Essentials: How to Set & Achieve Goals

This Essentials episode opens with a claim that frames everything after it: whatever the goal is, pursuing it draws on a common set of neural circuits. The host, who introduces himself as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, starts with a region people may not expect, the amygdala. It is usually linked to fear, but he argues that much goal-directed behavior is about avoiding punishments such as embarrassment or financial ruin. So some anxiety or fear is "actually built in to the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation to pursue goals."

The second region is the ventral striatum, part of the basal ganglia. The episode describes the basal ganglia simply as a circuit for "go," starting an action, and "no go," holding one back. The go example is a plan to get up and run five miles in the morning; the no-go example is passing on a second or third cookie, while the go circuit handles eating something else instead.

The last two regions are in the cortex. The lateral prefrontal cortex supports executive function: planning and thinking across time scales, including what we might want tomorrow and how current actions relate to the future. The orbitofrontal cortex, among many functions, combines emotion with our current progress and compares that feeling with how we expect to feel closer to the goal.

The episode's own shorthand for the four components: - Amygdala: anxiety and fear. - Basal ganglia: action and inaction (go and no go). - Lateral prefrontal cortex: planning and thinking across time scales. - Orbitofrontal cortex: where we sit emotionally now compared with where we expect to be when we reach a goal.

The host boils the work of these circuits down to two functions. One is value: judging whether something is worth pursuing. The other is action: deciding which actions to take and which to avoid, given the goal's value at that moment. He stresses that value information is central because one neuromodulator system governs goal setting, assessment and pursuit.

Dopamine is the common currency by which we assess our progress toward particular things of particular value.

He then lays out the process in a few steps: identify a specific thing to attain, assess whether you are making progress, and carry out the goal. The four-region circuit splits this into assessing value (are things going well or poorly, and can you judge that accurately) and taking action (do more of this, less of that). Listeners are asked to keep their own goals in mind so they can later plug them into protocols that the host believes will help them reach goals faster and with less effort. That belief is stated as his expectation, not as a measured result.