Principles of Behavioral Neuroscience

I’m sipping a glass of water.  Drinking is what behavioral scientists call “a motivated behavior”.  I wonder, is there any behavior that’s not motivated?

Walking?  When I’m walking someplace, I’m presumably walking there for a reason.  Even if I’m walking to no place in particular- I’m still walking around for a reason — to spend time in the fresh air, to clear my mind, to relax, something like that.  And so walking seems to me to be a motivated behavior as well.

How about typing? I’m typing on my laptop now in order to achieve a goal — to compose a blog post for this textbook website. So long as I’m doing it to achieve a goal, I’m engaged in a motivated behavior.  The textbook has several chapters on motivated behaviors– one on Eating; another on Sex. Maybe we should just have a chapter called Motivated Behavior – and have a single page with three words: “Everything you do.”

Is there anything that we do at any moment of the day that is not for some goal?