The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

The episode is about setting goals, assessing progress toward them and executing them. It sets itself apart from the large body of goal-setting advice in books and online, which it describes as full of programs and acronyms that "can be a little bit overwhelming." Its central claim is neuroscientific: the brain does not have hundreds, dozens or even several separate circuits for pursuing goals. It has one. That circuit spans many brain areas, but the same circuit handles every goal, and it rests on basic neurochemical mechanisms that are already understood.

The plan is to explain that neuroscience, connect it briefly to the psychology literature, and then lay out four specific protocols for goal setting, goal assessment and goal execution. These are meant to be used on an ongoing basis "regardless of what your personal goals happen to be." The episode argues that the public has heard a lot about the psychology of goals but comparatively little about their neuroscience.

Before the main topic, the episode presents a finding about learning. It defines neuroplasticity as the brain's ability to change in response to experience, and says it underlies every kind of learning: language, music, math or physical skills. All of these involve reorganizing connections in the brain, spinal cord and body. The counterintuitive point is that errors help. Making a mistake is frustrating, but that frustration "cues up particular brain areas to be more alert." On later attempts, the learner has more focus and a higher probability of learning the skill.

The episode is careful to say that errors are not a goal in themselves. They are an entry point for making the brain more plastic, and the window for better learning is "the immediate seconds and minutes" after an error. The logic is put as a question:

why would the brain change at all if it's performing everything perfectly?

That raises a practical question: how often should a learner fail, or in other words, how hard should a task be? The answer comes from a paper in Nature Communications, with Jonathan Cohen as last author, titled "The eighty five percent rule for optimal learning." As described in the episode, the paper shows that difficulty should be set so the learner succeeds about 85% of the time and makes errors about 15% of the time.

The finding is set against two common pieces of advice. One is to set lofty goals, but not so lofty that no progress happens. The other is to start very small and incremental, only attempting what you know you can do, so that success builds self-esteem layer by layer. The episode's verdict: "it turns out that neither is true." Its reading of the paper is to make tasks "pretty hard, but not so hard that you're failing every attempt or even half of the attempts."

Qualifications the episode attaches to the rule: - The figure is approximate. No protocol for sport, language, math or anything else can produce exactly 15% errors. - For teaching, a failure rate near 20% is "probably okay." If students fail about half the time, the material is probably too difficult for them at that point. - Outside factors affect error rates, such as whether the student slept well, or whether the teacher slept well and is giving clear instructions. - With those caveats, the "15% rule" is offered as a good target for both teachers and learners.

Next, the episode points out that setting and pursuing goals is not uniquely human. A honeybee collects honey and brings it back to the hive. A herbivore forages for plants and, at some point, has to find a mate and perhaps raise young, depending on the species. A predator has to hunt, kill and eat without getting injured. The episode stresses this shared process because it argues that "there is one basic system" by which all animals, including humans, set and try to achieve goals.

What sets humans apart is the range of timescales. Humans can direct their minds toward immediate goals, medium-term goals lasting a week, a month or a year, and very long-term goals that take a decade or a lifetime. The episode admits a limit here: we do not have access to other animals' mindsets, thinking or emotions. What is known is that brain areas present in both animals and humans orient thinking and action toward goals.

Humans are also described as unusually good at juggling many goals at once: fitness, friendships and romantic relationships, schooling or other learning, and business or financial goals. This creates one of the main challenges in goal pursuit, because goals interact. Spending 100% of your time on one goal may work for that goal, but others slip. If you focus only on business, "often your health will suffer"; if you focus only on health, other things suffer. The episode calls these "interleaving goals" and proposes managing them through the mechanisms all forms of goal seeking share.

The episode defines a neural circuit as a set of brain areas that, when active in a particular sequence, produce a particular behavior or perception. For example, happiness does not come from a single "happy brain area." It involves many areas active together, to different degrees. The analogy is a piano: no single key represents a song, but each key may be needed. In the same way, one brain area can be necessary but not sufficient for an experience or behavior. Goal seeking of any kind uses a common set of these circuits.

Listeners are told they do not need to memorize the names, only to grasp the logic. The first region is the amygdala, usually associated with fear. The episode explains its role this way: much goal-directed behavior is about avoiding punishments such as embarrassment or financial ruin. Some anxiety or fear is therefore "built in to the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation to pursue goals."

The second is the ventral striatum, part of the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are described as having two circuits. A "Go" circuit starts actions; the example is deciding to get up tomorrow and run five miles first thing in the morning, which is flagged as just an example. A "No-Go" circuit prevents actions, such as declining a second or third cookie. In that example, the Go circuit is also what leads to eating something else instead.

The last two regions are in the cortex. The lateral prefrontal cortex handles executive function: planning, thinking across different timescales, and relating current actions to what we may want tomorrow or later. The orbital frontal cortex has many functions. One key function is blending emotion with our current progress and comparing that feeling to how we expect to feel when closer to a goal.

The episode's simplified summary of the circuit: - Amygdala: anxiety and fear. - Basal ganglia: action and inaction (Go and No-Go). - Lateral prefrontal cortex: planning and thinking across timescales. - Orbital frontal cortex: emotion, comparing how we feel now with how we expect to feel on reaching a goal.

The point the episode underlines most is that this circuit does not depend on what the goal is. Whether someone is building a billion-dollar company that will go public, planning a crafts day at home, or choosing a movie, setting goals, seeking them and assessing progress "all involve the exact same neural circuits."

The episode reduces the circuit's work to two functions. The first is assessing value: is something worth pursuing? The second is action: which actions to take or avoid, given the goal's value at a given moment. The episode repeats this second point and says value information will come up again and again, because one neuromodulator system governs goal setting, goal assessment and goal pursuit: dopamine.

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