BOOMSTIM · Understanding and Boosting Motivation using Brain Stimulation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2020-05-24
- EU contribution
- €175,420
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Understanding and Boosting Motivation using Brain Stimulation
An organism’s behavioural success is determined by its ability to mobilize resources to overcome challenges. This ability to mobilize resources involves the noradrenergic brain system, indicated by the finding that pupil size in the eye (which is controlled by this system) increases proportionally with the amount of physical effort that is being exerted. However, humans can already deliberate in advance whether to invest effort in the future. It remains unclear how the brain can consider such a needed mobilization of physical effort in an anticipatory fashion, for example during decision-making.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Imagine losing the motivation to do the job that you used to enjoy. The idea of doing those tasks overwhelms you. You cannot push yourself to give the best efforts and end up doing the bare minimum. What are the brain processes that cause such depleted motivation and how can we restore the motivation to put in effort in order to achieve goals? To address these questions, I propose a series of studies to gain a theoretical and practical understanding of the causal relationship between brain computations of effort and the motivation to energise behavior to achieve goals. Specifically I plan to conduct, for the first time, a combined brain stimulation-functional neuroimaging (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation-TMS; functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-fMRI) experiment to perturb brain regions whose activity represents the amount of effort costs, and measure its impact on neural value computations in a remote but interconnected brain region known to drive choice behavior. This change in causal interplay in the brain should have a quantifiable impact on the motivation to expend effort. I will then use this theoretical knowledge to design a large-scale application of an inexpensive brain stimulation method (Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation-tDCS) to increase motivation, thus establishing a realistic and versatile protocol for restoring motivation in rehabilitative settings. In sum, my research will address the overarching question of how motivation can be enhanced with neuroscience techniques, by combining computational and neuroimaging advances in effort discounting with causal brain stimulation methods. This project will allow me to be trained in the two most common brain stimulation techniques at a pioneering lab in Europe, and forge a new collaborative research line at the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research at the University of Zurich.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT ZURICH · ZurichCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/702799
- https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20201229134713/https://sites.google.com/site/irmakurniawan/home
Data: CORDIS, © European Union