A devastating neurodegenerative disease that first appears in toddlers just as they are beginning to walk has been traced to defects in mitochondria, the ‘batteries’ or energy-producing power plants of cells.
Neuroscience
How to Bring Motivation to the Classroom
Everyone has been in a rut – when you feel frustrated and aren’t experiencing any motivation to carry on with whatever you are doing.
What’s really at the root of this problem though? Motivation is a funny word that teachers often use incorrectly on their students. Many teachers claim that their students are unmotivated, as if motivation was an intrinsic character trait that everybody had different levels of. This isn’t the right way to think about motivation. In fact, motivation and drive comes from pleasure of accomplishment and incremental success. If you give a child a task to do, like assembly of a large jigsaw puzzle, and they work on it for a while with no discernable progress, it’s obvious that they’ll get frustrated and lose motivation to continue. However, if they’re able to figure out the first step of filtering out the edge and corner pieces and start assembling the frame of the jigsaw puzzle, they’ll experience continual progress and replenished motivation to keep solving the puzzle.
So here is the source of motivation – it comes from progress. This is particularly important in the classroom. If teachers think that students are unmotivated, the students should not be blamed – this means that the learning process and the actions of the teacher must be adjusted. Following this model, the primary job of teachers should be to ensure that every student is making progress and experiencing incremental success in the learning process. This is what games are so good at and why all children love them – it’s not because they’re easy.
In fact, games are oftentimes fiendishly difficult and challenge stretch the players’ abilities to the limit. However, when players overcome a challenge and make visible progress, they experience a rush of pleasure and continued motivation to keep playing. Why is it, then, that games are so hard but kids still want to play them, and the same doesn’t hold true for school? The answer is that school is oftentimes like a poorly-designed game. When students fall behind, there is a lack of support. They don’t understand what’s being taught, and are never given a chance to catch up. Failure is fatal. Good games, however, don’t punish failure. They always provide an avenue for players to see incremental success and make headway. Learning should be the same way – teachers must support the continual learning progress of students by keenly observing them and ensuring they are being properly and adequately challenged. This should be regarded as a powerful tool to keep their motivation levels high.
Related to this same point is the concept of social learning. The most effective type of new learning comes from binding of new knowledge to past experiences and knowledge and from making the material at hand both meaningful and relevant to students. Who better to socialize and learn with than a child’s peers, whose cognitive networks and past experiences are very similar? Peer-supported learning and interaction with others provides a backdrop upon which kids can measure their progress and understand the success they’ve achieved already. The teacher should support this process and manage the presentation of challenges and assignments to make sure that students don’t get stuck, but see real personal progress to keep them motivated.
Why do Games Need Neuroscience? or,The Importance of Having a Theory
The field of game design is maturing. For the past several decades, games have experienced many revolutions, most of which up until recently were driven by technological advances and development of next-generation consoles. This process is still ongoing, but with graphics technology approaching photorealistic levels and the power of computer hardware today able to simulate highly detailed real-world environments, most future game advances will be driven not primarily by technology but mostly by development of new and innovative game mechanics. One of my strong beliefs is that the next major advance in games, and even entertainment in general, will come from the incorporation of neuroscience into game mechanics and player experience design.
Game designers have struggled for many, many years to understand how to produce fun games. There have been many successes and many failures as well. Designers deliver entertainment to their players, and they design games to be fun by instinct, but often cannot fully and precisely explain how they inject fun into games. Many great game designers work by “feel,” playing through their levels over and over again and tweaking the gameplay loops that don’t feel fun to them or that most people would not find fun.
There’s nothing wrong with using intuition as a design approach, but if designers cannot pinpoint what makes a game fun, the effectiveness of game design is compromised and we are then stuck in a more or less primitive stage of development. Game design is seen as an art, not a science. This means that what makes a game fun is not tightly and accurately defined and at least difficult to pass down to new game designers or the next generation in a systematic manner.
These concerns are reflected in the fact that over the past decade, the game industry has become increasingly hit-driven. World of Warcraft chomps up over 60% of MMO market share and the top 20 casual games occupy 75% of the market. This has forced the entire game industry to become conservative and very risk-averse, suppressing innovation and radical design and in so doing, making it difficult for new types of games to flourish.
I believe that the remedy to this problem lies in use of neuroscientific rigor in game design. Games, at their core, are systems that must be learned. According to Raph Koster (one of the MMO gods), games are “rule-based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.” If your game isn’t quickly learnable, players will get frustrated and it will fail. It’s natural, then, that the origin of learning, the brain, should not only be taken into consideration, but regarded as a guiding light when designing learning-based systems like games, even purely entertainment-based games.
First of all, neuroscience can be used to study and understand the elusive concept of fun. Design of reward systems and schedules and understanding of player pleasure and motivations must obviously be based on how the brain works. As has been widely reported, World of Warcraft’s variable ratio reward schedule essentially hijacks the reward systems of the brain to keep players playing forever. There are many other ways to generate fun that have yet to be described in a scientific manner.
Secondly, neuroscience will provide general rules and formulas to explain what the best game designers have discovered by instinct. We need to improve the current “hit-or-miss through intuition and observation” attitude upon which many game are based and attempt to create the Holy Grail – a Neuroscience Theory of Fun. Finding these neuroscientific patterns in the world to explain how to make games fun to learn and play will drive the whole industry forward.
In a more broadly applicable sense, I firmly believe in the importance of Having a Theory. Understanding the patterns of behavior and design principles for success will provide a road map for greater achievements in the future. These aforementioned principles apply essentially to any industry, any business, and in fact, any single human being. If you collect and organize your experiences into a theory or an organizing philosophy or structure, you’ll be able to teach more effectively, spread the knowledge, and reproduce and expand your successes.
Malcolm Gladwell said in his New York Times interview, “People are experience-rich and theory-poor… people who are busy doing things don’t have opportunities to collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.” In that same spirit, neuroscience will change the whole game for the game industry and allow creation of a “neuroscientific theory of fun” that can be accurately and precisely applied in the future.
My Path to Neuroscience
At age 11, when I first stepped foot into a pathology lab at the Syddansk Universitet, I was originally interested in molecular biology and pursuing stem cell research. Next year, when I entered college, I started off by majoring in Biochemistry, but one day I saw an ad in an elevator for the Neurobiology major, a competitive major that everybody was trying to get into. That was my first encounter with neuroscience.
I became curious about how the brain thinks, and realized that neuroscience is one of the most powerful fields because the brain governs the entire fabric of society and human behavior. Everything is connected to the brain.
I applied for the major and luckily, got in – since then, I’ve been fascinated by the brain and wanted to understand its mysteries. It’s a young field and to say that we’ve charted a small fraction of its vastness would be an overstatement. In my travels and speeches, I’ve been asked a lot of questions from all disciplines and directions, and all of them to some degree are traceable back to how the brain perceives the world.
Nowadays, I’ve gravitated toward the broad topics of how the brain learns through play and games and how the brain makes decisions and experiences the world, including these subtopics of neuroscience:
* neuroscience and games
* reward and motivation
* play, pleasure and emotions (affective neuroscience)
* how the brain learns
* decision making
* how the brain buys
* interactive design
* neuro-branding
* user and player experience
* addiction
Sleep problems during neurodegeneration
A lot of brain disorders and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease are associated with sleeping problems and disturbances like insomnia, hypersomnia, sleep-wake rhythm disturbance, and so on. This can lead to worse symptoms including impaired motor and cognitive skills, headaches, and depression. Scientists are studying what causes these sleep disturbances, and what brain areas are responsible for controlling sleep and are damaged during disease.
Chokroverty S. Sleep and Neurodegenerative Diseases. Semin Neurol 2009;29:446-468.