The central concept is the presence in the normal personality of both active and passive forms of baseline motivation – a regulatory variable that modulates the gain of instrumental motivation – with this passive state fulfilling its primary function in infancy.

A mechanical perspective invites a distinction between infant and adult baseline motivation. Although the infant is capable of instrumental action, its baseline motivational state is proposed to situate it predominantly as the object rather than the subject of action: passive baseline motivation references and recruits the action of the carer rather than the infant’s own action. Persistence in adulthood of predominantly passive baseline motivation is hypothesised to be implicated in motivationally infant-like behaviours and traits such as narcissism, manipulation and a sense of entitlement to have one’s needs served by others, all of which are healthy and indeed essential in the infant personality.

It is further proposed that baseline motivation may be evolutionarily earlier than instrumental motivation. A plausible evolutionary basis notes that stimulus-response strategies such as the looming response operate within a limited spatial range. However, although more computationally demanding, a subsequent adaptation, an anticipatory response processing, for instance, predator approach speed, introduced the assessment of threat imminence, i.e., assessment of the temporal proximity of more distant threats. Consequently, the nascent scalar variable functionally represented the ‘urgency’ of action. Its computation required an ongoing readiness to assess the imminence of potential threat, i.e., ‘vigilance’, defined here as the ongoing processing of a datastream of perception against time. The variable could thereby have provided an efficient moderator of energy released to locomotion, allowing the animal to respond dynamically and with metabolic efficiency to the varying urgency of an unpredictable environment.

Although this facility is conserved in modern vertebrates, the historic adaptation itself does not seem to have been recognised. However, I would predict, in agent-based modelling, its success over spatial-proximity threat responses to be demonstrable in terms both of conservation of energy and early escape outcomes. This account proposes that ‘urgency’ originated as an evolutionarily early control mechanism, with its input being the ongoing processing of perception against time.

As a human control variable, I propose that a subsequent adaptation took the form of vectorisation, and hypothesise that this may have arisen in response to the motivational demands of altriciality. For a pair-bonding species with altricial offspring, effective care requires the welfare of dependent juveniles to retain motivational priority across extended periods, even in their absence (e.g., during foraging). Vectorisation is proposed as an adaptive solution: a hormonally triggered state change to a parenthood-caring baseline motivational state in which the welfare of offspring is prioritised by default, thereby reducing the need for repeated re-evaluation of priority. The complement of this ‘active’ state is the ‘passive’ baseline state of the infant.

Preparatory to parenthood, romantic love may represent a state change from passive to active, i.e., a commitment to the welfare of the mate – not exactly poetic but I believe that’s the essence of it. However much affection we might feel for them, we love our spouse and our children to the extent that we are committed to their welfare. Naturally, we romanticise love, but it is not adequately explained by attachment theory; it is rather a baseline motivational state change, hence the associated profoundly transformative phenomenology.

If the theory is valid, the level of baseline motivation is determined by the summed output of active and passive urgency. The moderately low levels of baseline motivation typical of the normal personality derive from the somewhat comparable magnitudes of opposing vectors. At near-zero net levels, markedly reduced baseline motivation might be expected to manifest as pathological lethargy. On the other hand, substantial inequality between active and passive urgency would manifest as an abnormal level of drive and focus.

Such exceptional levels of baseline motivation raise a significant problem of generalisability: despite the familiarity of highly motivated personalities in the ‘real’ world, they are likely to be poorly represented in the populations typically available to the laboratory. Consequently, theories derived mainly from individuals occupying the middle of the motivational range may fail to reveal the vectorised nature of baseline motivation, which becomes apparent only when either active or passive motivation substantially predominates. This may help explain why the domain remains absent from current psychological theory despite the societally consequential effects of unusually high baseline motivation.

I submit, therefore, that baseline motivation, while seemingly obscure and inconsequential in the normal personality, is in fact a non-trivial component of mental function. Since attention, information-seeking and learning are themselves motivated behaviours, variation in baseline motivation may influence not only what an individual does, but what is attended to, learned and ultimately understood. This may be particularly consequential if atypically high passive motivation and narcissistic traits contribute to the pursuit of wealth and power. Within the present account, such traits are hypothesised to arise, at least in part, from the persistence into adulthood of substantial passive baseline motivation whose primary adaptive function lies in infancy.

Jimmy

It is probably inappropriate at UG level to suggest a neurological mechanism that might mediate baseline motivation, hence my separating this paragraph from the theory. However, a dopaminergically modulated thalamocortical system may offer a plausible mechanism. The thalamus is anatomically and functionally well-placed to process both perception and time. It is feasible candidate anatomy, given the thalamus’s early access to the visual datastream, together with the potential of oscillatory thalamocortical neurons for encoding urgency, i.e., the processing of the visual stream against time. With regard to vectorisation, a possible analogue may be found in visual attention where frequency-tagging studies suggest that attended inputs can be selectively amplified, and oscillatory entrainment may help temporally prioritise them relative to competing inputs. This does not provide a direct mechanism for vectorisation, but it illustrates a plausible neural principle by which competing representations may be dynamically weighted.

I should also mention that I’ve cut this down from an original more loosely written 13,000-word document. Available at www.urgency.org.uk, it makes the case for research (hopefully) more cogently and persuasively, and sets the arguments squarely in their wider socio-political context.