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Does It Have To Taste Bad To Be Good? Leveraging Pleasure To Enhance Learning, Karen H. Dougherty M.D.

Kentucky Journal of Higher Education Policy and Practice

Emerging information from the field of neuroscience has illuminated the workings of the brain’s pleasure circuit as a powerful motivator of human behavior. While much of the research has been driven by an effort to uncover the roots of addiction, an understanding of the aspects of pleasure can be applied to the design of teaching strategies to engage college students and improve their retention and persistence.