Neuropsychology of Poker (4) - Motivation and Learning
Introduction
In this article
- What mechanisms the learning process is subject to
- How and by what your motivation is being influenced
- Why continuous improvement is more important than short term goals
“Life is full of obstacle illusions”. Grant Frazier was probably not directly referring to your path through poker when he first produced these words. Nevertheless, they can apply to you. In fact, they are extremely relevant to your goals as a poker player. Your route to success and riches as a poker player is rife with emotional difficulties and unpredictability, as most worthwhile ventures are.
Whatever you hope to achieve as a poker player, you most certainly can. Whenever the future is conjured up in your mind, the destination can seem blurry and potentially much too difficult to attain. Refine your perception and focus and start drawing a clearer line to your goals both practically and conceptually. What you learn will motivate, and with some applied energy… okay a lot of applied energy, your goals will become a reality.
The learning process
Where do we begin? Your brain learns in a variety of ways. Learning itself is actually rather difficult to define physiologically, as it encompasses many different processes working together. As you know by now, the brain’s processes do not operate in a mutually exclusive fashion. Mechanisms operate together and form cognition and behaviour that we then define. There are a couple of specific mechanisms involved in the learning process that will be very relevant to your poker. The first involves what I will now hail as the ‘neurotransmitter of poker’, Dopamine.
You may recall from part 3 that a subcortical region called the basal ganglia is heavily involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain. Certain processes in this region play a very important role in poker learning, using this neurotransmitter. Dopamine levels are influenced by how receptive your brain is to rewards. This 3-step learning procedure begins when you encounter a stimulus, which then elicits a response from you, and ends with the reward you receive from that response. A diagram might help clarify this:
Stimulus -> Response -> Reward = Influence on Dopamine levels
The nature of the Dopamine influence depends on the reward. Dopamine increases when you receive an unexpectedly high outcome, and decreases with an unexpectedly low one. The closer the outcome is to what was expected, the weaker the influence on your Dopamine levels: simple enough and also highly relevant to your poker life.
Let’s look at an example. Say you are starting out in poker (although in reality these principles apply to all poker players as there is always more learning to be done) and are just starting to learn how to play. Which plays are correct and which are merely unprofitable in certain situations is still largely a mystery to you.
Your brain is ready to receive knowledge. This of course is a very positive state to be in. Like a newborn learning about the world though, what is learned at this stage is extremely important, as it can form the basis for a lot of cognition and behaviour later on.
So, let us take a hypothetical poker player who has just started learning and assume they did not begin their poker-playing career studying but rather playing. After all, studying is boring and playing is fun. They are likely to have a basic understanding of preflop principles and some general plays that are profitable postflop, but beyond that the tools that form improvised decision-making at the tables are still very dull.
When this player makes a play and reaps a large reward unexpectedly (most results should be unexpected at this point as the player’s expectations of ranges are not based on much actual information), then dopamine levels rise and the basal ganglia begins a process of establishing learned principles based on the response. If the play is one that can be deemed objectively profitable and thus a good play, this is a very positive outcome. However if the play was in reality an unprofitable, bad play, then this initial learning process causes a lot of damage to the player’s future potential.
As the player learns in this way, by playing and allowing their brain to respond to the results, expectations are formed based on these outcomes. Instead, what a new player should be doing, in fact, what any player should be doing, is of course to form expectations based on the reality of what constitutes profitable play. This is why it is extremely important for players just starting to spend more time studying than playing and then increase the amount of playing-time and slowly decrease the amount of study-time.
That’s not to say that your initial learning will create a boom or bust scenario for your future poker potential.
Synaptic connections form and strengthen but can weaken as well. In other words, what you learn can be un-learned or re-learned. However, what is important here is that the initial forming of expectations in this learning process will form strong synaptic bonds which can prove difficult to change later on. Considering you’re working on the long-term outlook anyway, why not improve that reality right away?
With an activity like online poker, which can very quickly have you relying on automatic processes and decision-making, it can be very detrimental if you begin learning the wrong way. This forms yet another positive aspect of playing a fewer number of tables and not auto-piloting. The more automated your play, the more you will rely on the ingrained expectations, some of which can be faulty. When playing fewer tables you have more potential to think through what is learned for the current play, as well as future re-routing of synapses.
One attribute of fish that makes them fish is their unwillingness to learn the correct plays. Many regulars assume fish are simply dysfunctional minds, ‘dumber’ humans who do not know how to play poker because they are not clever enough. This might be true for some of them. However, put more accurately, fish are less interested in learning correct plays, whether because of their interest in gambling or their disinterest in the value of the stakes. Whatever the reason, you might have experienced fish, generally ones you see often, that adapt to the state of the games they play and become more difficult to play against. That is not to say they stop being profitable to play against, they still have huge leaks, but they learn to adapt to the way regulars play and can often make life difficult / potentially unprofitable for you if you do not re-adjust.
A successful, professional poker player will do work off the tables, as well as forming new expectations in this re-learning and adaptation phase of their career. A fish will continue to simply form the expectations based on the play itself, increasing their potential to form shaky conclusions in nature’s expectation pendulum.
Motivation
In an earlier article, we saw how a subcortical region called the hippocampus plays an important role in memory. It also is highly involved in the learning process. Hippocampus and cortex learning does not need a reward to establish the memory for learning. All that is needed is the stimulus itself. When you study poker, you are establishing hippocampal learning mechanisms, and these can better guide and influence the dopamine learning you encounter while at the tables. This type of learning is essentially forming a long-term and accurate (assuming the study material and conclusions are correct) memory guide for you.
What does all of this have to do with motivation? You are motivated by reward. Both what you stand to gain or lose can motivate your behaviour. How you learn, what you learn and how you process that information can influence your perception of potential reward and your motivation.
To give a quick example, suppose a new poker player begins his path by playing a lot and studying little. The conclusions formed are more likely to lead to consistent mistakes in the long-term and will quickly become a de-motivating force. If a new poker player studies a lot and plays little, even if they perform poorly while playing, they are more likely to perform positively in the future because they are more likely to play consistently well and confidently in the long-term.
There are other benefits to focusing on your studies and progress instead of pushing for quick results. You already read that unanticipated rewards can help the learning process. As it turns out, they can also boost your motivation. It is widely documented that as your anticipation of a result increases, your motivation decreases.
Looking at the physiology again, this seems rather obvious. The closer your expectations are to the actual results, the less dopamine is released. As you know from last time, the less dopamine is released, the less frontal lobe activity and physical energy there is. Frontal lobes help you envision the future and motivate yourself through rational thinking and planning. Thus, your anticipation of reward influences your motivation.
Ultimately, we all play poker for the money. Whether it is the main driving force behind your output or reason number 3 or 7, it is there as a motivating factor. Generally speaking, a supreme desire for money has the potential of decreasing your motivation. It is a widely held belief that, in general, people subconsciously desire their efforts to be intrinsically motivated. This means you feel more motivation if the desire comes from within, as opposed to from the outside world. Having a genuine interest in something means you are more motivated to make progress. Of course, this seems simple enough.
The problem arises when we consider another supported reality. It seems that external compensation can undermine intrinsic motivation as it becomes more anticipated. You may have seen stories on television or heard anecdotes of gifted and passionate individuals losing interest or motivation for their craft as their rewards became more anticipated. This phenomenon is not a binary force; the strength of the influence is a matter of degree and depends on the person and other factors. There are some important principles you should take from these conclusions though. The more genuine your interest, the more motivated you will remain. The more focus you place on the extrinsic reward and the more anticipated it becomes, the more your motivation is likely to decrease.
This seems slightly contradictory. As you start to make a lot of money in poker, it will surely motivate you to continue. This high can be short-lived and it takes a lot of discipline, among other things, to continue on the path of working as much as you should. When your behaviour starts to seem more externally controlled, you start to experience the over-justification effect. When you begin to reap external rewards for things you previously enjoyed anyway, your intrinsic motivation lowers and the activity starts to feel more externally controlled. This does not necessarily mean that your motivation will decrease on the whole, but it can definitely start to undermine your interest in the activity.
Another example of this interplay is the insufficient justification effect. This states that the smallest incentive capable of producing the output is the most successful motivator. Basically, motivation has the best chance of sticking around and remaining genuine if the reward is neither too small nor too large, but just right. This can really get in the way of your goal as a poker player. After all, you want the highest score at the highest stakes, which means the highest earnings. You can overcome this psychological inconsistency between your brain and your poker-play by examining why this phenomenon occurs.
When you are forced to hold two inconsistent thoughts in your head, tension is created which can be alleviated by altering your perception, behaviour or both. This is called cognitive dissonance and is caused by the insufficient justification effect. When the reward is not high enough, your brain has to alter its perception of why it is performing the action. Instead of being externally motivated, which it cannot be as the external reward is not sufficient, your brain then convinces itself the reasons are internal. An activity that is otherwise not enjoyed can be overcome with motivation through this principle. Your brain is very good at adapting and it will always find a way.
So how do you use this information to motivate yourself? To recap, extrinsic motivation is not as strong as intrinsic. When your behaviour seems controlled by external forces, in this case money, you will be less intrinsically motivated. You can remain motivated by the money but it will not be as strong a motivation, especially if you begin to accumulate more money than you need.
As a digression, one way your brain tries to overcome this last point is by having you spend the money so that you are motivated to make more. When the money becomes the prime motivator, there can be an influence even more negative than lowered intrinsic motivation, i.e. that money can become the tool which completely influences your behaviour. Anyway, one way to mitigate the discrepancy between the insufficient justification effect and wanting to maximize profits, is to internalize the motivation by altering your focus.
Studies have shown that when subjects are motivated by rewards praising progress instead of output, the motivation increases. Put specifically: intrinsic motivation grows. Subjects who were given rewards for their output as indications of their progress, such as learning that they are getting better and more skilled at the activity, were more motivated to continue. This is yet another reason why learning and improving is more important than the line in your results graph. Progress as an end in its own right should be your main focus. If you do this, not only will the money follow, but your motivation will remain and your output will be more consistent.
Conclusion
You play poker to make money, this is a comprehensible reality. You also play for the challenge, for the mental exercise, and the competition. The more you study and the more you work on your game, the greater the chances of improving in all of these areas. If you focus on the money alone, good things can happen. However, you might just have an easier and more successful time if you remove money as the primary objective. The Japanese have an important word called ‘kaizen’, meaning continuous improvement. When was the last time you thought about improving simply for the sake of it?
