My friend Dee lives in Port Aransas, a charming and artistic beach community on a barrier island near the Southern tip of Texas. Corpus Christi is the nearest city. For a year now, Dee has been writing an interview column for the local newspaper and she just decided that she wants to get paid. Will getting paid erase the fun and wipe out the creativity of writing for the Island Moon?
Academic research shows that if-then rewards are disastrous to creativity. You know — IF you sell newspaper advertising to the business you just profiled, THEN the newspaper will pay you a commission.
Daniel Pink says in his book “Drive” that the research shows that production jobs like auto manufacturing respond to financial incentives (if your production goes up 20% your pay goes up 10%) but the same strategy hobbles creativity. “Straight-forward production responds to incentives,” says Dan Pink, but high-performance creativity requires an unseen intrinsic drive. He says three things are necessary for creative “flow”:
- Engagement. The writer cares about the subject and the oucome
- Clear goals and immediate feedback
- Skill. The writer must believe that he or she can do it
Dee loves Port Aransas, a drinking town with a fishing problem. It is a colorful, artistic beach town on Mustang Island and a fun place to party for the students from the University of Texas at Austin. Dee owns a profitable business that has thrived on her writing talents but she longed for a more creative outlet. She started writing for the Island Moon as a hobby, interviewing the artists and interesting shop owners to get to know her neighbors better. The Island Moon doesn’t pay for writing, and that was a perfect fit because Dee was looking for a social hobby. A year ago, Dee did not want to have to sell advertising to her interviewees, but the Island Moon only pays for selling ads, not for writing. If Dee wants to get paid by the Island Moon, she will have to ask the businesses profiled in Dee-Scoveries if they want to advertise in the newspaper.
Pink thinks that adding compensation to the equation will contaminate the creative urge. He talks about how incentives impact productivity in his highly-watched TED talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation.
If Dee starts to tie in advertising with her interviews, will she begin to choose subjects that are more likely to advertise? Will she start to bypass the unique and quirky personalities that make Port Aransas so interesting? Will this impact her writing? Will it take the fun out of her hobby?
Karen Clark is a 
Safari froze on my new iPad2. Screen grayed out, nothing worked. Turns out, this is a common problem. Glad I found 
This suggests that a party-girl mother is likely to have a party girl daughter. People who are more sensitive to dopamine get a greater boost from dopamine-triggers like cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, money, sex, food, gambling… you know the list. Because they are more sensitive to the highs and lows, they are more likely to get hooked. And we all know that addiction runs in families, too.
Specifically, the research shows that people with conservative tendencies have a larger amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate than other people. The amygdala — typically thought of as the “primitive brain” — is responsible for reflexive impulses, like fear. The anterior cingulate is thought to be responsible for courage and optimism. This one-two punch could be responsible for many of the anecdotal claims that conservatives “think differently” from others.
In the same episode, the interview at the end (about :20 in) is with physicist Brian Greene who wrote “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes” said “Everything around us may be a hologram. You are a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics.” Short clip of the interview only: