The Science of Motivation: Drive, Curiosity and Your Brain
Why do some goals light you up while others die the moment you write them down? Why does a robot programmed to "want" things behave nothing like a human who actually does? Is there, in-fact, a mathematical law behind curiosity?
At our next Growth Lab Live, we're sitting down with one of Barcelona's leading computational neuroscientists to break open the science of motivation in a way that's genuinely useful.
About the talk
We throw the word "motivation" around constantly but almost nobody stops to ask what it actually is. Is it a drive? A goal? A feeling? Turns out, those are very different things, and understanding the difference changes how you approach pretty much everything.
Dr. Moreno-Bote will walk us through the neuroscience and the surprisingly elegant logic underneath it, keeping the maths friendly and the takeaways sharp.
On the night we'll cover:
The real difference between drives, goals and intrinsic motivation, and why conflating them holds you back
The paradoxes hiding inside how we make decisions and what they reveal about how motivation actually works
A beginner-friendly look at the mathematics of curiosity (yes, it exists, no, you don't need a calculator)
Can a robot be genuinely curious? AI, Asimov's Robot Laws and what the answer means for us
About the speaker
Rubén Moreno-Bote is a Full Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and director of the Theoretical and Cognitive Neuroscience Group at the Center for Brain and Cognition. His lab works at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, using physics, reinforcement learning and brain science to model how intelligent behaviour emerges. His recent research, published in Nature Communications, centres on what he calls the Maximum Occupancy Principle: a framework explaining how complex, exploratory behaviour grows out of intrinsic motivation. In short, he studies why curious, driven people act the way they do, and what the rest of us can take from that.
Agenda:
1915h - Doors open
1930h - Talk starts
2030h - Q&A
2100h - Drinks & Networking (on the terrace)
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