When we hear the word learning, we tend to imagine ourselves poring over a textbook absorbing facts, but nearly everything we do—and think and feel—was learned at some point, whether intentionally or not. Roy Wise, a motivation and addiction researcher at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Maryland, made this point in a 2004 review paper: Most goal-directed motivation—even the seeking of food or water when hungry or thirsty—is learned. It is largely through selective reinforcement of initially random movements that the behavior of the [newborn] comes to be both directed and
...more

