[acb-hsp] From Scientific American

[peter altschul]

How to Avoid the Temptations of Immediate Gratification
  Neuroscience hints at the power of imagining the future
  By Melanie Bauer Tuesday, January 15, 2013
  Happy New Year! It's 2013 and you've vowed to cut sweets out of 
your diet.
  Despite your desire for a trimmer body, the sight of cupcakes 
in a cafe window overpowers your good intentions.  You cannot 
resist the small, sweet reward even though the larger, delayed 
reward of a healthier body is ultimately more desirable.
  What leads some of us to give in to our immediate urges, while 
others are able to endure the wait for bigger and better 
outcomes?
  Neuroeconomists are investigating the brain to answer this 
question.  They are interested in comparing the brain activity of 
individuals who act impulsively-those who choose rewards now over 
later-to that of patient folks.
  Traditionally, the assumption of researchers in this field, and 
the related field of behavioral economics, has been that 
impulsive people choose immediate rewards simply because they 
dislike waiting.  In these prior studies, when presented with a 
hypothetical choice between, say, $50 now or $100 in a year, 
impulsive individuals went for the $50.
  Additionally, they showed a greater brain response to the 
immediate $50 reward-in the part of the brain that represents how 
much you are enjoying a reward (the ventral striatum)-than did 
patient people.  Researchers interpreted this brain response as 
the impulsive individuals' preference for immediacy.  So while 
impulsive individuals would claim "carpe diem" and "strike while 
the iron is hot" as their life mantras, the less quoted "carpent 
tua poma nepotes" and "good things come to those who wait" are 
patient individuals' words to live by.
  However, impulsivity may not simply be due to how long people 
are willing to wait for gratification.  A recent study by a team 
of researchers at Washington University in St.  Louis found that 
when people waited for a reward, patient people were seenbthrough 
the lens of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 
machinebimagining the future.  In more patient people, the 
researchers observed increased activity in the region of the 
brain that helps you think about the future (the anterior 
prefrontal cortex).  The patient individuals, it seems, devoted 
more energy to imagining receiving their reward later.
  What sets this Washington University study apart from previous 
studies is that researchers have never before focused on the 
brain responses of individuals after they make a decision and are 
waiting for their reward.
  Instead, researchers have typically measured brain activity 
while people are making their choices.  Prior researchers likely 
disregarded the waiting period because their studies used 
hypothetical rewards over long delays.  Because people weren't 
actually waiting in real time to receive a real reward, the 
researchers could not monitor the brain during this waiting 
period.  This new study presented people with real rewards in the 
form of squirts of juice either immediately or at a delay of up 
to a minute.  In fact, the researchers squirted the juice 
straight into the mouths of study subjects, in much the same way 
that animals have been rewarded in similar studies.
  This future thinking, which is associated with the anterior 
prefrontal cortex (aPFC), has also been found in 
neuropsychological studies that focus on two different, but 
related phenomena: prospective memory-remembering to do something 
in the future, like fill up your gas tank on the way home from 
work-and episodic future thought-thinking about the future, such 
as imagining what you'll cook for dinner later tonight.  Now, one 
more phenomenon can be added to the list of contexts in which 
people imagine a future outcome and activate their aPFC: 
imagining future rewards.
  One problem with the future is its vagueness.  While you are 
able to imagine in your mind going to the gas station or cooking 
dinner in general, the exact details of these activities are not 
clear.  You don't know which pump you'll use at the gas station, 
or precisely what time you'll remove the pizza from the oven.  In 
this way, the future is fuzzy.  This fuzziness can make the 
future less appealing.  Remember the marshmallow experiment that 
tested the willpower of children to resist the temptation to eat 
a marshmallow placed on a table in front of them, so they could 
receive two marshmallows after they waited? Research suggests 
that if that one marshmallow was made more abstract-such as 
hiding it from view or just showing a picture of it-the reward 
would become less appealing and more similar in appeal to 
receiving two marshmallows at a future time.  On the flip side, 
making the future less fuzzy by focusing on the details-eating 
double the marshmallows currently being presented-could also make 
the future marshmallows more attractive than the present singular 
marshmallow.  In this way kids would have an easier time 
resisting the one marshmallow now in exchange for the two 
marshmallows in the future.
  Perhaps a combination of this fuzziness research (i.e., delay 
of gratification research) with recent neuroeconomics 
researchblinking impulsivity with a lack of future thinkingbcd be 
useful for clinicians who are developing treatment plans for 
impulsive individuals.  Because the future is fuzzy and impulsive 
people have an especially hard time imagining it, clinical 
treatments could involve de-emphasizing the present, making it 
more abstract, and building a concrete image of the future.  For 
example, while it may be quicker, easier, and cheaper to buy fast 
food for dinner-immediate rewards that are all very 
desirable-people could learn to visualize larger future rewards 
when deciding what to eat, such as avoiding ailments like obesity 
and Type-2 diabetes.  They could also avoid driving past their 
favorite fast food restaurants and only stock their cupboards 
with nutritious foods so the most visually salient meal options 
are healthy ones.  This could help shift the attractive light 
from being cast on the present desire for fast food to instead 
being on the future desire for a healthy body.
  For impulsive individuals who repeatedly make decisions that 
satisfy their current desires at the expense of their future 
needs, the negative effects on their health can be significant.  
Given the host of public health issues that involve impulsivity, 
research in neuroeconomics could prove important.  Future 
research could measure the effects of an intervention on the 
brain.  Can we get impulsive people to produce activity in their 
brain that shows they're thinking about the future in a concrete 
way, making them look and act more patiently in the laboratory? 
Do these interventions lead to real-life choices to invest in the 
future and not give in to present impulses? Not to mention, could 
adapting the mindset that the future is worth waiting for help 
the rest of us keep some of our New Year's resolutions?