Can’t Get Started on a Daunting Task? This Brain Circuit That Slams the Brakes on Motivation Might Be to Blame

Monkey experiments hint at a “motivation brake” pathway between two brain regions. Manipulating it may lead to new treatments for depression and other psychiatric conditions

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

January 14, 2026

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Many of us struggle to start a daunting task—we might tell ourselves that the laundry can wait until tomorrow, or that we can wash the dirty dishes in the sink in the morning. Well, it turns out procrastinating isn’t merely some personal failure: It seems to go brain deep.

Scientists have uncovered a neural circuit in macaque monkeys that appears to kick in when faced with a potentially stressful or unpleasant experience. The discovery of a “motivation brake,” described in a paper published January 9 in the journal Current Biology, could provide insights into psychiatric conditions characterized by a loss of motivation, such as depression.  

“We were able to causally link a specific brain pathway to a ‘brake’ on motivation when individuals face unpleasant tasks in daily life,” study co-author Ken-ichi Amemori, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University in Japan, tells Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American.

To conduct the study, Amemori and his colleagues trained two thirsty macaques to perform two distinct decision-making tasks. Completing one of them earned a monkey a reward of water, but the other gave the animal water plus an unpleasant puff of air to the face. When presented with the task that also involved punishment, the monkeys were more likely to hesitate than with the reward-only task, the researchers found.

Then, the team homed in on two brain regions—the ventral striatum and the ventral pallidum—that are important for reward processing and motivation. The ventral striatum sends messages to the ventral palladium, and past studies have shown that manipulating the pathway in primates can result in apathy or compulsive behaviors, the study authors write.

After suppressing the brain circuit in the two macaques using a targeted genetic technique, the animals became much more willing to start the task that would give them an unpleasant air puff. “The change after this modulation was dramatic,” Amemori tells Lynne Peeples at Nature. The primates’ ability to judge rewards against punishments did not change.

Nerve cell activity in the monkeys’ brains suggests that the ventral striatum might detect a potentially unpleasant experience and subsequently tamp down the ventral pallidum’s activity, making the animals hesitate, the researchers found. 

“Focally disrupting one part of the network and showing a causal effect is important,” says Vikram Chib, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the work, to Nature. “It helps us understand how this network can go awry.”

Future research could build on the findings to develop treatments for psychiatric conditions that are often accompanied by a lack of motivation, such as depression and schizophrenia, the study authors write. For instance, drugs or deep brain stimulation might be able to modify the pathway between the ventral striatum and the ventral pallidum. The discovery might also help psychotherapists tailor cognitive behavioral therapy to their clients, Pearl Chiu, a computational psychiatrist at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the work, tells Nature.

Still, Amemori says in a statement that the motivation brake is probably very important, and that any possible treatment techniques involving it will require fine-tuning.

“Over-weakening the motivation brake could lead to dangerous behavior or excessive risk-taking,” he says. As a consquence, he notes to to Daniel Mediavilla at El País, “any therapeutic intervention would therefore need to be carefully calibrated and evaluated within a rigorous ethical framework.”

Editor’s note, January 29, 2026: This story previously misidentified the source of Amemori’s final quotation.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.