You’ve just
had a decadent lunch, and you are pleasantly full when you walk back into work
to find that it’s your coworker’s birthday and he is about to cut into a
delicious looking cake. He offers you a piece. Do you take it? “Getting to No”
outlines the different processes that go on in your brain when you reach that
critical decision making point where you must decide if you will give into
temptation or take the healthier route and reject the cake. The reason why we
must actively draw on our willpower to deny that tasty piece of cake is because
it has been in our best interest to take in as many calories as we could get
our hands on in the past. In terms of evolution, those that took the cake, or
other high calorie snacks, tended to survive more than the person who didn’t.
Understanding the evolutionary basis for a behavior can often help us to
understand a behavior, as Gary Marcus develops in his book Guitar Zero. He
seeks to understand why music helped ancient humans survive because that might
give us insight into why music is a world-wide phenomenon. Unfortunately, music
has a much more complex evolutionary basis than the obvious reasoning for why
humans would benefit from more food.
Despite
their differences when it comes to their evolutionary basis, music and deciding
whether or not to have that piece of cake do share one type of complexity: they
both involve complex brain processes. Learning to play an instrument is so
difficult because one must transform an immense amount of declarative memory,
the memory of facts, into procedural memory, the type of memory we use for
reflexes. This involves transferring ideas stored in the prefrontal cortex,
which involves conscious activity, to the hippocampus, which involves memory,
and the basal ganglia, which involves the control of muscles. Willpower
involves emotion as well as logic, so it comprises more complex brain pathways.
A study showed that dieters who were shown an
image of food while hooked up to an fMRI machine had more action in their
amygdala than their nuclei accumbens, indicating that they were working to
suppress their appetites. Non-dieters showed the opposite effect. After
drinking a milkshake, chronic dieters who were shown a picture of food had more
action in their nuclei accumbens than their amygdala, indicating that the brain
was stimulating the dieter to want more food. Once again, non-dieters showed
the opposite effect. This data seems to suggest that drinking a milkshake, or
conceivably eating any high calorie food, caused the dieter to feel anxiety,
which then caused the dieter to quell that anxiety with more food.
When trying to activate their
willpower, people can also get lost in illogical mind games. For example, the
halo effect is when you do something good and then feel that you can do something
bad because it will be counteracted by the good action. This is true to an
extent, but it is often pushed to the extreme, such as thinking that if you have
a banana with breakfast you can have desert with dinner. A healthy start to the
day does not counteract a naughty end to it. People can also get stuck in the “Tonight
Guy vs. Tomorrow Guy” conundrum. We feel like our actions will impact our
current selves, but we don’t stop to think about how it will impact our future
selves. You might feel good eating that cake at the moment, but you aren’t
thinking about the love handles that you’ll get down the road.
It may seem like there is no hope
to a successful diet, but don’t give up yet! It has been shown that being
mindful of the future effects of eating that cake can help you bypass
temptation by bringing the prefrontal cortex, which Gary Marcus told us involves
conscious activity, into play. Theoretically, with enough practice, someone
could begin to store mindfulness towards what they eat in the hippocampus, the
memory center, in much the same way that someone learning to play an instrument
would. Exerting willpower could become as easy as riding a bike, or playing the
guitar.
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