#reward machine

Human Brain Is the Reward Machine.

We don't do anything if it weakens our will to live.

Normally the brain expects a simple sequence of effort followed by reward. You work, you receive money, praise, pleasure, completion, recognition. The brain learns this pattern very early. Because of that conditioning, most activity is organized around external outcomes. We tolerate effort mainly because something desirable is expected afterward.

When someone performs a task that clearly has no practical outcome like washing a floor that is already clean the usual reward logic breaks down. There is no improved result, no gain, no recognition. Yet the person may still notice a subtle sense of calm or satisfaction simply from performing the action with attention.

The significance is psychological rather than mystical. It reveals that the mind is capable of generating a form of satisfaction independent of external payoff. The reward is not the result of the action but the quality of attention while doing it. When attention becomes stable and absorbed in a simple activity, the nervous system sometimes produces a feeling of clarity or presence. Many traditions noticed this phenomenon long before neuroscience had language for it.

However, the moment someone deliberately performs the task in order to obtain that feeling of “more being,” the activity again becomes a reward-seeking behavior(!) The mind simply replaces one type of reward with another. Instead of chasing money or success, it now chases a particular internal state.

What about making the task slightly more difficult? The intention behind that advice is to expose another feature of the mind which is resistance. When the effort increases enough that the person thinks that she really don’t feel like doing this and the impulse to avoid effort becomes visible. Observing that resistance is supposed to show how strongly behavior is normally guided by the pursuit of comfort.

The task is again not about breaking causality or getting closer to God. It is more like a small laboratory experiment on your own motivation. By performing an action with no obvious purpose and slightly increasing the difficulty, you watch several mental processes appear: resistance, boredom, impatience, and sometimes quiet satisfaction when the action is completed anyway.

The discovery that attention itself can produce a form of satisfaction is interesting, but it does not overturn the basic fact that humans remain organisms driven by reward systems. Such psychological exercises just shift the reward from external results to internal states.