all this information in a matter of nanoseconds, her will elected to unleash a dramatic reply demonstrating her anger.
The exercise of will is not just a matter of being deliberative. It’s more complicated than that and involves a complex juggling act of assessing information, modulating emotions, and thinking strategically. It’s your Conductor that helps you sift through all the data to come up with a plan, and in some instances, the best course of action may be a more aggressive go-for-it approach.
Let’s say you have come up with what you think is a promotion-worthy idea for a new marketing campaign, and you excitedly share it with your immediate supervisor, Kathy. The next day, you overhear Kathy telling the marketing director about your idea and taking credit for it. Do you say nothing or stand up for yourself? Keeping the peace ensures that you won’t irritate your supervisor, but it also means that you will probably be stuck in a cubicle for the foreseeable future. Telling the marketing director that it’s your idea may upset Kathy but it could be your ticket to a big office and a major payday. You decide it’s worth it, and it’s your working memory that allows you to think strategically to come up with a clever way to let the boss know it was your idea without making Kathy look bad.
Delay of Gratification
Those who are able to delay gratification have a great advantage in life. By going for the fast buck, the easy way out, we lose the rewards that come with practiced patience, and as we will see in this section, it is our working memory that helps us achieve long-term goals. As anyone who has worked hard to move up the career ladder knows, it’s the things you don’t do as much as the things you do that make it possible to ascend the ranks. It is the times you don’t go to happy hour with your friends so you can take night classes to advance in your career, don’t plop down in front of the TV on Sunday for a football marathon when you need to prep for Monday’s meeting, and don’t call in sick for a “mental health day” just because you had a little too much fun over the weekend. The ability to set aside current pleasure for a greater reward is critical for success. But human nature has long been known to undermine this ability. Behavioral economist and psychologist George Ainsle is famous for his theoretical work on decision making and impulse control. In 1975, Ainsle drew together research demonstrating how people are much more inclined to pursue immediate rewards that are lesser rather than wait for a bigger reward later on. In one study, when participants were offered the choice of an immediate reward of $11 or a delayed reward of $85, they tended to take the smaller amount.
We now know that working memory plays a major role in this process, thanks to John Hinson and researchers from Washington State University. They found that when working memory is removed from the decision-making process, the average person opts for a smaller, immediate reward rather than waiting for an even better outcome. Hinson overloaded his participants’ working memory with a large amount of information. Then when given a choice between accepting a small reward of between $100 and $900 immediately or waiting for a larger reward of up to $2,000, their working memory was unable to calculate which reward would be better in the long run. As a result, they followed their impulse and grabbed the smaller, immediate reward.
This study was echoed in research conducted by Bennedetto De Martino from University College London. He wanted to look at what was happening in the brain when people used their will to hold out for a larger reward. De Martino gave people a series of risk scenarios, but this time he scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). De Martino found that when people opted for the smaller but certain reward, they didn’t really mull over the decision. Their emotional center, the amygdala lit up, and they made the easy, if unconsidered, choice. But when people controlled their impulse and chose the larger and uncertain reward, their prefrontal cortex, which houses their working memory, lit up.
Some people had a more automatic and stronger emotional response to these decisions: their amygdala showed greater activation. You may think that such people are more likely to always opt for the immediate choice, but when de Martino ran the numbers, he saw that the strength of their emotions didn’t determine how likely they were to choose the immediate reward. In fact, it was how hard their working memory was working that influenced their choice. If their PFC showed less activation, they followed their impulses. But the greater the activation, the more likely they were to make the better choice.
Our Conductor’s ability to delay gratification is also backed up by a decades-long series of studies from psychologist Walter Mischel, starting with his famous marshmallow test in 1968 and continuing with his most recent findings published in 2011. In the 1960s in his lab at Stanford University, Mischel offered more than six hundred children between the ages of four and six a marshmallow. Then he told them that he was going to leave the room, and if they could wait until he returned, they would get a second marshmallow. If they could not wait, they could ring a little bell that he left on the table, and he would return and let them eat the one marshmallow. Some of the children immediately popped the marshmallow into their mouths while others resisted temptation and held out for the greater reward of two marshmallows.
Although Mischel and his colleagues didn’t call the marshmallow test a working memory task, we now know that it had many of the same features of a working memory task, such as keeping a goal or greater reward in mind, ignoring a distraction, planning, and executing strategies to divert attention. Based on what we now know about working memory, we understand that a child can manage only a limited amount of information, and they can easily be overwhelmed by a very tempting option, such as a single delicious, pillowy marshmallow sitting in front of them.
In order to overcome the urge to reach out and gobble up the marshmallow, they had to use their working memory Conductor to shift their gaze or, at the very least, their attention to something else. The kids used a variety of techniques to distract themselves from the fluffy treat: hiding under the table, covering their eyes with their hands, turning their chair the opposite way, or singing a song.
Mischel has tracked these children over the years, investigating whether their ability to delay gratification gave them an advantage in life. For example, in a 1990 follow-up study, Mischel compared the children’s SAT scores with how they performed in the initial experiment and found that the longer a child had been able to wait for that second marshmallow, the higher his or her SAT score was.
In a paper published in 2011, Mischel and his colleagues retested the group. Now that they were in their forties, would they still be defined by how they performed as children? They selected the adults who as children were high delayers—they were able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow for longer— and those who gave in pretty quickly. In one testing session, they showed both a series of faces with different expressions—happy, fearful, or neutral—and asked them to press the space bar on the computer every time they saw a happy face but ignore the fearful or neutral faces. The groups performed similarly. In another testing session, the participants now had to press the space bar every time they saw a fearful expression and not when they saw a smiling face. It is a natural human impulse to respond to a smiling face, so this would require suppressing that natural inclination. Those who as children were low delayers, also had trouble not responding to the happy faces as adults; while those who had been high delayers as children, were able to control their impulses.
The next step was to find out what was happening in the brain, so they put the adults in a brain scanner while they were doing the same face task. When the high delayers had to resist the temptation to press the space bar in response to a happy face, the PFC was activated. But the low delayers were not using this area of the brain as much as the high delayers were. Instead, they were recruiting an area of the brain called the striatum, associated with automatized and unconsidered reactions.
Although Mischel didn’t give specific details on the career successes of the participants, anecdotally it seems to be the case that the high delayers turned out to be more professionally accomplished. Carolyn, one of the high delayers, earned a Ph.D. at Princeton and is
