Disclaimer: This is not a literature review or a research post but a journal-like entry on a concept I found intriguing. For a more comprehensive review, listen to the Huberman Podcast on Willpower & Tenacity or read Lisa Feldman Barrett's paper.

It's very difficult to find local hubs in the brain that have something similar to a one-to-one region-to-function mapping. Brain regions like the amygdala were thought to be responsible for regulating fear and adverse emotions, but it turns out they are also responsible for a wide range of emotions and reward-related behaviors. Other brain regions, once thought to do one thing, often turn out to have limited understanding because the brain is a very complex, dynamic system.

All this is to say that it was very surprising when I heard and read about the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (aMCC). It is entirely possible that neuroscientists and surgeons have limited data about this region and will find in the future that it is responsible for other functions too. But as far as I know, the evidence points to the fact that the aMCC is responsible for the following:

• Reward calculations and action planning, including resource allocation in the brain (allostasis) and asking "Is this worth doing?"
• The sense of "I will do it" or "I won't do it"
• Making effort feel good (because of its links to and from testosterone-generating endocrine glands)

These functions and studies involving various methodologies (ablation, fMRI, structural volume, diffusion tensor imaging) point to the fact that the aMCC is probably the hub for tenacity and willpower in humans. It's also plastic, meaning it grows with usage and shrinks with disuse.

This is nothing new, and I believe people knew this intuitively all along. The neuroscientific literature just provided more details on the mechanisms. From personal experience, I found it persuasive that doing what you don't want to do, but know to be right, has led to the most productive changes in life, although there is no desire to do so at the moment of taking action (aka delayed gratification). The roles of parents, teachers, elders, and religious figures were largely to enforce this when there wasn't "enough will" to do something good for oneself or the collective good. Parents, teachers, and leaders instill values that heavily weight the collective good, making altruism feel more rewarding. As this post argues, fully internalizing this as adults is crucial for autonomous prosocial behavior. Allocating resources to perform tasks that won't provide an immediate reward was never pleasant for mammals, so perhaps it was outsourced to others with more authority. As adults, we are asked to perform this more autonomously to become valuable, cooperative citizens.

Knowing this doesn't make it easier. Incentives and commitment devices are often external and separate from internal motivation. However, this strategy is internal. One approach I employ when I need to reach a goal is to identify micro-friction tasks and do them until they no longer generate friction. Then I identify other micro-friction tasks until they are no longer effortful. Much like physical exercise, our body finds ways to optimize this or put it on autopilot in the form of habit. Have you ever come to like learning something you initially had to learn? Obviously, there are tasks that will never become frictionless (like waking up in the morning, doing household chores, or exercising with progressive overload), but this is one framework for self-improvement.

However, one glaring hole in this logic of identifying micro-friction is that there are tasks you have to do and don't want to do, but they aren't helping anyone. This could be by someone else's choice or because people are on autopilot. At the risk of sounding informal, I call these unnutritious macro-friction tasks. These are the tasks that generate a lot of friction with no good reason to do them. Stop them or find ways to minimize them.

Fig 1. A very, very simplified matrix for identifying a task's friction made with gpt-4. Feel free to try it out for yourself. Unnutritious macro-friction tasks are [no, yes, no]. I think having at least two "yes" answers is a pretty good sign to do the task, but there are edge cases since it's very subjective. Here, have to do means you are either "incentivized / disincentivized to do" and good for you or others is consequentialist. 

How do you utilize the micro-frictions in your life and what are the macro-frictions which you wish to minimize? What do you have to cut out?