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A RECIPE FOR SELF-CONTROL

When my sons were just two or so and would get upset, I sometimes used distraction to calm them down: Look at that birdie, or an all-service, enthusiastic What’s that? with my gaze or finger directing their focus toward something or other. Attention regulates emotion. This little ploy uses selective attention to quiet the agitated amygdala. So long as a toddler stays tuned to some interesting object of focus, the distress calms; the moment that thing loses its fascination, the distress, if still held on to by networks in the amygdala, comes roaring back.1 The trick, of course, lies in keeping the baby intrigued long enough for the amygdala to calm. As infants learn to use this attention maneuver for themselves, they acquire one of their first emotional self-regulation skills—one that has vast importance for their destiny in life: how to manage the unruly amygdala. Such a ploy takes executive attention, a capacity that starts to flower in the third year of life when a toddler can show “effortful control”—focusing at will, ignoring distractions, and inhibiting impulse. Parents might notice this landmark when a toddler makes the intentional choice to say “no” to a temptation, like waiting for dessert until after she’s taken some more bites of what’s on her plate. That, too, depends on executive attention, which blossoms into willpower and self-discipline—as in managing our disturbing feelings and ignoring whims so we can stay focused on a goal. By age eight most children master greater degrees of executive attention. This mental tool manages the operation of other brain networks for cognitive skills like learning to read and do math, and academics in general (we’ll look into this more in part 5). Our mind deploys self-awareness to keep everything we do on track: meta-cognition—thinking about thinking—lets us know how our mental operations are going and adjust them as needed; meta-emotion does the same with regulating the flow of feeling and impulse. In the mind’s design, self-awareness is built into regulating our own emotions, as well as sensing what others feel. Neuroscientists see self-control through the lens of the brain zones underlying executive function, which manages mental skills like self-awareness and self-regulation, critical for navigating our lives.2 Executive attention holds the key to self-management. This power to direct our focus onto one thing and ignore others lets us bring to mind our waistline when we spot those quarts of Cheesecake Brownie ice cream in the freezer. This small choice point harbors the core of willpower, the essence of self-regulation. The brain is the last organ of the body to mature anatomically, continuing to grow and shape itself into our twenties—and the networks for attention are like an organ that develops in parallel with the brain. As every parent of more than one child knows, from day one each baby differs: one is more alert, or calmer, or more active than another. Such differences in temperament reflect the maturation and genetics of various brain networks.3 How much of our talent for attention comes from our genes? It depends. Different attention systems, it turns out, have different degrees of heritability.4 The strongest heritability is for executive control. Even so, building this vital skill depends to a large extent on what we learn in life. Epigenetics, the science of how our environment affects our genes, tells us that inheriting a set of genes is not in itself enough for them to matter. Genes have what amounts to a biochemical on/off switch; if they are never turned on we may as well not have them. The “on” switch comes in many forms, including what we eat, the dance of chemical reactions within the body, and what we learn. WILLPOWER IS DESTINY

Decades of research results show the singular importance of willpower in determining the course of life. One of the first of these was a small project in the 1960s in which kids from deprived homes were given special attention in a preschool program that helped them cultivate self-control, among other life skills.5 That project had hoped to boost their IQ, but it failed at that. Still, years later, when those preschoolers were compared with similar kids who had not participated in the program, over the course of life they had lower rates of teen pregnancies, school dropouts, delinquency, and even days missed from work.6 The findings were a major argument for what has become the Head Start preschool programs, now found everywhere in the United States. And then there was the “marshmallow test,” a legendary study done by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the 1970s. Mischel invited four-year-olds one by one into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus. In the room the child was shown a tray with marshmallows or other treats and told to pick one she would like. Then came the hard part. The experimenter told the child, “You can have your treat now, if you want. But if you don’t eat it until I come back from running an errand, you can have two then.” The room was sanitized of distractions: no toys, no books, not even a picture. Self-control was a major feat for a four-year-old under such dire conditions. About a third grabbed the marshmallow on the spot, while another third or so waited the endless fifteen minutes until they were rewarded with two (the other third fell somewhere in the middle). Most significant: the ones who resisted the lure of the sweet had higher scores on measures of executive control, particularly the reallocation of attention. How we focus holds the key to willpower, says Mischel. His hundreds of hours of observation of little kids fighting off temptation reveal “the strategic allocation of attention,” as he puts it, to be the crucial skill. The kids who waited out the full fifteen minutes did it by distracting themselves with tactics like pretend play, singing songs, or covering their eyes. If a kid just stared at the marshmallow, he was a goner (or more precisely, the marshmallow was). At least three sub-varieties of attention, all aspects of the executive, are at play when we pit self-restraint against instant gratification. The first is the ability to voluntarily disengage our focus from an object of desire that powerfully grabs our attention. The second, resisting distraction, lets us keep our focus elsewhere—say, on fantasy play—rather than gravitating back to that juicy whatever. And the third allows us to keep our focus on a goal in the future, like the two marshmallows later. All that adds up to willpower. Well and good for children who show self-control in a contrived situation like the marshmallow test. But what about resisting the temptations of real life? Enter the children of Dunedin, New Zealand. Dunedin has a populace of just over one hundred thousand souls and houses one of that country’s largest universities. This combination made the town ripe for what may be the most significant study yet in the annals of science on the ingredients of life success. In a dauntingly ambitious project, 1,037 children—all the babies born over a period of twelve months—were studied intensively in childhood and then tracked down decades later by a team assembled from several countries. The team represented many disciplines, each with its own perspective on that key marker for self-awareness, self-control.7 These kids underwent an impressive battery of tests over their school years, such as assessing their tolerance for frustration and their restlessness, on the one hand, and powers of concentration and persistence on the other.8 After a two-decade lull all but 4 percent of the kids were tracked down (a feat far easier in a stable country like New Zealand than, say, in the hypermobile United States). By then young adults, they were assessed for: • Health. Physicals and lab tests looked at their cardiovascular, metabolic, psychiatric, respiratory, even dental and inflammatory conditions. • Wealth. Whether they had savings, were single and raising a child, owned a home, had credit problems, had investments, or had retirement funds. • Crime. All court records in Australia and New Zealand were searched to see if they had been convicted of a crime. The better their self-control in childhood, the better the Dunedin kids were doing in their thirties. They had sounder health, were more successful financially, and were law-abiding citizens. The worse their childhood impulse management, the less they made, the shakier their health, and the more likely it was that they had a criminal record. The big shock: statistical analysis found that a child’s level of self-control is every bit as powerful a predictor of her adult financial success and health (and criminal record, for that matter) as are social class, wealth of family of origin, or IQ. Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life success—in fact, for financial success, self-control in childhood proved a stronger predictor than either IQ or social class of the family of origin. The same goes for school success. In an experiment where American eighth graders were offered a dollar now or two dollars in a week, this simple gauge of self-control turned out to correlate with their grade point average better than did their IQ. High self-control predicts not just better grades, but also a good emotional adjustment, better interpersonal skills, a sense of security, and adaptability.9 Bottom line: kids can have the most economically privileged childhood, yet if they don’t master how to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals those early advantages may wash out in the course of life. In the United States, for example, only two in five children of parents in the top 20 percent of wealth end up in that privileged status; about 6 percent drift down to the bottom 20 percent in income.10 Conscientiousness seems as powerful a boost in the long run as fancy schools, SAT tutors, and pricey educational summer camps. Don’t underestimate the value of practicing the guitar or keeping that promise to feed the guinea pig and clean its cage. Another bottom line: Anything we can do to increase children’s capacity for cognitive control will help them throughout life. Even Cookie Monster can learn to do better. COOKIE MONSTER LEARNS TO NIBBLE

The day I dropped by Sesame Workshop, headquarters for the TV neighborhood of Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and the rest of the gang beloved in the 120-plus nations where Sesame Street airs, there was a meeting of the core staff with cognitive and brain scientists. Sesame Street’s DNA wraps entertainment around the science of learning. “At the core of every clip on Sesame Street is a curriculum goal,” said Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the show’s workshop. “Everything we show is pretested for its educational value.” A network of academic experts reviews show content, while the real experts—preschoolers themselves—ensure that the target audience will understand the message. And shows with a particular focus, like a math concept, are tested again for their educational impact on what the preschoolers actually learned. That day’s meeting with scientists had cognitive essentials as a theme. “We need top researchers sitting with top writers in developing the shows,” said Levine. “But we need to get it right: listen to the scientists, but then play with it—have some fun.” Take a lesson in impulse control, the secret sauce in a segment about the Cookie Connoisseur Club. Alan, the owner of Hooper’s Store on Sesame Street, baked cookies to be sampled by the club—but no one had planned for Cookie Monster to join. When Cookie arrives by surprise on the scene he, of course, wants to eat all the cookies. Alan explains to Cookie that if you want to be a member of the club, you need to control your impulse to gobble up all the cookies. Instead, you learn to savor the experience. First you pick up the cookie and look for imperfections, then smell it, and finally nibble a bit. But Cookie, impulse embodied, can only gobble the cookie down. To get the self-regulation strategies right in this segment, says Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president for education and research, they consulted with none other than Walter Mischel, the mastermind behind the marshmallow test. Mischel proposed teaching Cookie cognitive control strategies like “Think of the cookie as something else” and reminding himself of that something. So Cookie sees the cookie is round and looks like a yo-yo, and dutifully repeats to himself over and over that the cookie is a yo-yo. But then he gobbles anyway. To help Cookie take just a nibble—a major triumph of willpower—Mischel suggested a different impulse-delay strategy. Alan tells Cookie, “I know this is hard for you, but what’s more important: this cookie now, or getting into the club where you’ll get all kinds of cookies?” That did the trick. A mind too easily distracted by the least hint of a cookie will not have the staying power to understand fractions, let alone calculus. Parts of the Sesame Street curriculum highlight such elements of executive control, which creates a mental platform prerequisite for tackling the “STEM” topics: science, technology, engineering, and math. “Teachers in early grades tell us, I need kids to come to me ready to sit down, focus, manage their emotions, listen to directions, collaborate, and make friends,” Truglio explained. “Then I can teach them letters and numbers.” “Cultivating a sense for math and early literacy skills,” Levine told me, requires self-control, based on changes in executive function during the preschool years. The inhibitory controls related to executive functioning correlate closely with both early math and reading ability. “Teaching these self-regulation skills,” he added, “may actually rewire parts of the brain for kids in whom they have been underdeveloped.” Focus_Art1.tif

THE POWER TO CHOOSE

Like this piece of art? People around the world say depictions of scenes like this are among their very favorite: an idyllic view from a high vantage point, looking toward water, a meadow, maybe some animals. Perhaps this universal preference dates back to the long epoch in human prehistory when our species roamed the savannas, or huddled in caves tucked into a hillside for protection and warmth. If from here you manage to stay with what I’ve written and not look back at that peaceful scene, though you may feel a mental pull to peek, you create in your own brain a tussle between focus and distraction. That tension occurs anytime we try to stay concentrated on one thing and ignore the lure of another. It means there’s a neural conflict going on, an arousal level tug-of-war in top-down versus bottom-up circuitry. And by the way, remember, don’t look over there at that art—stay right here with what I’m telling you about what’s going on in your brain. This inner conflict duplicates the battle a kid fights when her mind wants to wander away from her math homework, to check for texts from her BFF.11 Test high school students for their natural talent in math and you’ll find a spread: some kids are pretty terrible, many are merely not so good, and 10 percent or so show great potential. Take that top 10 percent and track them as they go through a tough math class for a year; most will get top grades. But contrary to predictions, a portion of these high-potential students will fare poorly. Now give each of the math students a device that buzzes at random times through the day and asks them to rate their mood at that moment. If they happen to be working on math, those who did well will report being in a positive mood far more often than being in an anxious one. But those who do poorly will report the reverse: about five times more anxious episodes than pleasant episodes.12 That ratio holds a secret of why those with great potential for learning can sometimes end up floundering. Attention, cognitive science tells us, has a limited capacity: working memory creates a bottleneck that lets us hold just so much in mind at any given moment (as we saw in chapter 1). As our worries intrude on the limited capacity of our attention, these irrelevant thoughts shrink the bandwidth left for, say, math. The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Such meta-cognition lets us keep our mind in the state best suited for the task at hand, whether algebraic equations, following a recipe, or haute couture. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak. Of the many nuances and varieties of attention, two matter greatly for self-awareness. Selective attention lets us focus on one target and ignore everything else. Open attention lets us take in information widely in the world around us and the world within us, and pick up subtle cues we’d otherwise miss. Extremes in either of these kinds of attention—being too focused outwardly or too open to what’s going on around us—can, as Richard Davidson puts it, “make it impossible to be self-aware.”13 Executive function includes attention to attention itself, or more generally, awareness of our mental states; this lets us monitor our focus and keep it on track. Executive function (as cognitive control is sometimes called) can be taught (as we’ve just seen, and will explore in more detail in part 5). Teaching executive skills to preschoolers makes them more ready for their school years than does a high IQ or having already learned to read.14 As the Sesame Street team knows, teachers want students with good executive function, as signified by self-discipline, attention control, and the ability to resist temptations. Such executive functions predict good math and reading scores throughout school, apart from—and more than—a child’s IQ.15 Of course it’s not just for kids. This power to direct our focus onto one thing and ignore others lies at the core of willpower. A BAG OF BONES

In fifth-century India, monks were encouraged to contemplate the “thirty-two body parts,” a list of unappealing corners of human biology: dung, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, fat, snot, and so on. This focus on distasteful aspects was meant to build detachment from one’s own body, as well as to help celibate monks disavow lust—in other words, to boost willpower. Fast-forward sixteen hundred years and contrast that ascetic effort with its extreme opposite. As I was told by a social worker who rescues teen sex workers in Los Angeles: “It’s unbelievable how impulsive some kids can be. They live on the streets, but if they got a thousand dollars, they’d spend it all on the most expensive iPhone, instead of getting a roof over their heads to find the security they need.” His program helps HIV-infected youngsters get government funds; takes them off the streets; and gives them free medical care, a stipend for an apartment and food, even a gym membership. “I actually saw friends of some of these kids,” he tells me, “go out to become HIV-positive so they could get the benefits.” That same contrast between high cognitive control and its discovered in a more innocent vein years ago in that Stanford test of gratification delay in four-year-olds tempted by a marshmallow. When fifty-seven of those Stanford preschoolers were tracked down forty years later, “high delayers” who resisted the marshmallow at age four were still able to delay gratification, but the “low delayers” were still poor at stifling impulse. Then their brains were scanned while they resisted temptation. High delayers activated circuits in their prefrontal cortex key to controlling thoughts and actions—including the right inferior frontal gyrus, which says no to impulse. But low delayers activated their ventral striatum, a circuit in the brain’s reward system that springs to life when we yield to life’s temptations and guilty pleasures, like a drug or a luscious dessert.16 In the Dunedin study, the teen years mattered especially for cognitive control. As adolescents those lower in self-control were the ones most likely to take up smoking, to become an unplanned teen parent, or to drop out of school—all snares that close doors to later opportunities and trap them in lifestyles that accelerate that path to lower-income jobs, poorer health, and, in some cases, criminal careers. So does this mean that kids with hyperactivity or attention deficit disorder are doomed to problems? Not at all—as for kids overall, there was a gradient of bad-to-good outcomes among those with ADHD. Even for this group relatively greater self-control predicted a better life outcome, despite their attention problems while in school. It’s not just four-year-olds and teens. The chronic cognitive overload that typifies life for so many of us seems to lower our threshold for self-control. The greater the demands on our attention, it seems, the poorer we get at resisting temptations. The epidemic of obesity in developed countries, research suggests, may be due in part to our greater susceptibility, while distracted, to go on automatic and reach for sugary, fatty foods. Those who have been most successful at losing pounds and keeping them off, brain imaging studies find, exhibit the most cognitive control when facing a calorie-laden morsel.17 Freud’s famous dictum “Where id was, there ego shall be” speaks directly to this inner tension. Id—the bundle of impulses that make us reach for the Dove Bar, buy that really-too-expensive luxury item, or click on that luscious but totally time-wasting website—constantly struggles with our ego, the mind’s executive. Ego lets us lose weight, save money, and allot time effectively. In the mind’s arena, willpower (a facet of “ego”) represents a wrestling match between top and bottom systems. Willpower keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a “cool” mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our “hot” emotional reactions—quick, impulsive, and automatic. The two systems signify a critical difference in focus. The reward circuits fixate on hot cognition, thoughts with a high emotional charge, like what’s tempting about the marshmallow (it’s yummy, sweet, and chewy). The greater the charge, the stronger the impulse—and the more likely it is that our more sober-minded prefrontal lobes will be hijacked by our desires. That prefrontal executive system, in contrast, “cools the hot,” by suppressing the impulse to grab, and reappraising the temptation itself (it’s also fattening). You (or your four-year-old) can activate this system by thinking about, for example, the shape of the marshmallow, or its color, or how it’s made. This switch in focus lowers the energy charge to grab for it. Just as he suggested for Cookie Monster, in his experiments at Stanford Mischel helped some of the kids out with a simple mental trick: he taught them to imagine that the candy is just a picture with a frame around it. Suddenly that irresistible hunk of sugar that loomed so large in their mind became something they could pretend was not real, something they could focus on or not. Changing their relationship to the marshmallow was a bit of mental judo that let kids who hadn’t been able to delay their grab for the sweet more than one minute deftly resist temptation for fifteen. Such cognitive control of impulse bodes well in life. As Mischel puts it, “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the SAT instead of watching television. And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about the marshmallow.”18 Intentional distractions, cognitive reappraisal, and other meta-cognitive strategies entered psychology’s playbook in the 1970s. But similar mental maneuvers were deployed long ago by those fifth-century monks as they contemplated the body’s “loathsome” parts. A tale from those days has it that one of these monks is walking along when a gorgeous woman comes running by.19 That morning she had a heated quarrel with her husband and she’s now fleeing to her parents’ house. A few minutes later, her husband, in pursuit, shows up and asks the monk, “Venerable sir, did you by any chance see a woman go by?” And the monk answers, “Man or woman, I cannot say. But a bag of bones passed this way.”