Motivating Learning: Neuroscience Insights from Video Game Model & Drug Addiction to Inspire Children's Learning Perseverance and Success
The popularity of video games is not the enemy of children's successful and motivated learning, but rather a model for best strategies to apply to all learning. Games insert players at their achievable challenge level and reward player effort and practice with acknowledgement of incremental goal progress, not just final product. The same brain processes and neurochemicals that compel children to skip meals and sleep to play video games can be activated by parents and teachers to increase their brains' motivation to be attentive class participants, do homework with focus, and even reverse school negativity to reignite the joy of learning.
Dopamine-Pleasure Rewards Achievement
The fuel that compels computer game perseverance and can also motivate academic or other skill learning is the brain chemical, dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that, when released in higher than usual amounts, goes beyond the synapse and flows to other regions of the brain producing a powerful pleasure response.
This is a deep satisfaction, such as quenching a long thirst. This increased release of dopamine is the brain's reward response to achievement of a challenge - intrinsic reinforcement. After making a prediction, choice, or action, and receiving feedback that it was correct, the reward from the release of dopamine prompts the brain want to repeat that action and receive more dopamine-pleasure.
During the play of computer games with progressing levels of challenge, the progressive achievement feedback, such as getting to a higher level of play, is the feedback to the brain that it succeeded in the challenge and made the correct response. These bursts of pleasure drive the brain to seek the next burst, so gamers upon reaching the next level want to continue on playing, even through increasing challenge and frequent failure. Actually if the new level of play doesn't pose new challenge, the gamer loses interest as the dopamine-reward response will not take place if there is no new task or skill to master.
Dopamine & Cocaine Addiction
Compulsive computer game playing, gambling, and risk taking can result from excessive craving of the dopamine pleasure, especially when people are depressed or do not have other sources of pleasurable experiences in their lives.
The addiction of cocaine is the direct result of dopamine increase. Cocaine would have essentially no euphoric effect if it were not for dopamine. Cocaine use is associated with a "high" because it increases the brain's levels of its own dopamine. Because cocaine elevates dopamine to very high levels, the euphoria can be intense, but when the dopamine plunges to below normal as the effects of the drug wear off, the response of an addict is to seek relief from that low by using more cocaine. However, the dopamine takes time to be restored to the storage areas, so repeated use of the cocaine brings less and less of the desired response and to regain that initial high an addict will use the drug at more frequent intervals and/or greater amounts.
Dopamine and Survival
The survival benefit of the dopamine-reward system for mammals is rewarding a successful or beneficial behavior or response when it is chosen so it will be repeated the next time a similar choice or response is needed. For animal survival, the dopamine-release from good predictions promotes life or species-sustaining choices and behaviors, such as remembering that scent that was chosen from other "choices" that lead to a mate or a meal and choosing that scent the next time it presents.
Dopamine Motivates Learning Without the Video Game
The human brain, much like that of most mammals, has hardwired physiological responses that had survival value at some point in evolutionary progression. The dopamine-reward system is fueled by the brain's recognition of making a successful prediction, choice, or behavioral response.
The release of the dopamine surge is a reward because it is a response to choices or the outcome of a behavior or response when the person or animal is not already certain of success. It requires the uncertainty of making a prediction or choice that activates the dopamine-reward cycle release (nucleus accumbens) to respond to the result of that prediction. When there is no challenge of making an accurate choice, because the outcome or answer is already known, such as adding 1 + 1 when a child is certain that the answer is 2, there is no activation of the dopamine-reward release when that answer is given. This lack of challenge disengages children's interest when they are required to drill repeatedly when they have already fully mastered the learning.
In addition to the challenge required for the dopamine reward pleasure response, the brain must be aware that it correctly solved a problem, such as figuring out a correct response in the video game, correctly answering a challenging question, or achieving the sequence of movements needed to play a song on the piano or swing a baseball bat to hit a home run. This is why children are especially motivated to keep playing video games because they give frequent feedback about the accuracy of their choices - hitting targets, choosing the correct move in a maze, such as accumulating points and progression to higher game levels.
Awareness of Incremental Goal Progress
In a sequential, multilevel video game, feedback of progress is ongoing, such as accumulating points, visual tokens, or celebratory sound effects. The dopamine-pleasure reward is in response to the player achieving a challenge, solution, sequence, etc. that allows him to progress to the next and more challenging game task.
When the brain receives the feedback that this progress has been made, it reinforces the memory networks that were used to predict the success. Through a feedback system, that neuronal circuit becomes stronger and more durable. In other words, memory of the mental or physical response used to achieve the dopamine reward is reinforced.
It may seem counter-intuitive to think that children would consider harder work a reward for a predicting a correct response on a homework problem, test, or physical maneuver. Yet, that is just what the video game playing brain seeks after experiencing the pleasure of reaching a higher level in the game. A computer game doesn't hand out cash, toys, or even hugs. The motivation to persevere and pursue greater challenge at the next level is the brain seeking another surge of dopamine -- the fuel of intrinsic reinforcement.
Helping Motivate Children through Achievable Challenge
Imagine you are placed in the following scenarios:
• You are dropped off at the top of a ski resort's steepest run when you've only had experience on the beginner slopes.
• You have to spend your day on the bunny hill when you're an expert skier.
• You play a game of darts with the target two feet away.
• You play a game of darts with the target 200 feet away.
• You are a 3rd grade student trying to do a crossword puzzle designed for experts.
• You are an adult trying to do a crossword puzzle designed for children.
In each of these extremes, you would feel either frustrated or bored, depending on your level of achievable challenge. Reflecting on those personal feelings helps us understand what it feels like for children who do not have the background understanding to understand the new topics the class is learning or who have already mastered the current material and are bored by having to listen to lessons that don't introduce new information for them.
Video games that are designed for progression to appropriate levels based on player mastery all each player to participate at their individualized achievable challenge level. This achievable challenge is key to motivating perseverance in academics, sports, musical instruments and other forms of learning that require effort and practice.
