Day 335: Another Day In The Frontal Lobe

The brain is soft. Some of my colleagues compare it to toothpaste, but that’s not quite right. It doesn’t spread like toothpaste. It doesn’t adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does. Tofu—the soft variety, if you know tofu—may be a more accurate comparison. If you cut out a sizable cube of brain it retains its shape, more or less, although not quite as well as tofu. Damaged or swollen brain, on the other hand, is softer. Under pressure, it will readily express itself out of a hole in the skull made by a high-speed surgical drill. Perhaps the toothpaste analogy is more appropriate under these circumstances.

The issue of brain texture is on my mind all the time. Why? I am a neurosurgeon. The brain is my business. Although I acknowledge that the human brain is a refined, complex, and mysterious system, I often need to regard it as a soft object inhabiting the bony confines of a hard skull. Many of the brains I encounter have been pushed around by tumors, blood clots, infections, or strokes that have swollen out of control. Some have been invaded by bullets, nails, or even maggots. I see brains at their most vulnerable. However, whereas other brain specialists, like neurologists and psychiatrists, examine brain images and pontificate from outside of the cranium, neurosurgeons boast the additional manual relationship with our most complex of organs. We are part scientist, part mechanic.

The scientist in me revels in the ethereal manifestations of the brain: the mind, consciousness, memory, language. The mechanic in me is satisfied by the clear fluid that rushes out of the end of a tube I insert into a patient’s brain to relieve excessive pressure. In everyday surgical practice, the science may take a backseat to the handiwork, and that’s okay. If you have an expanding blood clot in your head, you want a skilled brain mechanic, and preferably a swift one. You don’t care if your surgeon published a paper in Science or Nature.

I’ll give you an example of a most straightforward and manual case. I was paged to the emergency room a few years ago during my training and received the following brief report over the phone: “carpenter coming in with a nail stuck in the left frontal region of his head…neurologically intact.” What is going through my mind at this point? Do I hark back to my studies of frontal lobe circuitry and mull over the complex neural networks involved in language and memory? No. I’m thinking concrete, surgical thoughts: nails are sharp; the brain is full of blood vessels; the nail may have snagged a vessel on the way in. These thoughts are instantaneous, of course. I spell out the simple logic here purely for effect.

What I encountered in the ER was a young man, in his thirties, sitting up on an emergency room gurney. Perfectly awake and alert, arms crossed in repose and still in his construction boots, he smiled nervously when I walked in. Was he the right patient? He looked too good.

He was the right one. The carpenter explained that he and his friend were both on ladders along the side of a house. His friend was working a few rungs above. They were driving heavy-duty nails into the siding with automatic nail guns. His friend’s hand slipped upon firing in one of the nails, and the nail entered the left frontal region of my patient’s head below. For the first few moments after impact, the carpenter doubted what had happened. Although he noticed a stinging sensation within a split second of his friend’s slip of the hand, and heard the loud expletive coming from the same direction, there was no trickle of blood and he felt nothing unusual as his fingers frantically searched the top of his head. He wasn’t sure if it went in. His friend knew otherwise.

Upon close inspection of his scalp, past his short crew cut, I could see the flat silver head of the nail, not quite flush with the scalp, but a bit deeper. Apart from the nail, he looked great. I performed a quick five-minute neurological exam and found nothing wrong. I sent him down the hall for a CT scan. The nail entered his brain perfectly perpendicular to the surface of the skull. It had been driven a good two inches into his left frontal lobe. Luckily, it didn’t snag any sizable blood vessels along the way. There was no evidence of bleeding within the brain. Unlike the more common gunshot wounds we see, this was a respectably neat and clean penetrating injury.

At this point, my biggest fear—bleeding in the brain from entry of the nail—had been put to rest. Now, do I take a breath and mull over any complex scientific issues at this point? Am I exercising my formidable brainpower as a brain surgeon? When people say, “it doesn’t take a brain surgeon,” they refer to the assumption that we are the smartest ones around. Have I demonstrated this superior intelligence so far? Again, my thoughts return to the practical and concrete. We need to get the nail out of this guy’s head. It didn’t cause any bleeding on the way in. We need to avoid bleeding on the way out.

I walked out to the waiting room. His wife was there and so was his friend, who was pale and despondent, looking down at the floor. I tried to cheer them up a bit. Yes, the nail entered his brain, but his brain function, as far as we could tell, was normal and the nail caused no bleeding. Without looking up, the friend opened his hand and offered me a large silver nail that had been warming in his palm, the same type embedded in my patient’s head. “I don’t know…it might help you guys to have one of these…so you know what you’re dealing with.” I hadn’t been able to tell from the scan that the nail had two copper-colored barbs sticking out from the shaft at acute angles. I’m not a carpenter, but I figured that the purpose of the barbs was to ensure a strong hold. I thanked him and pocketed the nail in my white coat. On my way back to the ER, I ran my fingers over the pointy barbs and thought about the issue of bleeding again. Avoiding and controlling bleeding are elementary and pervasive themes in surgery—not quite the stuff of rocket science, but critical nonetheless.

After calling on the appropriate team, including the supervising neurosurgeon and anesthesiologist, I took him to the OR, shaved a small patch of hair around the nail head, and made a short linear incision in his scalp, down to the skull. There are no how-to entries in our textbooks regarding removing nails from heads, so we improvised using common sense. We drilled out a disc of frontal bone from his skull, with the nail head at the center of the disc. Slowly, we lifted this piece of bone up away from the surrounding skull, bringing the firmly embedded barbed nail with it. Although we could see a small jagged tear in the covering of the brain and a puncture wound on the surface of the brain itself, there was no blood oozing from the hole, and we considered ourselves lucky. (“Better lucky than good” is a favorite slogan among surgeons.)

Then, using large tools fit more for our patient’s line of work, we clipped off the barbs and pounded the nail through the disc of skull, backward. After soaking the bone in an antibiotic solution, we neatly plated it back in place with miniature titanium plates and screws and sewed his scalp back together. Actually, rather than suture, we used surgical staples from a staple gun to close the final layer of his scalp, unaware, at the time, of the subtle irony in that move. Within less than twenty-four hours, the patient was on his way home, joking the entire length of the hall with the friend who nailed him in the head.

When I recounted this story to my family and friends after dinner one night, they all nagged me with the same question: “How could he be normal? This went into his brain.” Finally, here’s where the scientist in me gets to pontificate a bit, settling into a fast-paced question-answer session in the comfort of my own home with a captive audience. I am not just a mechanic, after all, and the brain is not just tofu.

~Another Day In The Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside -by- Katrina Firlik

Day 182: Book Excerpt: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

Almost a decade after my first visit to Leonard Cohen’s perch in the bare hall near the top of the mountain, I ran into another unlikely maverick, this time in Zürich. I was in the Hallenstadion, a thirteen-thousand-seat auditorium recently visited by Britney Spears, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, on whose global movements I was writing, was delivering a complex discourse on the Bodhisattva’s way of life, explaining why some humans who attain Nirvana (the word means “blown out” in Sanskrit) choose to come back to the world to help the rest of us.

Many of the native English speakers there—mostly Buddhist, as I am not—were trying, if they could, to follow the intricate philosophical teachings in French, in part because the Dalai Lama’s words came through his French translator with such lucid transparency. The translator’s name was Matthieu Ricard, and he’d received his PhD in molecular biology from the Institut Pasteur, studying under the Nobel Prize winner François Jacob. Indeed, Matthieu’s father, Jean-François Revel, was celebrated as one of France’s leading intellectuals, the longtime editor of L’Express; his mother, Yahne le Toumelin, was well known for her abstract art. Around the family dinner table, while Matthieu was growing up, sat Buñuel and Stravinsky and Cartier-Bresson.

But when he was twenty-one, Ricard took a trip to Nepal, and the joy and sense of discernment he’d encountered in and through some Tibetan lamas there had so profoundly moved him that, five years on, he abandoned his promising career in science and went to live in the shadow of the Himalayas. He learned Tibetan, took on monastic robes, and served—for more than a dozen years—as attendant and student of the Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. At one point in the mid-1990s, Matthieu’s father flew to Nepal to spend ten days in dialogue with his scientist son to find out why his offspring would write (much as Leonard Cohen might) that “Simplifying one’s life to extract its quintessence is the most rewarding of all the pursuits I have undertaken.”

The book that arose out of their discussions, The Monk and the Philosopher, sold almost half a million copies in France, in part because Ricard was able to argue for the Buddhist “science of mind” he had taken on with all the Cartesian clarity and eloquence he’d no doubt inherited from his father. No one I’d met could better explain, for example, how getting caught up in the world and expecting to find happiness there made about as much sense as reaching into a fire and hoping not to get burned.

Just before I met him, Ricard had been the first participant in an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. Scientists had attached 256 electrodes to the skulls of hundreds of volunteers and put them through a three-and-a-half-hour continuous functional MRI scan to test for positive emotions (and, in later experiments, compassion, the ability to control emotional responses, the capacity to process information). The subjects were similar in every respect except that some had given themselves over to a regular practice of stillness and the others had not. Ricard’s score for positive emotions was so far beyond the average of nonmonastic subjects that the researchers, after testing many others who had meditated for ten thousand hours or more and many who had not, felt obliged to conclude that those who had sat still for years had achieved a level of happiness that was, quite literally, off the charts, unseen before in the neurological literature.

By the time we met in Zürich, the fifty-nine-year-old Frenchman was routinely described as “the happiest man in the world.” He was also in constant demand, explaining how happiness can be developed just as any muscle can be at the World Economic Forum in Davos, participating in conferences between scientists of matter and of mind in India, translating for the Dalai Lama across the globe, bringing the priorities he’d sharpened in stillness to the construction of clinics and schools and bridges across Tibet. Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler’s question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. “For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky,” Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn’t strike everyone. “There’s nothing I can do, so it’s really quite liberating. There’s nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It’s beautiful.” Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.

His explanation made a different kind of sense a few years later, when Ricard published a book of photographs that looked to me like the ultimate travel book. He’d been on retreat in a cabin on top of a mountain in Nepal for the better part of a year, and once or twice a week, he’d stepped outside and taken a picture of what lay beyond his front door. The same view, more or less, but as it changed with clouds or rain, in winter or in spring, and as the moods of the man behind the lens changed.

When I paged through the book, I realized Matthieu had inherited his mother’s eye for the art of stillness as well as his father’s analytical mind; these Portraits of Nowhere, as they could have been called, were magical. I saw Indonesia and Peru, sunlit valleys and storm-blackened skies in his work; it felt as if most of the world had made a house call to his cabin. The book, which he called Motionless Journey, might almost have been an investigation into how everything changes and doesn’t change at all—how the same place looks different even as you’re not really going anywhere.

But what made it most haunting was that, at heart, it was a description of an inner landscape. This is what your mind—your life—looks like when you’re going nowhere. Always full of new colors, sights, and beauties; always, more or less, unaltered.

~~The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere -by- Pico Iyer

Day 148: Book Excerpt: Moonwalking With Einstein

Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory. Any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be conveyed, first had to be remembered.
Today it often seems we remember very little. When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my day planner, which remembers my schedule so that I don’t have to. When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. When I sit down to work, I hit the play button on a digital voice recorder or open up a notebook that holds the contents of my interviews. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge, and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory. Growing up, in the days when you still had to punch seven buttons, or turn a clunky rotary dial, to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a neuropsychologist at Trinity College Dublin, fully a third of Brits under the age of thirty can’t remember even their own home land line number without pulling it up on their handsets. The same survey found that 30 percent of adults can’t remember the birthdays of more than three immediate family members. Our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things anymore.
Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they’ve also changed how we think and how we use our brains.
...
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes how the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and offered to bestow his wonderful invention upon the Egyptian people. “Here is a branch of learning that will ... improve their memories,” Theuth said to the Egyptian king. “My discovery provides a recipe for both memory and wisdom.” But Thamus was reluctant to accept the gift. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” he told the god. “They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”
Socrates goes on to disparage the idea of passing on his own knowledge through writing, saying it would be “singularly simple-minded to believe that written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.” Writing, for Socrates, could never be anything more than a cue for memory—a way of calling to mind information already in one’s head. Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay, because even while the quantity of knowledge available to people might increase, they themselves would come to resemble empty vessels. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today.
Socrates lived in the fifth century B.C., at a time when writing was ascendant in Greece, and his own views were already becoming antiquated. Why was he so put off by the idea of putting pen to paper? Securing memories on the page would seem to be an immensely superior way of retaining knowledge compared to trying to hold it in the brain. The brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering. Writing is how we overcome those essential biological constraints. It allows our memories to be pulled out of the fallible wetware of the brain and secured on the less fallible page, where they can be made permanent and (one sometimes hopes) disseminated far, wide, and across time. Writing allows ideas to be passed across generations, without fear of the kind of natural mutation that is necessarily a part of oral traditions.
To understand why memory was so important in the world of Socrates, we have to understand something about the evolution of writing, and how different early books were in both form and function. We have to go back to an age before printing, before indexes and tables of contents, before the codex parceled texts into pages and bound them at the edge, before punctuation marks, before lowercase letters, even before there were spaces between words.
Today we write things down precisely so we don’t have to hold them in our memories. But through at least the late Middle Ages, books served not as replacements for memory, but rather as memory aids. As Thomas Aquinas put it, “Things are written down in material books to help the memory.” One read in order to remember, and books were the best available tools for impressing information into the mind. In fact, manuscripts were often copied for no reason other than to help their copier memorize them.
In the time of Socrates, Greek texts were written on long, continuous scrolls—some stretching up to sixty feet—pasted together from sheets of pressed papyrus reeds imported from the Nile Delta. These texts were cumbersome to read, and even more cumbersome to write. It would be tough to invent a less user-friendly way of accessing information. In fact, it wasn’t until about 200 B.C. that the most basic punctuation marks were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the director of the Library of Alexandria, and all they consisted of was a single dot at either the bottom, middle, or top of the line letting readers know how long to pause between sentences. Instead, words ran together in an unending stream of capital letters known as scriptio continua , broken up by neither spaces nor punctuation. Words that started on one line would spill over onto the next without even a hyphen.

~~Moonwalking With Einstein:The Art and Science of Remebering Everything -by- Joshua Foer

Day 136: Book Excerpt: The Chaos Imperative

Letters started pouring in to Switzerland’s University of Bern from physicists all over Europe with questions and praise. Some came from the most esteemed scientists of the day. The letters were addressed to one Albert Einstein, who a number of months earlier had published his theory of relativity. But what the letter writers didn’t know was that Einstein didn’t work at the university. The physicists knew that he lived in Bern and just assumed he was a professor at the university there.

In fact, Einstein had nothing to do with the university. He was a patent clerk. A government worker had turned the world of physics upside down.

We all know the story of how Einstein, at a young age, made stunning advances in physics. Most of us also have heard that Einstein was a poor student and was able to make his pioneering discoveries in physics despite being completely divorced from academia.

It was almost too extraordinary to believe. A twenty-six-year-old emerges seemingly out of nowhere with a scientific theory that changes the world. That alone would have been unprecedented. But ten years later Einstein once again revolutionized physics, reinventing our understanding of gravity. Today Einstein’s name is virtually synonymous with genius.

The explanation that most of us have grown up with for Einstein’s breakthroughs is that Einstein had such a brilliant and unusual mind that he—almost magically, in a stroke of insight—saw the universe in a whole new way.
In trying to understand Einstein’s unique genius, scientists over the years initially focused on the structural nature of his brain. Einstein had such an extraordinary mind, scientists reasoned, that there must be something fundamentally different about his brain.

When Einstein died in 1953, coroner Thomas Harvey removed what had become the most famous brain in history as a matter of course; it was a regular part of the autopsy procedure. What he did next, however—putting the brain in a jar of formaldehyde, slipping the jar into a bag, and walking off with it—was not. But Harvey believed it was his duty to science and to the world to preserve Einstein’s brain in order to let researchers study it and unlock the secrets of his mind.

In the succeeding years, neuroscientists, or neuroanatomists, as they used to be called, asked Harvey for certain sections of the brain in a race to pinpoint exactly which part of Einstein’s brain was so unique.

Scientists found that Einstein had a higher-than-average concentration of neurons in the part of the brain responsible for mathematical thinking. This seemed like a promising lead. The problem with this finding, however, was that Einstein wasn’t exceptionally gifted in math. His first wife, Mileva Maric, used to check all his calculations and correct them. And while Einstein was far more accomplished in math than your average English—or math—major, his discoveries weren’t really mathematical breakthroughs. Instead, his theories of relativity reconceptualized our notions of time and space. They were more a new set of ways of looking at the universe, supported by the math, than a set of complex mathematical formulas.

Another scientist, Marian C. Diamond, discovered that Einstein had more glial cells than average. Glial cells make up the myelin layer that insulates the brain’s axons, speeding up communication between the neurons. They also function as a distribution system, bringing energy to the neurons while removing waste.

However, only in one area of Einstein’s brain was the difference in glial cells statistically significant. And since Einstein’s brain was older than the other brains Diamond compared it against, and glial cells continue to divide as we age, it was only natural that Einstein had more of them. So while his glial network conceivably could have had something to do with his genius, we simply cannot know its impact for certain.
On and on went the physiological investigations. Scientists discovered that Einstein’s brain was wider than average. On the other hand, it also weighed less than average.

In the end, the studies on Einstein’s brain proved compromised in many ways and yielded no real insight into his genius. The reality is that each of us has unique idiosyncrasies in the makeup of our brain.

Even Einstein didn’t think it was his brain that made him who he was. He once commented that the gap between what the public thought of his intellectual prowess and the reality was “grotesque.”

But if it wasn’t his brain that made the difference, what did set Einstein apart? And what does Einstein’s genius have to do with chaos?

At the University of Zurich at the turn of the twentieth century, rows of well-dressed students would have been taking copious notes, smoking, and tackling complex formulas. One student who likely would not have been in the room, however, was Einstein, who was inclined to skip class and hang out in the coffeehouses on the Bahnhofstrasse, talking about new ideas in physics with the café crowd.

In the summer, while other physics students were working in labs or helping professors publish papers, Einstein hiked the beautiful trails of the Appenzell District in the Alps. It was as if his entire year were one big, unstructured interlude.

And that is our first clue to Einstein’s genius. To all appearances, Einstein was a slacker. Granted, he was a slacker obsessed with theoretical physics, but he was a slacker nonetheless.

He couldn’t be bothered to go to class. He engendered so little confidence in his academic abilities that one of his instructors suggested he give up studying physics altogether. In a great bit of irony, when graduation rolled around, Einstein was the only unemployed member of the class of 1900. His father, Hermann, tried to call in favors to get his son a job, but to no avail.

Imagine his poor mother’s desperate concern: “You have to start going to class.” “What happened to the intelligent young man I knew?” “You know, if you worked harder, you’d be surprised by how much progress you could make.”

It’s easy to sympathize with his parents’ likely responses. Einstein’s seemingly dilettante behavior would have driven most parents to distraction.

But his parents’ misgivings were for naught. What Einstein was actually doing was exercising a very special part of his brain.

Most of us tend to have clearly defined ideas about what makes up the road to success. We value discipline and diligence, hard work, and the idea of “paying your dues.” Unstructured time just “hanging out” is for teenagers with too much time on their hands, we think, and for surfer bums. Most of us need to pay attention, study hard, and learn.

But that’s not what Einstein did at all. As we’ll see, Einstein followed a specific process in developing his ideas—one intimately related to the chaos imperative. It is one that arguably led to his extraordinary and unpredictable brilliance. And it is one that each of us can tap into as well.

~~The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness and Success -by- Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack

Day 37: Book Excerpt: Willpower- Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength

As psychologists were identifying the benefits of self-control, anthropologists and neuroscientists were trying to understand how it evolved. The human brain is distinguished by large and elaborate frontal lobes, giving us what was long assumed to be the crucial evolutionary advantage: the intelligence to solve problems in the environment. After all, a brainier animal could presumably survive and reproduce better than a dumb one. But big brains also require lots of energy. The adult human brain makes up 2 percent of the body but consumes more than 20 percent of its energy. Extra gray matter is useful only if it enables an animal to get enough extra calories to power it, and scientists didn’t understand how the brain was paying for itself. What, exactly, made ever-larger brains with their powerful frontal lobes spread through the gene pool?

One early explanation for the large brain involved bananas and other calorie-rich fruits. Animals that graze on grass don’t need to do a lot of thinking about where to find their next meal. But a tree that had perfectly ripe bananas a week ago may be picked clean today or may have only unappealing, squishy brown fruits left. A banana eater needs a bigger brain to remember where the ripe stuff is, and the brain could be powered by all the calories in the bananas, so the “fruit-seeking brain theory” made lots of sense—but only in theory. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar found no support for it when he surveyed the brains and diets of different animals. Brain size did not correlate with the type of food. Dunbar eventually concluded that the large brain did not evolve to deal with the physical environment, but rather with something even more crucial to survival: social life. Animals with bigger brains had larger and more complex social networks. That suggested a new way to understand Homo sapiens. Humans are the primates who have the largest frontal lobes because we have the largest social groups, and that’s apparently why we have the most need for self-control. We tend to think of willpower as a force for personal betterment—adhering to a diet, getting work done on time, going out to jog, quitting smoking—but that’s probably not the primary reason it evolved so fully in our ancestors. Primates are social beings who have to control themselves in order to get along with the rest of the group. They depend on one another for the food they need to survive. When the food is shared, often it’s the biggest and strongest male who gets first choice in what to eat, with the others waiting their turn according to status. For animals to survive in such a group without getting beaten up, they must restrain their urge to eat immediately. Chimpanzees and monkeys couldn’t get through meals peacefully if they had squirrel-sized brains. They might expend more calories in fighting than they’d consume at the meal.

Although other primates have the mental power to exhibit some rudimentary etiquette at dinner, their self-control is still quite puny by human standards. Experts surmise that the smartest nonhuman primates can mentally project perhaps twenty minutes into the future—long enough to let the alpha male eat, but not long enough for much planning beyond dinner. (Some animals, like squirrels, instinctively bury food and retrieve it later, but these are programmed behaviors, not conscious savings plans.) In one experiment, when monkeys were fed only once a day, at noon, they never learned to save food for the future. Even though they could take as much as they wanted during the noon feeding, they would simply eat their fill, either ignoring the rest or wasting it by getting into food fights with one another. They’d wake up famished every morning because it never occurred to them to stash some of their lunch away for an evening snack or breakfast.

Humans know better thanks to the large brain that developed in our Homo ancestors two million years ago. Much of self-control operates unconsciously. At a business lunch, you don’t have to consciously restrain yourself from eating meat off your boss’s plate. Your unconscious brain continuously helps you avoid social disaster, and it operates in so many subtly powerful ways that some psychologists have come to view it as the real boss. This infatuation with unconscious processes stems from a fundamental mistake made by researchers who keep slicing behavior into thinner and briefer units, identifying reactions that occur too quickly for the conscious mind to be directing. If you look at the cause of some movement in a time frame measured in milliseconds, the immediate cause will be the firing of some nerve cells that connect the brain to the muscles. There is no consciousness in that process. Nobody is aware of nerve cells firing. But the will is to be found in connecting units across time. Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern. Smoking one cigarette will not jeopardize your health. Taking heroin once will not make you addicted. One piece of cake won’t make you fat, and skipping one assignment won’t ruin your career. But in order to stay healthy and employed, you must treat (almost) every episode as a reflection of the general need to resist these temptations. That’s where conscious self-control comes in, and that’s why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

~~Willpower- Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength -by-Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney