The Psychology of Motivation | Dr. Masud Husain

Masud Husain (0:00)

I'm a clinical neurologist about 15 years ago. I get this letter which says, I've got this young man in his 30s. He's been a highly productive person, but all of that has gone. He hasn't been looking after himself. He hasn't been taking a shower. Turns out he got fired from his job because he lost motivation.

Michael Gervais (0:18)

This is terrifying.

Masud Husain (0:19)

It is terrifying, and he wasn't depressed. He had this condition we call pathological apathy. And the reason he had it is that he suffered two tiny little strokes in the basal ganglia.

Michael Gervais (0:31)

Oxford neuroscientist, neurologist, Professor Masud Husain, author of Our Brains, Our Selves, the winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, editor-in-chief of Brain, one of the most respected journals in neurology. Why ought the person right now pay attention to your finding?

Masud Husain (0:50)

That circuit we found in David that links the basal ganglia to the frontal lobes, which, when damaged, leads to loss of motivation, apathy. That same very circuit is the one that's been identified as the circuit that's hijacked by almost every drug of addiction, whether it's nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines. They work through this system. So we thought, why don't we try a drug that affects the dopamine system? We started him on that and slowly increased it. David came back to see us three months later, and I didn't recognize him.

Michael Gervais (1:28)

This is incredible.

Masud Husain (1:29)

Exactly. But the really interesting thing in the results we got was that...

Michael Gervais (1:41)

I'm so excited to sit with you, and I'll tell you why. Neuroscience, consciousness, performance, a better way of living by being more connected. You've studied this deeply, and you've got some real research in science and lived experience on how the intersection of those variables work. So, first and foremost, thank you for being here.

Masud Husain (2:03)

Thank you for inviting me.

Michael Gervais (2:04)

Secondly, how do you describe your work?

Masud Husain (2:08)

Well, I do several kinds of work. Probably first and foremost, I'm a neuroscience researcher, and I work in humans, and I work on how humans think, cognitive processes, and how those thinking processes might go awry because of brain diseases. I'm a neurologist, that's what I study. Secondly, I'm also a clinical neurologist, so, you know, I look after patients, so I have to interact with people in a way which I think requires certain skills to, first of all, extract information that you need that might be helpful in understanding what's going wrong with somebody, and also thinking about treatments. But in my other life, I'm also the editor-in-chief of a big journal called Brain. We get about a hundred new submissions, new papers every week that we have to look through. And of those, perhaps, you know, eight of them will make it into the journal.

And finally, I also have personal responsibilities. I'm a father, husband, and a son. So those things are really all important in terms of how they color your work.

Michael Gervais (3:16)

You've got a full plate from what I can understand. And one of the reasons I wanted to be able to sit with you is that you take those facets of your life seriously.

You are leading from the front and supporting from the back, if you will, in a world class way. And I fully thought that you would explain all of those variables that you just did. And then you've done it rather humbly as well, meaning that you're doing it on the world stage. You're doing it at a significant university as well. And so, let's start with the brain. Let's start with consciousness, which is a hard problem in science, considered one of the three hard problems in science. Why did you want to tackle consciousness?

Masud Husain (3:57)

Well, I wanted to see if we could tackle one part of consciousness. And we were particularly interested in attention. And the relationship between attention and conscious awareness is something that's quite controversial. But attention is something that we can measure. Whereas consciousness is sometimes very difficult to measure. Of course, someone can be conscious, or they can be in a coma, unconscious. But between those levels, between the highly conscious and the someone who is comatose, it's much more difficult to measure states of consciousness. So we were very keen to measure attention and how that can go wrong in people with brain disorders. In particular, we started off looking at patients who had suffered a stroke, particularly of the right hemisphere, that tends to give more problems with attention than strokes of the left hemisphere, which is usually a language dominant hemisphere.