A Brief History of Motivation and Reward Concepts

Abstract

The modern concept of motivation derives from the historical need to account for the arousal and direction of behavior. Human and animal activity occurs in peaks and troughs and it shifts its direction from one goal to another many times throughout a day. Even the ancients knew that these shifts in levels of activity and direction were the result of some combination of changes in external stimuli and internal state. What they did not know, however, was that the brain was the organ that integrated these inputs and was responsible for both behavior and conscious experience. Plato (428–348 B.C.), for example, thought that reason was in the head, but that courage was in the chest and appetite in the abdomen. The temptation to think in terms of separate central-neural and peripheral physiological controls of motivated behavior is still with us today. The lesson of history, however, is that there must be a biologically coherent mechanism integrating both peripheral and central controls. That mechanism is in the brain.