Word count: < 1000

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 passive baseline motivation acting to recruit the behaviour of others. This passive state fulfils its primary function in infancy.

A mechanical perspective invites a distinction between infant and adult motivation: the infant’s motivation is passive, referencing not its own action but that of the carer. 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.

A plausible evolutionary basis notes, firstly, that stimulus-response strategies such as the looming response operate within a limited spatial range. However, although more computationally demanding, a subsequent adaptation, a learning-based 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 was, thus, an optimal 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 expect, in agent-based modelling, the likelihood of 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 – the ongoing processing of perception against time – being a plausible precursor of consciousness – the processing of time is absent only in syncope and anaesthesia.

As a human control variable, I propose that a subsequent adaptation produced vectorisation and bi-stability, and that this is likely to have arisen because of altriciality. For a peer-bonding species with altricial offspring, the care of altricial juveniles would be sub-optimal were it to rely upon the computationally costly and unreliable strategy of holding their needs in memory. Vectorisation thus emerges as an adaptive solution: a hormonally-triggered state change to a parenthood-caring baseline motivational state prioritising the needs of offspring by default, and with the complement of this ‘active’ state, being the ‘passive’ baseline state of the infant.

Preparatory to parenthood, romantic love is therefore posited as 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 profoundly transformative phenomenology associated with ‘falling in love’.

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 the opposing vectors. However, bi-stability is likely a hypothalamic function resisting the condition of zero baseline motivation that might otherwise obtain as a result of the summed output of two equal and opposite vectors. Near-zero levels may offer a mechanistic account of chronic depression. On the other hand, substantial inequality manifests as an exceptional level of drive and focus. Such exceptional levels of baseline motivation underscore ‘the problem of induction’ since, despite the familiarity of such personalities in the ‘real’ world, they exist almost wholly outwith the populations typically available to the laboratory.

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, particularly so in consideration of the predominance of the highly motivated narcissistic personality in politics and the corporate world. If the theory is valid, the drive to pursue excessive wealth and power can be explained not only in terms of compensatory needs but also, at a more fundamental level, in terms of the persistence in the adult personality of substantial infantile passive baseline motivation.

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 thalamocortical dopaminergic 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. I feel I should also suggest a somewhat plausible mechanism for vectorisation. One such might be found in the visual system, whereby entrainment has been proposed to facilitate attention, with a higher frequency of entrainment for the attended stimulus outcompeting that of alternative stimuli.

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.