We are doing a unit on Psychology in our homeschool program. How the brain works, what makes us do what we do, what influences cause us to learn and remember information.
Yesterday we learned about Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation or how we can be both inspired (motivated) to want to learn something by external rewards or be self-directed (Intrinsic Motivation) to learn for no other reason than the love of doing it.
Which begs the question - which kind of learning nets better results?
One example presented was a clinical test performed on a group of children who loved to play with felt markers. The group was divided and one half were offered small rewards or treats to play with the markers. The other half were left to choose to freely play on their own. After a period of time, the first group were suddenly denied the rewards and, not unpredictably, they quickly lost interest in the markers. The second group, however, continued playing and enjoying the markers with no interruption.
As is our routine, at the end of a study session, my deep thinker grandson and I do comparative analysis by exchanging personal experiences and POVs. I offered that it had been my lifelong experience that when I love doing something, writing, painting, sewing, creating in general, I can do it with great energy and limitless imagination. However, in those times when I was commissioned to create something in exchange for a payment or wage, I found my creative juices were somehow stifled. I hated the deadline imposed, the boundaries, the commitment to perform to someone else's expectations. In short, I didn't love the activity but did it only or the reward (fee).
I could also add, in hindsight, those times when I was doing something I loved doing but for an Extrinsic Reward, I can't recall a single time I did it better than I ever did when I was doing it for no other reason than for the joy of doing it.
Then, Deep Thinker contributed his experience. For over a year, at the beginning of the Covid Madness, he became obsessed with learning the piano. He poured himself into it for hours a day and was soon playing complex arrangements like Moonlight Sonata, with amazing skill completely self taught except for a short time when he had a unique opportunity to take lessons via Zoom from a well known singer songwriter.
Then, one day, he just stopped. Months passed. The piano sat silent.
In our study of the human brain and how it processes, how it stores, how we remember and forget information, what motivates us, we leaned that some memorized skills require ongoing practice. In short, use it or lose it. This might include sports, learning another language and playing a musical instrument. But there has to be some kind of motivation even so.
Deep Thinker did not admit this to me, but I suspect that when he sat down to the piano last weekend, he was testing his 'memory' of that thing he so loved doing. He said he realized that he quit because it became a chore, a thing that had to be done to 'get better' at it. His joy in doing it was superseded by a vague, no-end-in-sight goal to improve so he didn't love doing it anymore. It was the sheer exhilaration of doing it that got him doing it to begin with.
And isn't that a classic example of how our strange brains are so easily manipulated into replacing delight in doing with some other extrinsic reward? When it becomes a job, an obligation, a commitment to perform, more often than not it isn't fun anymore. There's an old saying, "It isn't work unless you don't want to do it" so this entire topic does not apply to those who have found their niche, the thing they love to do and actually get paid to do it. But, I have to wonder, would these doers still do what they love, as volunteers, even if they didn't get paid? In other words, the Extrinsic Reward is not what motivates them.
Inventors, innovators, out of the box thinkers, who are usually artists/creators who find what they do for the love of doing it, (Intrinsic Learning), will always be those who keep us from sinking into the dull numbing condition of monotony.
The mind is indeed a mysterious thing.
For Him,
Meema
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