As mentioned before, recently I read Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of its Own, a highly informative and accessible account of some of the traits of human psychology, as documented by empirical research, indicating that our cognitive and emotional apparatus is highly unreliable. From the introduction:
[…] the truth of the matter – as revealed by the quite extraordinary and fascinating research described in this book – is that your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. (p. 2)
The rhetoric is quite (too?) strong, and one may raise an eyebrow or two at the conflation of brain with human cognition and psychology generally speaking. Nevertheless, the evidence presented by Fine is compelling and unsettling. The chapters have the following titles: the vain brain, the emotional brain, the immoral brain, the deluded brain, the pigheaded brain, the secretive brain, the weak-willed brain, the bigoted brain, and finally the vulnerable brain. (You get the picture…) I highly recommend the book, especially for philosophers who still hold on to the idea that human cognition is for the most part reliable and truth-conducive.
Anyway, in this post I want to discuss specifically the ‘weak-willed brain’; in this chapter, Fine discusses experimental findings suggesting that the will is an extremely vulnerable and, let’s just say it, weak feature in humans. Indeed, psychologists are increasingly recognizing the role of self-control in a person’s behavior; after the IQ and the EQ paradigms, the latest news in the field of performance and success is the concept of self-control (see here for example). However, “self-control, as we all know to our chagrin, is a temperamental performer” (p.154). Moreover, there is significant variability among individuals; there is this person who somehow always finds the strength to go to the gym and forego desserts, and who has a continuous work rhythm regardless of circumstances, while most of us simply can’t get ourselves to stick to New Year’s resolutions past the first weeks of January. What is more: some experiments have shown that, if self-control is called upon extensively at a given time (for example, if the temptation to eat cookies when hungry must be resisted), it is as if it became ‘tired’ and subsequently even less effective than usual.
Fine discusses two approaches to enhancing self-control: one is based on the idea that it should be used parsimoniously, only for what really matters, as there seems to be a limited store of self-control one is capable of; the second is based on the idea that self-control can be enhanced with practice. To illustrate the first approach, she offers the following quote (particularly delightful to philosophers):
What, for example, can best be done about this unfortunate tendency of the moral muscle to become fatigued with use? One option, of course, is to use it very sparingly. My father, a professional philosopher, has a job that involves thinking very hard about very difficult things. This, of course, is an activity that consumes mental resources at a terrific rate. The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a decadent chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday’s shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the sale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father’s willpower – rested and restored whenever possible – can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of ten men. (p. 167)
(The philosopher in question is, of course, Kit Fine.) One may conclude from this passage that it’s all doomed to failure anyway, and that there is no rational option other than Roman indulgence and decadence. But towards the end of the chapter, Fine also discusses empirical evidence for the benefic effects of ‘training’ one’s will and self-control on a regular basis. People who regularly exercise restraint and discipline seem to do it across the board, and the good news is that this is a characteristic you can acquire and develop along the way, even when all hope seems lost (details in the book!).
Coincidentally, just as I was reading Fine’s book, I also read an article on the celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Besides being a writer, Murakami is also notoriously a runner, having run countless marathons and ultra-marathons in his life. In fact, to him, writing and running are intimately related; as he narrates in his short book What I talk about when I talk about running (which I read with much interest last year, being a bit of a runner myself), he picked up running precisely at the moment he decided to become a writer, at age 33. He figured he needed some systematic exercising when his routine became sitting and writing for hours and hours, everyday. Moreover, he claims that the same discipline which makes him run at least 6 miles a day, come rain or come shine, is what gives him the inner strength to write an extremely long and complicated book such as his latest, 1Q84.
Thus, with Kit Fine and Haruki Murakami, we have two radically different approaches to getting a lot of brilliant work done and exercising self-control. While most of us most probably secretly hope to become a Kit Fine while eating chocolate and enjoying comfy armchairs, I suspect that in most cases, the best advice is to go with the Murakami approach: no pain, no gain.
Recent Comments