The Motivated Brain: Improving Student Attention, Engagement, and Perseverance

What really motivates students to learn? What gets them interested—and keeps them interested—in pursuing knowledge and understanding? Recent neuroscientific findings have uncovered the source of our motivation to learn, or as neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp terms it, the drive to seek. Seeking is what gets us out of bed in the morning, the engine that powers our actions, and the need that manifests as curiosity.

Informed by new findings on the nature of the brain's seeking system, internationa...