Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

Those of us who struggle to resist junk foods or otherwise suffer a lack of will power will be heartened by some good and bad news from neuroscience.

First, the bad news.  A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of will power, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others.  Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes will power.  In a typical experiment on this effect, people who first had to circle every ‘e’ in a long passage gave up sooner when they then had to watch a video of a fixed, boring, scene. The same loss of persistence has been found when people resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all suggests we have a fixed will power budget, one we should be careful in spending. Some neuroscientists suspect that self-control consumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again, and so the depletion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our will power; like a muscle, over time the more we use it, the more it gradually increases. But doing this takes, of all things, will power.

The sociologist Anselm Strauss was a proponent of methods to generate “grounded theory,” that is, a progressive series of hypothesis that are tested, then refined according to what the data shows, and tested again, and so refined, in a perpetual cascade of theory-data loops, each of which presents new conclusions and raises new questions. In this model, the essence of the scientific method boils down to changing your mind for the right reasons, and asking the right questions.
And now it’s happened to me; I’ve changed my mind yet again. Here’s what I originally thought:

One of my most basic assumptions about the relationship between mental effort and brain function has begun to crumble. Here’s why.

My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems.  My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.

One of my most basic assumptions about the relationship between mental effort and brain function has begun to crumble. Here’s why.

My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems. My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.

My guiding assumptions included the standard premise that the mind-body relationship operates according to orderly, understandable principles. One such might be called the “dose-response” rule, that the more time put into a given method of training, the greater the result in the targeted biological system. This is a basic correlate of neuroplasticity, the mechanism through which repeated experience shapes the brain.

For example, a string of research has now established that more experienced meditators recover more quickly from stress-induced physiological arousal than do novices. Nothing remarkable there. The dose-response rule would predict this is so. Thus brain imaging studies show that the spatial areas of London taxi drivers become enhanced during the first six months they spend driving around that city’s winding streets; likewise, the area for thumb movement in the motor cortex becomes more robust in violinists as they continue to practice over many months.