So we've talked about two pathways so far. The first was a psychological pathway for how purpose can improve our outcomes. The second is a behavioral pathway, and we've focused so far on how thinking about your core purposeful values reduces defensiveness to change, and that's great. So when people say you should eat less, or you should work out more, you should quit smoking, or don't drink so much, or whatever we tend to get very defensive. But if we start thinking about our core purposeful values, we start reducing that defensiveness, we transcend and we start opening to change. So that's one mechanism for how purpose seems to improve our behaviors, which in turn improves our health outcomes, which in turn helps us live longer for example. But there's another way too, people who have a strong purpose tend to have a future orientation. They tend to look ahead more and that's really important. So I want to unpack that just a little bit in this video. So looking ahead, there's a really cool study that was done showing that people with a strong sense of purpose over a 10-year period of time, end up making more money. They end up with greater income, and they end up with greater net worth, controlling for the income and net worth they're making, at baseline at that first time that they were surveyed. That's a really interesting finding, sense of purpose, money, that's quite a side effect, if you're thinking about all the other positive things purpose does. So I want to really explore just a little bit more and figure out why, what's going on? So let's start looking in between the arrows here and what's happening. Let's ask this question of why would purpose, how could purpose possibly influence income and net worth later on? So unpacking this a little bit, that having a sense of purpose actually influences your future orientation. And that's been shown In some studies, we know that. So, in fact part of purpose is thinking about the future, and thinking about a path and direction in your life. We know that people who start thinking about the future as opposed to immediate pleasures start saving their money more. So maybe this mechanism is working this way, that having a sense of purpose improves our future orientation. So we're thinking longer term, and it's that thinking longer term that helps us in making more money, in creating a greater net worth. We also know that creating a sense of purpose as we've said many times in this course, improves your ventral medial prefrontal cortex activity. So that VMPFC activity, it turns out as you're thinking more about the future, that VMPFC is actually working more, it becomes more active. So here, we're suggesting that having a sense of purpose improves your ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity. That activity goes hand-in-hand, is associated with the future orientation that you might have, which leads to more money. So that's how we're thinking about this, more research needs to be done. But it's very exciting that we know that purpose changes behaviors. How does it change behaviors? Probably through reducing ego, as well as increasing this future orientation. So, I want to start looking at the VMPFC a little bit more, what does it actually do? What is it there to do? What's its function? And the simplest way to put the function is that it evaluates the value of our values. Just think about this, we may have a chocolate bar. We may be thinking about our parents. We may be thinking about a new car that we really want. We may be thinking about all sorts of things. Those are such different things. How do we somehow put all those into the same scale so that we can evaluate the values that we see all the time? Each of those things might be valuable to us. But how do we construct some sort of scale or way of thinking about all those in the same space? That's something that the VMPFC does. And so for example, I may be interested in a sports car, but I may be interested also in taking care of my family. Two totally different values, right? So want to explore how sense of purpose somehow helps me put those things, assemble those into the same space that I can evaluate both of those things simultaneously and say, you know what, overall, thinking about those two very very different things, I'm going to focus more attention on my family. I'm less conflicted now, and so as a result maybe for that example, I end up making more money, or having some other positive outcome. This is Emily Falk. She's a neuro scientist and researcher from the University of Pennsylvania. She used to work with me at the University of Michigan. And together we've studied this VMPFC a lot. She does a lot more research in neuroscience than I do, but I asked her about the role of the vmPFC and this is what she said. She said that the vmPFC is taking inputs from all of these other parts of the brain and integrating them into a common value signal, this kind of common space. The function of the common value signal is to help us compare and make decisions about things that aren't inherently comparable. That's really what this vmPFC is doing, and maybe its role as we think about purpose and core values that we have that are so different. We also have found in her lab along with the researcher, Yoona Kang, that people who have stronger purpose are less conflicted. So we're always conflicted by what kinds of values, right? And the vmPFC is helpful in evaluating different values, as I said before. But very often, we have values that conflict with one another. So at the end of the day, we might be kind of tired, we get home and we're thinking, boy, I need a drink. I need some alcoholic drink, an old fashioned, or I need a glass of wine, or something. And yet maybe our kids really need to play with us too, or maybe our spouse or partner really wants to hang out with us and talk about the day a little bit more. So we have a conflict. It turns out that if you have a strong purpose, you're less conflicted. There's a part of the brain that's really interesting that we studied among people with a strong purpose versus people with a weaker purpose, and we introduced conflict to them. We introduced among sedentary people the idea you really need to work out more, and that poses a conflict in a sedentary person. Well, I'd kind of like to watch TV and eat popcorn or whatever, or I'm going to have to work out. Now, I have to figure out which one to do, right? So that introduces a conflict, and we're particularly interested in a part of the brain that relates to conflict. And this part of the brain is called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, or the dACC. And it turns out that if you have a weak purpose and you introduce this conflict, that more activation goes on in that dACC, this dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, than if you have a strong purpose. So what this is saying is if I have a strong purpose, I'm not so conflicted. I know just what I'm supposed to do. That's a really important part of purpose as well. It reduces conflict.
