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Page added on June 12, 2016
Hot Brain Cool Brain
“Voting these days is like choosing between the hot faucet and the cold faucet, but only the hot faucet works.“
Lion and wolf cubs, when they learn to stalk prey, learn fairly quickly that they must delay the urge for immediate gratification if they are to be successful. They have to cultivate patience.
Babies who are taken to their mother’s breast whenever they cry do not learn this as early. Those allowed milk only after they stop crying, and maybe even then not right away, learn patience.
Last month Walter Mischel gave a Long Now talk that eventually found its way to our earbuds as we bicycled through Amish country in Southern Tennessee.
It is wheat harvest time here and Amish men are out scything the sheaves, tying bundles, and forming them into shocks to field dry in the sun. When the wheat has cured, the shocks will be collected by horse wagon and carried back to the barn for threshing. The Amish abide in the Long Now.
Walter Mischel’s psychology experiment at Stanford in the 1960s took students from the Bing Nursery School, put them in a room one-by-one, gave them a choice of a cookie, mint, pretzel, or marshmallow and the following deal: they could eat the treat right away, or wait 15 minutes until the experimenter returned. If they waited, they would get an extra treat.
Michel and his team then went behind the one-way glass and filmed for 15 minutes.
Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.
— Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker
The genius of the experiment was not in discovering what percentage of children delayed gratification and how that might correlate to sex, age, race, ethnicity or income, but in following the children with a longitudinal study for the rest of their lives.
As they matured and became adults, the kids who had shown the ability to wait got better grades, were healthier, enjoyed greater professional success, and proved better at staying in relationships—even decades after they took the test. They were, in short, better at life.
— Drake Bennett, Bloomburg
Mischel showed that a child’s ability to delay eating the first treat predicted higher SAT scores (by 210 points) and a lower body mass index (BMI). They got paid more, lived longer, and had fewer divorces.
In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester added more nuance to the original work. In “Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability,” Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin tested children who had little reason to trust that the scientists would return in 15 minutes versus a control group of children who were more likely to have trust. Children raised in homeless shelters or alleys, for instance, have much less faith in the reliability of their environments, or adult authorities, than children who are raised in stable family settings surrounded by environmental constancy.
What do children plucked from bus station bathrooms do when told that if they delay gratification they will get a bigger reward? They eat the treat right away. While the study is too recent to track those kids for a lifetime, the long term effects of mistrustful childhood do not require a leap of imagination.
Kidd et al report:
The results of our study indicate that young children’s performance on sustained delay-of-gratification tasks can be strongly influenced by rational decision-making processes. If self-control capacity differences were the primary causal mechanism implicated in children’s wait-times, then information about the reliability of the environment should not have affected them. If deficiencies in self-control caused children to eat treats early, then one would expect such deficiencies to be present in the reliable condition as well as in the unreliable condition. The effect we observed is consistent with converging evidence that young children are sensitive to uncertainty about future rewards.
***
To be clear, our data do not demonstrate that self-control is irrelevant in explaining the variance in children’s wait-times on the original marshmallow task studies. They do, however, strongly indicate that it is premature to conclude that most of the observed variance—and the longitudinal correlation between wait-times and later life outcomes—is due to differences in individuals’ self-control capacities. Rather, an unreliable worldview, in addition to self-control, may be causally related to later life outcomes, as already suggested by an existing body of evidence.
There is also an existing body of evidence that tells us that humans are predisposed to disbelieve scientific facts, or even their own experiences, if they conflict with strongly held beliefs. This is likely the phenomenon most responsible for our failure not merely to make the cultural changes required of us to avert climate Armageddon and Near Term Human Extinction – even simple lifestyle changes like eating lower on the food chain, cutting discretionary travel, living in a smaller house and having no more than one child – but our failure to even acknowledge, as individuals or collectively, that we have a problem. We have chosen instead, to use the words of Dr. Kidd, an unreliable worldview.
As John Michael Greer says, human beings are like yeast. They respond to increased access to food and energy with increased reproduction. In other words, marshmallows make us horny.
Our cockeyed worldview has a concatenation of causes. We are products of the religious views of our parents. We inhabit a globalized culture that infantilizes us while it trains us to become dedicated followers of fashion. We like hearing the sound of our “own” voice in our heads. Add all that up and it amounts to simmering distrust. We are not at all prepared to delay gratification. The average child in Kidd’s study waited only 6 minutes.
In his Long Now talk and in his book, The Marshmallow Test, Walter Mischel spoke of our internal dialog in terms of a conflict between the “hot brain” that wants to operate on impulse and take what is right in front of it, and “cool brain,” that is willing to wait, willing to trust, and then to reap the greater rewards.
Those who find themselves more often on the winning side – whether in athletics, business, politics or relationships – are those who have cool brains. They play the long game.
All too often they use the inabilities of opponents to see that long game to pad their advantage. That is how they get ahead.
Climate change and the existential threat it holds cannot even be perceived without a long view. It needs a cool brain, not a hot one. But there is a self-reinforcing feedback being played out here that does not work in favor of our species. Climate change weirds the normal course of things. It makes the environment for everyone unreliable. It seeds distrust. It makes brains hot.
The question then becomes, how can we develop cool brains? Mischel suggests several techniques of ideation that can help build self-control. What is clear, however, is that the best self-control starts early in life and is built upon a foundation of trust. The environment a child experiences will affect how much trust they can invest in adults, their culture — its rules and social responsibilities — and their future. Take away stability and trust from children and the effects of that loss ripple out to very large consequences for everyone.
“By changing cognitive skills and motivation, we can use the cool system to regulate the hot system,” Mischel says. “Is it all pre-wired? My answer is an emphatic no.”
Attention control strategies and cognitive transformations/reappraisals can ‘cool’ the immediate temptations and ‘heat’ the delayed consequences is what’s important.
***
The point I am trying to make is that if we are going to talk seriously about taking long term consequences like climate change into account, we’ve got to make the consequences hot. We have to really make them hot. And that’s not easy to do.
One of the reasons that it is not easy to do is because that limbic system, that hot system that activates automatically when you have high stress, is there for good reason.
We have often wondered whether continuing to write scary tomes about our future is an effective strategy. Mischel says it is and we need more of it. But we also need to cool our brains once they have grasped hot consequences.
His advice is to narrow the economic class divide, teach self-control in schools, assume everyone is capable of improving their skills, and stop creating new victims of biological and social biographies.
Mischel’s main worry is that, even if his lesson plan proves to be effective, it might still be overwhelmed by variables the scientists can’t control, such as the home environment. He knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ “
— Jonah Lehrer
From the presidential campaign now playing out in the United States and similar dramas in Brazil, Philippines and elsewhere, we can surmise that a cool brain standard is not in the immediate offing. It is easy to see the distinctions between the many hot brain / instant gratification candidates and constituencies, whose policies would widen the class divide, rekindle the Cold War and heat the planet, and the rare cool brain / calm and steadfast candidates and constituencies, who want to end divisive rhetoric, level the playing field, and pursue a path to real progress in peace, justice and transformative change.
Voting these days is like choosing between the hot faucet and the cold faucet, but only the hot faucet works.
Watching the Amish gather in the sheaves we see a culture that invests in trust. Children grow up relying on adults to be steadfast, seasons to come and go, and the good earth to provide. They learn self-denial and delayed gratification early. It becomes a joyful practice because it underpins a greater love of community, and the return of community love for each member.
Humans are capable of these things. We are capable of designing entire societies that function this way. Whether we choose to act rationally, with self-control, and not on impulse, is simply a matter of choice.
The Great Change by Albert Bates
37 Comments on "Hot Brain Cool Brain"
onlooker on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 12:08 pm
Unfortunately, the default manner in which we act is compulsively. We must cultivate and teach a person starting from a young age the traits of self-control and rational thoughtful behavior. In my experience more people are acting with their limbic part of their brain than the more developed cognitive part.
Apneaman on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 12:16 pm
Sorry Albert, but you live in thee marshmallow gorging culture where dopamine trumps all.
A deadly crisis: mapping the spread of America’s drug overdose epidemic
By Nadja Popovich
Overdoses kill more Americans than car crashes or guns – and experts say the crisis hasn’t yet peaked. Data reveals how a local problem became a national epidemic
http://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2016/may/25/opioid-epidemic-overdose-deaths-map
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 12:37 pm
Definitely something gets programmed in ur head from baby to growing up…..no mater how u twist it we all seem to start the same…but all end up different!!!
Although there isn’t mention of parent DNA influence….something or someone influenced that Muslim gunman to murder people in the Orlando gay club….genetically think we need to find the education point of all problems…
Northwest Resident on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 1:23 pm
“something or someone influenced that Muslim gunman to murder people in the Orlando gay club”
When I was in the U.S. Navy aboard a combat ship, one of my shipmates was a HUGE guy that enjoyed spending his onshore leave hanging outside gay clubs, waiting for gays to walk out, picking fights with them and beating them badly. One night, on shore leave in Italy where over-the-counter speed was obtainable, this guy got himself some speed and overdosed on it. He came back to the ship and proceeded to start throwing officers and others around like rag dolls, going beserk. I was one of the guys who got the privilege of keeping watch on him, once we subdued him and strapped him down for the night. During my watch, this guy was carrying on and on about how he hated gays — how his UNCLE used to force him to give blow jobs and blah blah blah.
Anger toward gays is often engrained by pedophiles and abusers into their victims at a very early age. The shame and the rage and the lifelong burden of psychological damage sometimes explodes in unpredictable ways.
If we want to know what made this mass killer explode, we would have to look deep into his psychological make-up, the events that shaped him as a child, and what we would find there would no doubt be very ugly indeed.
There’s lots of guys like that walking around, ready to explode. Just wait until economic distress and social upheaval really gets underway. The fireworks is going to be terrible to behold.
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 2:06 pm
“something or someone influenced that Muslim gunman to murder people in the Orlando gay club”
I wonder if that gunman had of been a white guy, if he would have been referred to as a “Christian gunman”, or a “Southern Baptist gunman”?
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 2:52 pm
Northwest, hope that’s what I said…..but….lets all take a short cut….a beating is slightly different to death….if a leader says kill, that is what u are going to get ….sorry I don’t know, would u like to date when a Christian or baptist gunman murdered, at the moment, 50 + humans?
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 3:13 pm
Not a gunman per se, but I don’t remember anyone referring to Timothy McVeigh as that “Roman Catholic” terrorist. He purportedly killed 168 people. Or how about Ted Bundy? The “Baptist” serial killer? Jeffrey Daimler? The born again Christian murderer?
One thing that all of these people had in common? They’re psychologically deranged. There are some 3.5 million Muslims in the USA alone. Painting an entire religion with the same brush as a few deranged individuals, is not exactly bright.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 3:43 pm
Let’s see how bright u turn out to be Greg T…I hope u don’t regret what u said later in life…that comment is what u will need to live with!!!….sorry but u are way off ur target comments and if u can sleep at night saying them….that is sad for u
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 3:50 pm
I have some very good friends who just happen to be Muslim John. Judging from your above comments, they are much better people than you could ever hope to be.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:10 pm
That’s the prob…I have Muslim friends too….are u so blind that if the leader says kill, u are going to get a different outcome, kiss on the cheek outcome or death???….I can only say u have only just started ur usa internal war, which, mark my word, will last at lest 30 years
onlooker on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:17 pm
John, I dont know what the heck your talking about. You think we all do not have our own free will and our own brain. You have millions upon millions of Muslims who are not committing violence on others for the sake of Islam or any other reason. People like Greg is what has allowed this planet to stay somewhat sane. You do not generalize about groups and you certainly do not cure hate and violence with more hate and violence. But I am sure all that goes right by your narrow mindedness.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:41 pm
Is that onlooker or unlooked or ultimatestupidlooker, religion for seeker…u have no idea….Northern Ireland had about 1million people and the loss of life is % so high over two Christian religions….which neither said thou shalt not kill…if u get 32 virgins to kill someone, u have an outlook to die for
Davy on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:56 pm
“Painting an entire religion with the same brush as a few deranged individuals, is not exactly bright.”
John, Greg does the above all day long with Americans but that is legitimate for Greg.
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:57 pm
There are radical offshoots in all ethnicities and religions John. Muslims, and radical Islam, are not the same thing. People make choices as individuals.
“I can only say u have only just started ur usa internal war, which, mark my word, will last at lest 30 years”
I do not live within the borders of the USA, and this war was started in the Middle East. The so called “War on Terrorism”, in reality, is a War on Islam, and has been for a very long time.
And John, if you feel the need to call others names who are obviously far more intelligent than yourself, at least make an attempt at stringing two coherent sentences together.
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 4:59 pm
I have made my position to you crystal clear Davy. I’m tired of your childish, delusional, little games.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:20 pm
Greg T either is stupid or lives for another agenda…who have I called names???…It doesn’t take much brains to see there is another world agenda running with and without plebs!….Greg T u have used that statement of “making statements of stringing of two sentences strung together” on many occasions when anyone says something outside ur brain boundaries!!!….Davy…GregT sees virgins ahead!!!
Mark my word….mark my word…mark my word….ur troubles have only started…..oil or no oil!!!!
onlooker on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:27 pm
John, you write alot and say little. You have anything even slightly worth saying then say it. Otherwise your just wasting bandwidth on this site.
Davy on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:39 pm
John, I like to call out hypocrites. Greg is the board hypocrisy master.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:39 pm
Onlooker…stop making a licking ass of urself on GregT statements…at least GregT makes a point to read twice, u just lick up behind
onlooker on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:51 pm
Just what I thought you got nothing worth saying so you just write ad hominems and insults. Folks move on John as nothing worth reading.
onlooker on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:52 pm
John is a perfect example of the Hot Brain.
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 5:59 pm
Better than no brain / brainer….lol
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 6:06 pm
@John
You’re a fucking retard
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 6:14 pm
Why do all of the muslims wear dynamite around their middle?
See there goes another one:
http://images2.naharnet.com/images/106046/w460.jpg?1389545556
makati1 on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 6:45 pm
Obviously John is another looser that cannot spell, be bothered to use correct English and/or must be on a good drug (propaganda?) of some sort. Not worth replying to.
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 9:25 pm
Sounds like Davy has found a new friend.
GregT on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 9:30 pm
Pretty sad that you need to stoop to that level Davy boy.
JuanP on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 10:42 pm
John “no mater how u twist it we all seem to start the same…”
BS! We are not all born the same. Some of us are born OK and others not. Some are born saints and others murdering psychopaths. You can turn some of those saints into antisocial sociopaths, but you can’t turn a raving psychopath into a saint.
We are all different, very different!
John on Sun, 12th Jun 2016 11:45 pm
Thought I said there was no mention of the DNA element…other than that we all cry at birth with a slap on the arse through choice of two routes out…though reading the comments here there must be a third route out I didn’t know about…
makati1 on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 12:57 am
“no mater how u twist it we all seem to start the same…”
Tell that to a 3rd world baby born into poverty.
Tell that to an American baby born into poverty.
Tell that to anyone with a few brain cells and they will spit in your face or laugh at your ignorance, John.
There are 7+ billion of us and no two of us “start the same”.
John on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 2:22 am
Oh dear…start is start, start is where the baby leaves the woman….with its own DNA…nothing complicated…after that live route of that child begins….hope that’s simple enough…bye
makati1 on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 2:59 am
John, intelligence is not your thing is it? Does a baby born of a dietary deficiency have the same “start” as a baby born of a 1st world mother with all kinds of vitamins, minerals, and healthy food along with prenatal care? Nope!
Were you born to a 3rd world mother? lol “Equality” is a man made lie fed to first worlders from birth, along with a lot of other brainwashing bullshit.
makati1 on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 3:03 am
I should qualify that as “…a man made lie fed to WHITE first worlders from birth …”
Ask any black man if he is ever “Equal”. Latino? Asian? Arab? Even lower class Americans are never “equal”. Nor females of every color or race. Not in the eyes of most white males. We pretend that they are but reality proves otherwise.
onlooker on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 6:10 am
haha, makes me laugh any insinuation that we are all born equal. Nothing could be further from the truth.
HARM on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 1:23 pm
“Obviously John is another looser [sic] that cannot spell”
Ironically, it’s “loser”, not “looser” (unless you’re using it as an adjective –monetary policy, waistband, etc.).
Apneaman on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 1:28 pm
Gun stocks are surging
“Shares of major gunmakers rallied in trading on Monday, one day after the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
Smith & Wesson shares jumped by as much as 11%, while Sturm, Ruger & Company shares rallied 8%.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/gunmaker-shares-after-orlando-shooting-2016-6
makati1 on Mon, 13th Jun 2016 6:39 pm
HARM, a typo once is not a sign of ignorance, or all of us would be guilty, even you. No way to back up and correct errors on this site.