Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.

Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.