Money that comes as a result of reasons unrelated to one's own
performance causes less activity in the area of the brain associated
with reward processing than when the money comes as a result of good
performance. (same article here)

Human beings are more aroused by rewards they actively earn than by
rewards they acquire passively, according to brain imaging research by
scientists at Emory University School of Medicine. Results of the
study, led by first author Caroline F. Zink and principal investigator
Gregory S. Berns, MD, PhD, of Emory's Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences, are published in the May 13 issue of the journal
Neuron.

The Emory scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to measure brain activity in the striatum, which is a part of the brain
previously associated with reward processing and pleasure. Although
other experiments have studied and noted brain activity associated with
rewards, until now these studies have not distinguished between the
pleasurable effects of receiving a reward and the "saliency" or
importance of the reward.

Study volunteers in the Emory experiment were asked to play a simple
target-detection computer game. During the game, a money bill appeared
occasionally and automatically dropped into a bag of money on the
screen. The participant was given the amount of money that dropped in
the bag at the end of the game, but because receiving the money had
nothing to do with their performance on the computer game, it was not
particularly arousing or salient to them.

In another version of the game, a money bill occasionally appeared on
the screen and the participant had to momentarily interrupt the target
detection game and push a button to make the bill drop into the bag. In
this case, whether or not the participant received the money did depend
on their performance, which made the appearance of the money bill more
salient to them.

In yet another version, participants played the same computer game
except the bag on the screen did not appear to have money in it and a
blank "blob" dropped into the bag instead of money.

The investigators performed fMRI on the subjects while they were
playing the game, particularly focusing on the reward centers. They
found that some reward centers of the brain were activated whenever the
money was received, but that other parts, particularly the striatum,
were activated only when the participants were actively involved in
receiving the reward.

"Scientists have conducted tests with monetary rewards in the past and
noted that the striatum was activated, but it has been unclear whether
it was because of the pleasure surrounding the money or the fact that
the money was presented to participants in a salient or behaviorally
important manner," said Zink. "We differentiated the saliency aspect by
having the participants receive money that had nothing to do with their
actions and having them receive money through active participation."

The investigators confirmed that the appearance of money that required
a response was more salient to participants than money received
passively by measuring skin conductance responses during the game -- a
measurement of general arousal used as part of lie detector tests. The
active participation in receiving the reward was the only condition
that elicited a higher skin conductance measure, indicating greater
arousal.

"Being actively engaged in the pursuit of rewards is a highly important
function for the brain, much more so than receiving the same rewards
passively," Dr. Berns explains. "It is like the difference between
winning the lottery and earning the same amount of money. From the
brain's perspective, earning it is more meaningful, and probably more
satisfying."

It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that the brain is wired
up to reward itself for successfully engaging in activities that bring
gains to one's position. History has already provided copious
quantities of evidence that the political philosophy of Karl Marx is
incompatible with human nature. Even before communist revolutionaries
swept into power there were older theories of human nature that
predicted the failure of a creed based on "from each according to his
ability and to each according to his need". But advances in brain
imaging technology has produced tools that are allowing reductionist
brain scientists to start unravelling the deep seated mechanisms of our
brains that alwayts doomed Marxism to failure.

A more general observation here is that by discovering the mechanisms
that govern our behavior science is discovering limits to the
malleability of human nature. As brain science advances its results are
increasingly going to be used to judge whether proposals for changes in
social order are going to compatible with human nature as science comes
to understand it. Radical advocates of new social orders are going to
increasingly be challenged by results from scientific research labs.

However, science will not only play a conservative role in opposition
to proposed changes. Some proposals will be found to be compatible with
human nature. Also, and more worringly, eventually scientific advances
in the understanding of the brain and in ways to manipulate neurons
will serve as the foundation for the development of technologies for
changing human nature. Any future radicals who manage to seize power
will be able to use biotechnologies to rework the brains of their
subjects to be compatible with their imagined utopias. We will no
longer be able to count on human nature to serve as a source of
resistance to radical utopians because human nature will become more
malleable.

above post from http://neurosociety.net

The Herzberg Hygiene Factor for compensation already knew this in management circles.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994795

NASA develops 'mind-reading' system


Updated 15:35 22 March 04

NewScientist.com news service

A computer program which can read silently spoken words by analysing nerve signals in our mouths and throats, has been developed by NASA.

Preliminary results show that using button-sized sensors, which attach under the chin and on the side of the Adam's apple, it is possible to pick up and recognise nerve signals and patterns from the tongue and vocal cords that correspond to specific words.

"Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement," says Chuck Jorgensen, a neuroengineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, in charge of the research. Just the slightest movements in the voice box and tongue is all it needs to work, he says.

The sensors have already been used to do simple web searches and may one day help space-walking astronauts and people who cannot talk. The system could send commands to rovers on other planets, help injured astronauts control machines, or aid disabled people.

In everyday life, they could even be used to communicate on the sly - people could use them on crowded buses without being overheard, say the NASA scientists.


Web search


For the first test of the sensors, scientists trained the software program to recognise six words - including "go", "left" and "right" - and 10 numbers. Participants hooked up to the sensors silently said the words to themselves and the software correctly picked up the signals 92 per cent of the time.

Then researchers put the letters of the alphabet into a matrix with each column and row labelled with a single-digit number. In that way, each letter was represented by a unique pair of number co-ordinates. These were used to silently spell "NASA" into a web search engine using the program.

"This proved we could browse the web without touching a keyboard," says Jorgensen.


Noisy settings


Phil Green, a computer scientist focusing on speech and hearing at the University of Sheffield, UK, called the research "interesting and novel" on hearing the news. "If you're not actually speaking but just thinking about speaking then at least some of the messages still get sent from the brain to the vocal tract," he says.




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Weblinks


NASA Ames Research Center

Computing, Information and Communications Technology Program, NASA

Speech and hearing research, University of Sheffield, UK




But he cautions the preliminary tests may have been successful because of the short lengths of the words and suggests the test be repeated on many different people to test the sensors work on everyone.

The initial success "doesn't mean it will scale up", he told New Scientist. "Small-vocabulary, isolated word recognition is a quite different problem than conversational speech, not just in scale but in kind."

He says conventional voice-recognition technology is more powerful than the apparent results of these sensors, and that "the obvious thing is to couple this with acoustics" to enhance communication in noisy settings.

The NASA team is now working on sensors that will detect signals through clothing.


Maggie McKee

that's interesting. Also, I guess you could use EEG for similar purposes. That is, decoding the EEG signals and then using the signals for controlling different devices.

There was a modem developed that allowed people to think the movement of the cursor across the screen a few years ago.

I agree the EEG or MRI technology can be used an an interface for such non-verbalized commands as well.