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It would seem logical to begin research on motivation by examining the thing that motivates—the end goal, the desired outcome, the carrot on the end of the stick. That’s what Dr. R. Alison Adcock, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University, and her team have done in a series of studies examining how people respond to different rewards. But the results of their studies have been surprising, indicating more variation from person to person than her team expected:

“One of the things that has felt most productive from our work is evidence that rewards mean very different things to different people—and we can see that in how their brains respond.”

For example, when Adcock and her team offered study participants monetary rewards for completing a puzzle, some participants’ brains lit up in the pleasure center and other participants’ brains responded with what looked like anxiety or fear. Of the latter group, Adcock says, “Some people responded like we were threatening them with an electric shock when we promised them money for doing a maze.” For whatever reason—performance anxiety, fear of failure, lack of confidence—these people felt stressed instead of motivated when presented with the prospect of monetary rewards.

This means that examining external rewards may not be the best way to understand motivation after all. A better way, in fact, may be to look at what drives us when no visible external reward is present.