Commoveor, ergo sum: Information, communication, and motivation. Towards the foundations of evocative communication with a protocol for a positron emission tomography (PET) experiment for relating neural systems responses to induced emotional states

The old saw about the Englishmen in India ran: "They speak of God. They mean Cotton." Similarly, when we speak of good motivation we actually mean effective information. The radical thesis in this work is that effective information is information that makes people smile, shiver, or perspire. How can motivational states be induced, maintained, and changed by communication of information? How do "neutral" info-bits acquire the ability to generate motivational states? These two questions define the core of this work. The fundamental technical contribution of this work is to concretely show the link between information and motivation at the level of human brain processes. Specifically, a framework protocol for a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is presented in this work to show, at the level of brain processes, the link between information and motivation mechanisms. This PET brain imaging framework was reviewed and approved by an international expert in Nuclear Medicine (Director N.M. at the U.K.). Conventional wisdom separates out information and motivation processes at individual and organizational levels. The broad ranging and radical implication of this work is that the interface between information systems and motivation processes is a frequently neglected but crucial area of human behavior.