Because It's More Fun

"I do it because it makes me happy."

"I don't care what other think of it, I made it because It made me happy."

Opinions of other people becomes meaningless when one really has strong conviction at what he's doing.

There's no fear of the outcome, there's no fear of doubts, the outcome become irrelevant.

As much as disappoinment is inevitable when it comes to "measurable outcome".

I was day dreaming to extrapolate my feelings of disappoinment to a hypothetical scenario on how to calm a child who is sad and disappointed that he has failed his grades. How does a good parent handle this scenario knowing there are tight bind to the implied consequences of having a bad grade? And most importantly, how do I extrapolate myself to calm a sobbing child?

First emotions, I would ask my child why is he sad, what is the reason that he is crying. Crying could be seen as a confession that one is attaching a result of something to their own perceived expectations that is not met, or even a fear implied to the mismatch of desire and outcome. In which the stronger the attachment, the more emotional intricacies are involved, in which the result of the outcome is shown in tears. On the other end, the other child who feels completely indifferent about their falling grades, is just a confession to how little to no attachment they have to the grades. A child who cries about the result of the falling grades, it is because he understands the significance of the grades to him. (assuming that in this case, there are no grounding by the parents of the result of the failling grades).

In certain cases where the height of emotions are apparent, it is not good to solve the problem systematically as the brain is divided in working capacity. If one were to bruteforce solving the problem systematically, it will just lead to unproductive conversations as emotions will most probably take over the rational mind to solve the problem systematically, even if the problem needs to be solved systematically. Sometimes people when they are sad, they just at least initially just want be listened.

If the mood has come to a "healthy baseline" when it is apparent from the "outward vibe" as the heights of emotions are apparent in vibe, as in people who are distressed, sad, or even crying, are having physiological sympthoms such as shortness of breathing, apparent nervousness, apparent confusion, and could be as apparent as facial expression. When one thinks that it has reverted to the "mean/average" emotion, one can start a conversation that asks them what they think is the source of the sadness.

Most of the time with grades, is i think, the source of fear that they think they are not excelling enough, because grades are on some certain correlation are tightly bound to one's future and career, assuming that the kid is mature enough to understand. Now the father is left with a task, to define a credible metric that shows clear correlation between study-time to results. In which I believe, the famous assumption that "just put more time studying" is too straightforward and could actually harm the child, in the other hand, studying should also not be antagonized as a mentally draining activity, the child must understand that the only reason why he is studying is only for himself. Not for the sake of the fulfillment of their parents and nothing external, the activity and how the self chooses the activity is primarily for the sake of himself. Or in other words, the job of the parent is to exercise a sense of self awareness to the child, in which self awareness by nature is self defining. Let the child define what it wants and acts on it and see the consequences of it, if he is not going to learn that concept now he is going to learn it later when he realizes late enough that he is the only person who is responsible to make his very own best assumption about the condition of life that he wants and ultimately his individual happiness. The parent still lead the child however, find out if his best assumptions is indeed for the better or for the worse as the knoweldge of the parents are debatedly "more" than the child but it doesn't mean it contains absolute "truth", as what has worked for the parents may not work for the child as they inhibits very different character growing up in a very different environment surrounded by very different people.

The child however, is born into this world with situations outside of his control, he could hate living if we give it too much stress hormones. Yet, he must be taught on how the game of life is played, the fact that he is not always going to get what he wants as much as he wants to burn his dopamine circuit by playing lego batman all day. One of the finest intricacies of life in which the majority of things revolve around with is money. This article from [CNBC, When to teach kids about money, according to the experts — and how to do it, 2023] shows that:

He recommends teaching five- to eight-year-olds “very, very basic things” like that money has value and how choices made with it have an impact.

Money is the reason why this civilization doesn't collapse and we became hunter gatherer and forage for deers and clean water again. The same reason why we want our child to have good grades and ultimately a "good" future for them that they produce "good money" is the same reason why some torture their child into studying to the point that the child cries. Might as well take the hard road of explaining the concept of money so the child can automate itself by understanding that he can buy better toys in the future if he is studying.

The Stanford Marshmellow Experiment has taught us this, to introduce the expriment, I will quote from James Clear, Behavioral Psychology:

During his experiments, Mischel and his team tested hundreds of children — most of them around the ages of 4 and 5 years old

The experiment began by bringing each child into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them.

At this point, the researcher offered a deal to the child.

The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow.

So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.

The researcher left the room for 15 minutes.

As you can imagine, the footage of the children waiting alone in the room was rather entertaining. Some kids jumped up and ate the first marshmallow as soon as the researcher closed the door. Others wiggled and bounced and scooted in their chairs as they tried to restrain themselves, but eventually gave in to temptation a few minutes later. And finally, a few of the children did manage to wait the entire time.

Published in 1972, this popular study became known as The Marshmallow Experiment, but it wasn’t the treat that made it famous. The interesting part came years later.

As the years rolled on and the children grew up, the researchers conducted follow up studies and tracked each child’s progress in a number of areas. What they found was surprising.

The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures. (You can see the followup studies here, here, and here.)

The researchers followed each child for more than 40 years and over and over again, the group who waited patiently for the second marshmallow succeed in whatever capacity they were measuring. In other words, this series of experiments proved that the ability to delay gratification was critical for success in life.

I guess it's not only one dimensional of power of delayed gratification, but I believe there must be a relation between the ability to exercise self awareness and as scientist would say that there's a part of the brain that ables us to mentally project ourself through time, the default mode network, as I quote Psychedelics: The scientific renaissance of mind-altering drugs by Big Think, 2020:

This was discovered not very long ago by a researcher in England named Robin Carhart-Harris who was dosing people with psilocybin and LSD and then sliding them into an MRI machine, to take an FMRI a functional magnetic resonance image. The expectation I think was that people would see an excitation of many different networks in the brain. You know, that's what the kind of mental fireworks sort of foretold, but he was very surprised to discover that one particular network was down-regulated and that was this default mode network.

So what is that? Well, it's a tightly linked set of structures connecting the prefrontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, to the deeper older centers of emotion and memory. It appears to be involved in things like self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states to others, mental time travel, the ability to project forward in time and back, which is central to creating an identity, right? You don't have an identity without a memory and the so-called autobiographical memory, the function by which we construct the story of who we are by taking the things that happened to us and folding them into that narrative.

and it is true, if you ingest the LSD drug, you will have no sense of self, you will feel that you're always one with everything, so the ability of mental time travel, the ability to project forward in time and back, having an identity, calculating causes of actions in mental time travel, is all an active part of the brain that is able to do mental time travel. What I believe is that enabling a strong sense of mental time travel and also implied consequences of decisions in the future is just saying that that person has high self awareness. This is my assumptions before I do the research to find correlation between delayed gratification and brain changes. Anyway, below is an image of the default mode network:

Now I have read, this article Delay of gratification dissociates cognitive control and valuation brain regions in healthy young adults, Lamichhane, 2022 as I summarize the most important part so that you don't need to read the article yourself (VmPFC is short for ventromedial prefrontal cortex btw):

1. Ramping-up Pattern of vmPFC Activity:

   • The study observed a consistent pattern of increasing activity in the vmPFC as participants waited for the delivery of delayed rewards. This pattern has been reported in prior studies as well.

2. Contrasting vmPFC Activity for Different Rewards:

   • The researchers contrasted vmPFC activity while participants waited for a specific type of reward (referred to as DofG rewards) with other delayed rewards.
   • DofG rewards were associated with an increase in the subjective value of future rewards. This was evident as the reward rate increased after the delivery of DofG rewards due to a reset of the PI (presumably a reference to some reward-related mechanism) reward delay.
   • Other delayed rewards were associated with either a decrease in future reward subjective value (Persev trials) or no change (Rew40NR trials).

3. Dynamic vmPFC Activity:

   • The study found subtle differences in the pattern of vmPFC activity across conditions.
   • On Persev trials, where participants waited for a long-delayed reward that decreased future reward subjective value, the characteristic ramping-up pattern in vmPFC activity was not observed.
   • On Rew40NR trials, where participants waited for a delayed reward with no change in future subjective reward value, the vmPFC showed the ramping-up pattern during the waiting period, but the reward receipt was associated with a rapid decrease in activity.

4. Implications:

   • The findings suggest that the vmPFC encodes subjective reward value in a dynamic, time-varying manner.
   • The vmPFC's representation of subjective reward value is sensitive not only to the delivery of immediate rewards but also to the overall reward context, including the extended time horizon of expected summed future rewards.

In summary, the study contributes to understanding how the vmPFC is involved in the valuation of rewards and highlights its dynamic responsiveness to different reward conditions and contexts.

And for another study Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience:

Situated in the medial portion of the prefrontal cortex, the highly interconnected vmPFC serves as a region for binding together the large-scale networks that subserve emotional processing, decision-making, memory, self-perception, and social cognition in general.

It is fucking amazing to know that apparently, a sense of "self" is inside the fucking brain, it's fact and it's proven and could even be proven by YOU! (ifykim). And what other measure as "intelligence" or "Oh how smart you ace you grades with flying colors" can also be fucking behavioral-biology. It's insane the "truthness" of the experiment and the finding that apparently, "intelligence" is not just measured by some standards of "How well you do math" but also behavioral roots to that person behavior that can be "trained" in such a early age as early as fucking FIVE.

If we extrapolate the experiment that exercising the experiments directly correlated to the activity of vmPFC, doesn't it mean that the exercise of "self awareness" that resides in vmPFC is utmost important? Instead of scolding the child on how bad the grades are if your only metric as the metric, try to shift the metric as understanding his own self awareness. Ask him whether does he even know the purpose of all of it and the consequences of having bad grades, his self awareness is his only own metric of his success.

There's still a catch on the finding, "The vmPFC's representation of subjective reward value is sensitive not only to the delivery of immediate rewards but also to the overall reward context, including the extended time horizon of expected summed future rewards." In which the expected future rewards, when it comes to studying, sometimes is not apparent if the metric is grades, which is placed outside of the self/external. It's hard to be satisfied to know "How much you've learned" if it's lacking in impracticality, it's easier to just see "apparent results" that is shown by mere numbers. But I beg the differ that is wrong to just see the only metric as mere numbers. For every process that the child is learning, it is our duty as parents to give the oversight of the knowledge he is obtaining, how it can be useful, how it can be mentally stimulating to figuring things out rather than just a robotic memorization and see the outcome based on grades. Pay close attention whether he likes what he founds out, what are the "truthness" of the knowledge he has obtained and how in the grand landscape of things, those knowledge will be useful for determining his own future and career. He's doing it for the sake of himself not for the pleasure of others. The duty of the parents is to help heightened the sense of self awareness of the child, in which it is still self-defined by the child.

I explained on Short Term Goals Over Long Term

I believe meaning is a function from the future that is passed down to the present in which enables me to love writing and takes time in writing. Because I know my purpose in writing is to better understand myself, immortalize my thoughts, and to take a trip down memory lane full of meaningful ideas. As how you quote yourself back in 2022: “I write this because I fucking need to. If there’s any regret that I have in my life, is that I wish I couldve write more. Life feels too short sometimes”

I think it's nice to have a general understanding or best assumption towards the future, but the future is just an outline. An outline can be changed as the nature of "best understanding" is everchanging. It is true that the "dream" that is a function from the future is the one that gives some sense of soul in the present. The outcome of having "emotions" and "desires". We don't need to think about the future CONSTANTLY, we only need to think about it couple of times, it serves as an outline, the soul and the emphasis of the flow that exists in the NOW remains in the NOW. The very act of enjoying and happiness that one is doing out of its own conviction.

Now this sense is becoming more true, when one has good ability to mentally project itself to the future, just like the kid in the experiment who is able to delay the present gratification of eating one marshmellow in hope of a second marshmellow in the future, the kid is able to mentally project itself in the future

All of these basically in a way vouched The Pleasure Battle: The Will, Fighting for Limited Pleasure Mechanism in where it says:

The Will is composed of this mental calculation:

The Will = Sum Feelings About Doing Activity + The Perceived Emotions when the Activity is done (Future)

The sum of mental calculation of doing the activity and the result of getting it done. The "Will" can sluggishly justify doing very soul crushing tasks like doing organic chemistry homework that the self really hates, but it really wants to delete the feeling of regret, uneasiness, knowing that it must be handed over to your course tomorrow.

This approach is the same reason why your friends seem bewildered by the fact of seeing you writing every day, almost as if inhuman. But everyone has the same positive feedback loop when it comes to motivation, intent, and 'The Will" to do things.

There's a research that vouched another argument that "Mental Time Travel" is directly linked biologically on the vmPFC, this theory is more famously well known as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis as I qoute The Decision Lab, Somatic Marker Hypothesis:

I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.

Neurologist, Dr. Antonio R. Damasio, in an interview with Scientific American

Key Terms

The somatic marker hypothesis (SMH): A theory suggesting that emotional processes can consciously or unconsciously impact decision-making by creating biomarkers, also known as somatic markers. [src]

Somatic markers: Changes in the body and brain, which together make up an emotion. They are triggered by one’s perception of external or imagined events and can include both perceptible changes (posture, facial expression) and imperceptible changes (endocrine release, heart rate). [1]

Iowa gambling task (IGT): A psychological task, created by Antoine Bechara and his colleagues to study decision-making, which asks participants to pick from advantageous and disadvantageous card decks. [2]

Case studies

Interoceptive ability and trading success

Narayanan Kandasamy and his colleagues wanted to see whether results supporting the SMH would hold up outside the lab. [14] His team conducted a field experiment on a mid-sized hedge fund in the City of London to test whether the perception of somatic markers assisted traders in making more money. The participants all engaged in high-frequency trading, which often required making important and high-risk decisions very quickly. The researchers quantified the heartbeat detection skills of the traders to determine how advanced they are in perceiving their own physiological signals. Compared to their non-trading controls, traders exhibited a better ability to perceive their own heartbeat. Furthermore, the ability to perceive somatic markers predicted the profitability of the traders and the amount of time they survived in the financial markets. These results provide some initial support for the SMH outside of the lab and can explain why traders often attribute successful decisions to a gut feeling.

Sources

[1] Bechara, A., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). The somatic marker hypothesis: A neural theory of economic decision. Games and Economic Behavior, 52(2), 336–372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2004.06.010

[2] Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50(1-3), 7–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3

[14] Kandasamy, N., Garfinkel, S. N., Page, L., Hardy, B., Critchley, H. D., Gurnell, M., & Coates, J. M. (2016). Interoceptive Ability Predicts Survival on a London Trading Floor. Scientific Reports, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32986

So it's amazing. The brain perceived emotion can impact decision making consciously or unconsciously shown outwardly biologically as somatic markers.

So if we were to come back to the "Will" equation

The Will = Sum Feelings About Doing the Activity + The Perceived Future Emotions when the Activity is done

Somatic Marker Hypothesis just elevates the "Perceived Future Emotions", the self is more aware of the mental time travel that it can do and the emotions embedded with it materializes as the current "Will". In which these emotions will give rise to what the Child can perceive as "Fun and engaging", obviously video games is greatly heightened on the first part of the equation of "Sum Feelings about doing the activity", this is why studying and playing is on a constant battle of attention, but with greater vmPFC strength and through reinforcement of self awareness why studying is important not only for the parent favor but also for the sake of the child that it understands, it greatly heightens the child biological brain. It lets the child have more autonomous decision and learn from his mistakes and let him do his own time management, where the metric is not his grades but rather his own self awareness and his ability to calculate cost benefit of managing his own time. Some parents would rather brute force the approach into micro managing the child's time schedule and see grades as a function of "forcing more studying hours = good grades", while completely diminishing the child's feeling about studying, prolonged exposure could give the child unnecesarry stress. Rather, accompany the child, make sure he has self awareness in the condition of making decisions and grow his vmPFC little by little, the stanford marshmellow expirment shows that it can be done as early as a 5 year old child, grow his vmPFC.

Growing vmPFC is not only limited to a child behavior but also until adulthood and probably forever in life. At any point, the child would learn by exposed to making mistakes and learn from it. If vmPFC is distilled by its role for emotional processing, self-perception, memory, and decision making. The only metric would be the child's vmPFC that shows by his reasoning and justification of choosing activities and his "Will" to do things that he has gone through the "emotional processing" part by himself rather to be dictated everytime by his parents. Although still process is still need to be encouraged by the parents.

And until the child is happily studying. Studying out of his own will because he chooses to not because it is his obligation to study, he has become both the marble and the sculptor. The sculptor is no longer other people rather his own self, as he founds joy and excitement in carving himself, he doesn't see the process of studying as something soul crushing rather it was always his decision to do as he knows the importance of it. The attention towards his will to study is directly proportional to his very own emotional affect towards studying.