People routinely choose to climb mountains or finish marathons, yet also avoid doing the dishes or filling out tax forms—the brain treats effort as both a cost to dodge and a reward to seek, and no one knows how it switches between the two. This paradox is the core problem. Decades of research show that humans follow a "law of least effort," avoiding hard work when possible. Yet daily life is full of examples where people voluntarily pursue difficult tasks. Understanding how the brain flips between these modes could explain why motivation collapses in conditions like depression, apathy, or Parkinson's disease—where even simple actions feel impossibly costly. EffDox will combine brain imaging techniques never before used together on motivation: fusing fMRI and MEG in healthy volunteers, plus direct brain recordings from Parkinson's patients undergoing deep brain stimulation. The goal is a computational model that predicts when and why someone shifts from effort-avoidance to effort-seeking. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a therapy or app next year. But a clear neural and computational framework of effort could eventually guide treatments for motivational disorders, or help design environments—schools, workplaces, public policy—that nudge people toward sustained effort on collective challenges like climate change.
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Exerting effort is essential for a successful life. From training for a marathon, to completing a project before work deadlines, meeting our goals requires us to repeatedly choose to undertake effortful acts. Pathological reductions in such goal-directed motivation characterise some of the most common and debilitating symptoms in psychiatry and neurology. Moreover, solving humanities greatest challenges (e.g. climate change) will require billions of people to exert more effort than they typically do. Yet, we have a limited understanding of the biggest challenge to research on motivation: the effort paradox. On one hand, decades of research shows that people conform to a law of least effort, avoiding the cost of effort. On the other hand, at school, work or in our hobbies, people break that law daily, we pursue and seek highly effortful acts when easier options are available. How does the brain concurrently process effort as a cost to avoid, but a benefit to seek? EffDox will deliver a paradigm shift in our understanding of the cognitive, computational and neural basis of motivation to address this paradox. It will provide novel paradigms and computational models to understand the cognitive processes and individual differences that underlie how people switch from avoiding effort to seeking it. A suite of neuroscience tools, never previously combined to examine motivation, will offer a new understanding and test specific hypotheses about the neural dynamics underlying effort. This will include multivariate techniques to 'fuse' together functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy people; simultaneous deep brain stimulation, cortical intracranial and subcortical recordings, in unique samples of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, and testing links between dopamine, motivation and neural signals with wearable MEG. These conceptual, methodological and analytical innovations will reveal a new understanding of the effort paradox.
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