(Self)) *Obstacle

More the number of self-desires, more of anger due to external factors.
Forget about external factors, the internal conflicting desires of say, sleeping and watching TV, makes you angry and thus frustrated with yourself so many times. The more desires and things you want to achieve are there, the more possibility of anger there is.

JEALOUSY & ENVY
How jealousy is different from envy? Before, answering that, let us define jealousy, if the person has an object which I desire in a quantity which is slightly more than what I have, I will feel jealousy.If I don't have desire for the object, then whatever amount of the object others have, I don't care. It just doesn't matter. I will not feel jealous. You will not feel jealous of orange or plain white

Mathematically, JEALOUSY= k* Cap[DESIRE(Object with Others)]

The catch here is that there is Cap function. If there is a person who possess the hordes of object which we wouldn't be able accumulate in any way, we will feel envy and not jealousy. A beggar will not be jealous of a multi-millionaire, though he will be envious of multi-millionaire. A beggar will be rather jealous of another beggar around the corner who daily earns twenty more rupees than himself. Jealousy is such a petty emotion that can very easily surface between you and your mother, father, siblings, spouse and even between you and your kids. So, rather look for it. Being jealous of your best friend is not a big deal. So, admit it. If I have a black spot on my face and I look into the mirror, it is better to admit the black spot of being jealous with your dear ones to understand yourself in the first place to conquer it.

Knowing that there you have jealousy is the first step to realization. Let us try that realization. In a daily conversation, person A says that person B is so nice. You will start feeling jealous. To add to it, if you are an aggressive person, you will try to bring down the person B to get you jealousy levels down.

JEALOUSY & COMPETITION
In a competition of A and B, B is leading. If then A shoots up and wins the race. in case of jealousy, there is downward spiral of B belittling A to bring to his level, irrespective of his factual win. B will try to bring down A in the eyes of others. To add to this, B feels very happy when he is able to shake the opinion of A in other's mind.

Now, why is this important? We don't even know our mind patterns, the erratic mind patterns, and unless until we are cognizant of these erratic mind patterns, we wont be able to direct our mind to avoid those traps. We have to be master of our mind by analysis of our mind and then change the patterns.

AHANKARA & ABHIMANA
Ahankara is not Pride as most of people think. Ahankara is the notion of "I"(Ego). If I am saying I am Saurabh, it is Ahankara and not pride. I am a computer engineer, it will be ahankara and it I say that I am the best computer engineer, it becomes Abhimana.

"I" notion behind everything is Ahankara. It is a mind concept. 

Evolution of "I"-Consciousness explained as per Mandukya Upanishad

There is a famous story of Raja Janaka waking from a dream and then only saying or telling "Is this true or was that true?"

Please go through this video for details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xri4pcH1rMk

I/Ego/Knower              World/Prapancha                                                    Station Master

1) Waker                           Waking World              Bangle                         Rajdhani Express
2) Dreamer                        Dream World               Necklace                      Goods Train
3) Sleeper                          Sleep Blankness           Ring                             Blank Station
4) Turiya (Conciousness)                                       Gold                             I

The main argument is that Turiya even though listed fourth here is actually a superset of first three states. Turiya is pervasive in all the forms of Waker, Dreamer and Sleeper just like Gold is pervasive in all the forms Bangle, Necklace and Ring.

While explaining the phenomenon to Raja Janaka, Astavakra told to Janaka that none of Waker or Dreamer states was true because of the simple reason that the environment whether it was his wife, kingship or even his children were not in every next state. This means that nothing experienced by brain was true. The next question is then obviously "what is truth?". Just as Gold pervades in each of the forms such as Bangle, Necklace and Ring and still the truth among all is Gold because Gold is the common denominator across all the states, the states of the Waker, the Dreamer, and the Sleeper are just the forms of "I". I being the common perceive-r of different states is the only constant and thus the only truth across all the "I" states.

Let us come to Consciousness perspective. Consciousness watches the continuous experience of the person. In a way, a person keeps on changing with age. One's belief system, physicality and psyche becomes completely different from a state when one was 10 and when one was 40. So, within the physical state(Waker), the physical form(body) itself is not the True 'I". I cannot say that I am the same person who "I was at 10", but there is a common denominator across all the ages by virtue of experiences by which I can say that common denominator to be "I". Now, we have established that is the experience part is common in "Waker" state and is the truth, so similar truth can be extended to Dreamer part based on experience part in the dream. Mind changes by age as well say by age of 10 and then 40, so it also is not constant or common denominator. Since, it is possible to watch what your mind is doing, mind is clearly different from "I" or consciousness. But, again your mind at 10 and your mind at 40 has a common factor of "I" or consciousness.

MIND AND BODY is series of changes whereas CONSCIOUSNESS is not. Same holds true for the different human states whether it is Waker, Dreamer or Sleeper state. Everything changes, but not your consciousness. Even the false body in dream is known to consciousness.

This Consciousness watches each of state.

Mandukya upanishad says that "I" is not the waker/dreamer/sleeper nor the "Waking World"/"Dream World"/ "Sleeping World". "I" is though in and out of waker/dreamer/sleeper and just watching the "Waking World"/"Dream World"/ "Sleeping World"(Jagrut/Swapn/Susupti).

Got these concepts from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGKFTUuJppU

Evolution of STRESS

I am going to present two sides to Stress in academia over last decade and how a general human should approach stressful situations.
There are 2 different views on stress1) The nemesis view of stress affecting the age, and telomere length(placing a quantitative measure to your general health)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBngws_cWho
In a nutshell, Stress leads to more mind-wandering and thus reduction in telomere length. Since, the practice of meditation is more embedded into "remaining in the present", meditation helps in slowing down this process of trimming . Over the time, mediation has proven to be the best way to fight out cell ageing (direct resultant of stress). 
2) The embracing view of stresshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEUHere is abridged version of the talk. " Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died.Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

INTERVENTION 1You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health. 

So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says "yes". When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress.

Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. (Laughter) And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this. 
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident,but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful,their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. 

So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you,and your stress response becomes healthier. 

INTERVENTION 2Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. 

To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.

Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart. And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone,your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing,that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.
INTERVENTION 3I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93,and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?"And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.

Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But -- and I hope you are expecting a "but" by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience. And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.

Thank you.

Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job,does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense?

KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. 

CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool.
Closing Conclusion after looking at both sides demarcates that chronic stress is definitely detrimentally effective in reducing the life span of a person(as suggested by telomere reduction research), but this negative impact of stress can be metamorphosed by interventions like "Thinking Stress to be Good",  "Being more social" and "Being more compassionate and helpful."