impulse control

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Potatoes not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph. D.

confounding variable, impulse control, meta-analysis, mouse model, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Now that you have a better sense of the overall chemistry affecting your brain process, let’s take a deeper look at the specific neurotransmitters affecting the sugarsensitive person. SEROTONIN As we saw in chapter 3, when your serotonin level is in an ideal state, you feel mellow and relaxed. You feel at peace with life. Serotonin also increases your impulse control, which allows you to more easily “just say no.” People with low levels of serotonin do not have good impulse control. It is almost impossible for them to “just say no” because there is such a short time period between the urge to do something and doing it. This is why the warm cookies on the kitchen table hop into your mouth before you even know what has happened.

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Hypoglycemia Low blood sugar resulting from a number of causes, such as not eating regularly or eating foods high in sugars. sugarsensitive people are more vulnerable to hypoglycemia because they are thought to have an exaggerated insulin response to sweet foods. (See Low blood sugar.) Impulse control The ability to “just say no.” The gap between your intention and your actually doing something. Mediated by the level of serotonin in your brain. Low serotonin results in low impulse control and vice versa. Isolation distress Emotional pain induced from being separated from a loving and supportive environment. Feelings of isolation distress increase as a person’s level of beta-endorphin drops and decrease as beta-endorphin rises.

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The chart that follows shows the difference between how you feel with optimal blood sugar and low blood sugar: OPTIMAL BLOOD SUGAR LOW BLOOD SUGAR Energetic Tired all the time Tired when appropriate Tired for no reason Focused and relaxed Restless, can’t keep still Clear Confused Good memory Trouble remembering things Able to concentrate Trouble concentrating Able to problem-solve effectively Easily frustrated Easygoing More irritable than usual Even-tempered Gets angry unexpectedly BRAIN CHEMICALS: SEROTONIN In addition to blood sugar, there are a number of chemicals in your brain that affect how you feel and how you act. Serotonin is a brain chemical that is particularly important for sugarsensitive people. An optimal level of serotonin creates a sense of relaxation. It mellows you out and makes you feel at peace with the world. Serotonin also influences your self-control, your impulse control, and your ability to plan ahead. When your serotonin level is low, you may feel depressed, act impulsively, and have intense cravings for alcohol, sweets, or carbohydrates (all of which are sugars). Scientists have worked hard to find ways to increase the level of serotonin in the brains of people who are depressed.

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Children who can describe the feelings can understand and communicate them better.” — LACK OF EMPATHY is hardly the only thing that makes most babies unalloyed narcissists—even if they’re age-appropriate narcissists. Lack of impulse control contributes too, and indeed, that one’s a lot harder to overcome. The empathic response comes on kids slowly, usually with little effort, and it costs them nothing to act on it; indeed, parents may reward them when they do. Impulse control is a whole different matter. The ability to want something and not take it—or at least to put off taking it—is something human beings struggle with their entire lives. Play must come second to work, gluttony must yield to restraint, and all manner of other pleasures must be passed up entirely if they violate marriage vows, the law or simple common sense.

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It’s hardly as straightforward a thing for a child in a shelter or an unstable home to reach a broader conclusion—that the lessons of unreliability they learn where they live are applicable to other situations in life. Still, kids do make that leap, and when they do, impulse control can be powerfully affected. — THE HANDMAIDEN of both lack of empathy and lack of impulse control is lack of remorse. It’s hard to be a successful glutton for goodies or manipulator of people if you constantly feel lousy afterward about what you’ve done. Better to remain numb to the wrongness of your behavior if you plan to keep it up. Both children and narcissistic adults feel bad when they’re punished, but non-narcissists may feel bad beforehand, too.

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They are moved equally by the fact that they want the cookie they’ve got their eye on and the belief they have a right to the cookie—are owed the cookie—and woe betide the person who tries to deny it to them. And as for asking babies to police themselves—to keep their hands off the plate of snacks or their playmate’s belongings? Not a chance. The heart wants what it wants. It was in the 1960s that Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel first conducted his landmark study in impulse control that became simply and universally known as “the marshmallow test.” Working with a sample group of four-year-olds, he offered each of the kids a deal: They could have one marshmallow right away or, if they waited fifteen minutes while he stepped out to run an errand, they could have two upon his return.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

These, then, are the traits that most often underlie the addiction process: poor self-regulation; lack of basic differentiation; lack of a healthy sense of self; a sense of deficient emptiness; and impaired impulse control. The development of these traits is not mysterious—or, more correctly, there is no mystery about the circumstances under which the positive qualities of self-regulation, self-worth, differentiation and impulse control fail to develop. Any gardener knows that if a plant hasn’t grown, most likely the conditions were lacking. The same goes for children. The addictive personality is a personality that hasn’t matured.

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Calling myself an addict in such company may be nothing more than an attempt to excuse my selfishness and lack of discipline. I fear being recognized. People may have seen me on TV or read something I’ve written. It’s one thing to be on stage as an authority figure, addressing an audience on stress or ADHD or parenting and childhood development, and to acknowledge that I’ve had problems with impulse control over the years. In that context my public self-revelations are received as honest, authentic and even courageous. It’s quite another matter to confess as a peer—to a group who have had a much closer confrontation with life’s gritty realities than I have—that I’m “powerless,” that my addictive behaviours often get the better of me.

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One of the most important duties of the cortex is “to inhibit inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one,” suggests neuropsychologist Joseph Ledoux.2 The prefrontal cortex (PFC), writes psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “plays a central role in the seemingly free selection of behaviours” by inhibiting many of the alternative responses that arise in a situation, allowing only one to proceed. “It makes sense, then, that when this region is damaged patients become unable to stifle inappropriate responses to their environment.”3 In other words, people with impaired PFC function will have poor impulse control and will behave in ways that to others seem uncalled for, childish or bizarre. It is also in the frontal cortex that social behaviours are learned. When the executive parts of the cortex have been destroyed in rats, they are still able to function—but only as immature youngsters who haven’t acquired any social skills.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

An oft-repeated fact about adolescents is how “emotional intelligence” and “social intelligence” predict adult success and happiness better than do IQ or SAT scores.33 It’s all about social memory, emotional perspective taking, impulse control, empathy, ability to work with others, self-regulation. There is a parallel in other primates, with their big, slowly maturing frontal cortices. For example, what makes for a “successful” male baboon in his dominance hierarchy? Attaining high rank is about muscle, sharp canines, well-timed aggression. But once high status is achieved, maintaining it is all about social smarts—knowing which coalitions to form, how to intimidate a rival, having sufficient impulse control to ignore most provocations and to keep displacement aggression to a reasonable level.

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Simmons decision), offers a logical resolution.16 Deciding whether to have an abortion involves logical reasoning about moral, social, and interpersonal issues, stretching out over days to weeks. In contrast, deciding whether to, say, shoot someone can involve issues of impulse control over the course of seconds. The frontal immaturity of the adolescent brain is more pertinent to split-second issues of impulse control than to slow, deliberative reasoning processes. Or in a mitigated-free-will framework, rapid-fire, impulsive behaviors can occur while the homunculus has gone to the bathroom. Causation and Compulsion Some proponents of mitigated free will distinguish between the concepts of “causation” and “compulsion.”17 In a way that feels a bit nebulous, the former involves every behavior having been caused by something, of course, but the latter reflects only a subset of behaviors being really, really caused by something, something that compromises rational, deliberative processes.

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There are frequent counterexamples to each; stress elicits prosociality in more males than just pair-bonded male marmosets, and we saw that females are plenty capable of aggression. Then there’s Mahatma Gandhi and Sarah Palin.* Why are some people exceptions to these gender stereotypes? That’s part of what the rest of this book is about. Stress can disrupt cognition, impulse control, emotional regulation, decision making, empathy, and prosociality. One final point. Recall from chapter 2 how the frontal cortex making you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing is value free—“right thing” is purely instrumental. Same with stress. Its effects on decision making are “adverse” only in a neurobiological sense.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

Because it’s a competition, this means the outcome can be tipped. Poor impulse control is a hallmark characteristic of the majority of criminals in the prison system.29 They generally know the difference between right and wrong actions, and they understand the seriousness of the punishment—but they are hamstrung by an inability to control their impulses. They see a woman with an expensive purse walking alone in an alley, and they cannot think but to take advantage of the opportunity. The temptation overrides the concern for their future. If it seems difficult to empathize with people who have poor impulse control, just think of all the things you succumb to that you don’t want to.

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If it seems difficult to empathize with people who have poor impulse control, just think of all the things you succumb to that you don’t want to. Snacks? Alcohol? Chocolate cake? Television? One doesn’t have to look far to find poor impulse control pervading our own landscape of decision making. It’s not that we don’t know what’s best for us, it’s simply that the frontal lobe circuits representing the long-term considerations can’t win the elections when the temptation is present. It’s like trying to elect a party of moderates in the middle of war and economic meltdown. So our new rehabilitative strategy is to give the frontal lobes practice in squelching the short-term circuits. My colleagues Stephen LaConte and Pearl Chiu have begun leveraging real-time feedback in brain imaging to allow this to happen.30 Imagine that you’d like to get better at resisting chocolate cake.

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For the past billion years this has been a tremendously successful approach, yielding human beings in rocket ships from single self-replicating molecules in pre-biotic soup. But this variation is also a source of trouble for the legal system, which is built partially upon the premise that humans are all equal before the law. This built-in myth of human equality suggests that all people are equally capable of decision making, impulse control, and comprehending consequences. While admirable, the notion is simply not true. Some argue that even though the myth may be bullet-riddled, it may still be useful to hold on to. The argument suggests that whether or not the equality is realistic, it yields a “particularly admirable kind of social order, a counterfactual that pays dividends in fairness and stability.”33 In other words, assumptions can be provably wrong and still have utility.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Agreeable people are able to control undesirable emotions such as anger and frustration. This control happens in the frontal lobes, which govern impulse control and help us to regulate negative emotions, the same region that governs our executive attention mode. When the frontal lobes are damaged—from injury, stroke, Alzheimer’s, or a tumor, for example—agreeableness is often among the first things to go, along with impulse control and emotional stability. Some of this emotional regulation can be learned—children who receive positive reinforcement for impulse control and anger management become agreeable adults. As you might imagine, being an agreeable person is a tremendous advantage for maintaining positive social relationships.

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In fact, most of the prefrontal cortex’s connections to other brain regions are not excitatory; they’re the opposite: inhibitory. That’s because one of the great achievements of the human prefrontal cortex is that it provides us with impulse control and, consequently, the ability to delay gratification, something that most animals lack. Try dangling a string in front of a cat or throwing a ball in front of a retriever and see if they can sit still. Because the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop in humans until after age twenty, impulse control isn’t fully developed in adolescents (as many parents of teenagers have observed). It’s also why children and adolescents are not especially good at planning or delaying gratification.

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Ioana knew that keeping up with her coursework was more important than what pen to buy, but the mere situation of facing so many trivial decisions in daily life created neural fatigue, leaving no energy for the important decisions. Recent research shows that people who were asked to make a series of meaningless decisions of just this type—for example, whether to write with a ballpoint pen or a felt-tip pen—showed poorer impulse control and lack of judgment about subsequent decisions. It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal

banking crisis, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Easter island, game design, impulse control, lifelogging, loss aversion, low interest rates, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, phenotype, Richard Thaler, social contagion, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

Your willpower challenge could be something you’ve been avoiding (what we’ll call an “I will” power challenge) or a habit you want to break (an “I won’t” power challenge). You could also choose an important goal in your life that you’d like to give more energy and focus to (an “I want” power challenge)—whether it’s improving your health, managing stress, honing your parenting skills, or furthering your career. Because distraction, temptation, impulse control, and procrastination are such universal human challenges, the strategies in this book will be helpful for any goal you choose. By the time you finish the book, you’ll have greater insight into your challenges and a new set of self-control strategies to support you. TAKE YOUR TIME This book is designed to be used as if you were taking my ten-week course.

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But because it paid off for our ancestors, our modern brains still come equipped with a well-preserved instinct to crave fat and sweets. Fortunately, we can use the brain’s more recently evolved self-control system to override those cravings and keep our hands out of the candy bowl. So while we’re stuck with the impulse, we’re also equipped with the impulse control. Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind. There’s the version of us that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and the version of us that controls our impulses and delays gratification to protect our long-term goals.

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Or you could build your own “I will” power obstacle course, with stations that require you to drink wheat grass juice, do twenty jumping jacks, and file your taxes early. Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness. It doesn’t take a lifetime of meditation to change the brain.

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive load, computer vision, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, happiness index / gross national happiness, impulse control, indoor plumbing, inventory management, knowledge worker, late fees, linear programming, mental accounting, microcredit, p-value, payday loans, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Though careful research in psychology employs several fine distinctions to capture this idea, we will use the single umbrella term bandwidth to cover them all. Bandwidth measures our computational capacity, our ability to pay attention, to make good decisions, to stick with our plans, and to resist temptations. Bandwidth correlates with everything from intelligence and SAT performance to impulse control and success on diets. This chapter makes a bold claim. By constantly drawing us back into the tunnel, scarcity taxes our bandwidth and, as a result, inhibits our most fundamental capacities. IT’S LOUD IN HERE Imagine sitting in an office located near the railroad tracks. Trains rattle by several times an hour.

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After the information had sunk in, they gave the subjects a Raven’s test and found that those who anticipated being lonely did much worse. In fact, when they placed subjects in the scanner, they saw that making people think they would be lonely reduced activation of the executive control areas of the brain. Finally, in a study looking at impulse control, when subjects who anticipated being lonely were given the opportunity to taste chocolate-chip cookies, they ate roughly twice as many. Consistent with this, research on the diets of older adults has found that those who feel lonely in their daily lives have a substantially higher consumption of fatty foods.

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The bandwidth tax changes us in surprising and powerful ways. It is not merely its presence but also its magnitude that is surprising. Psychologists have spent decades documenting the impact of cognitive load on many aspects of behavior. Some of the most important are the behaviors captured in these vignettes: from distraction and forgetfulness to impulse control. The size of these effects suggests a substantial influence of the bandwidth tax on a full array of behaviors, even those like patience, tolerance, attention, and dedication that usually fall under the umbrella of “personality” or “talent.” So much of what we attribute to talent or personality is predicated on cognitive capacity and executive control.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

While many genetic theories of crime have been thoroughly discredited, crime is one area of social behavior where there are actually good reasons to think that genetic factors operate. Crime is of course a socially constructed category, but certain serious acts like murder and theft are not condoned in any society, and behavior traits, such as poor impulse control, that can lead certain individuals to transgress these rules could plausibly have genetic sources.39 A criminal who shoots someone else in the head over a pair of running shoes is obviously not making a rational trade-off between short-term gratification and long-term costs; this can easily be the result of poor early childhood socialization, but it is not absurd to think that some people are simply innately bad at making this sort of decision.

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Prozac, or fluoxetine, is a so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which, as its name implies, blocks the reabsorption of serotonin by the nerve synapses and effectively increases the levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is a key neurotransmitter: low levels are associated, in both humans and other primates, with poor impulse control and uncontrolled aggression against inappropriate targets, and in humans, with depression, aggression, and suicide.3 It is unsurprising, then, that Prozac and its relatives have emerged as a major cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century. Peter D. Kramer’s Listening to Prozac and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation both celebrate Prozac as a wonder drug that effects miraculous changes in personality.4 Kramer describes a patient of his, Tess, who was chronically depressed, locked into a series of masochistic relationships with married men, and at a dead end at work.

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Brunner, “Abnormal Behavior Associated with a Point Mutation in the Structural Gene for Monoamine Oxidase A,” Science 262 (1993): 578–580. 44 Lois Wingerson, Unnatural Selection: The Promise and the Power of Human Gene Research (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), pp. 291–294. 45 The theory that crime is the result of a failure to learn impulse control at a certain key developmental stage is sometimes referred to as the “life course” theory of crime; it offers an explanation as to why so large a percentage of crimes are committed by recidivists. The classic study establishing the existence of criminal “life courses” is Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Delinquency and Nondelinquency in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...And You Too! by Chelsea Handler

airport security, Burning Man, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, impulse control, microdosing, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, systems thinking, zero-sum game

You may find that after you give it some space, you may not want to react at all.” “Yes, I’ve heard about people doing that.” “Are you ever able to sit back when you’ve heard a story more than once, or know the person you’re speaking to is wrong about something, but you withhold?” Dan asked. Dan was talking about impulse control. He may as well have been speaking Portuguese. “Does impulse control go with empathy? Because I don’t have that one either.” I came to understand that motion had been cemented in my life at a time when I needed it to survive, and over time it became the only way I knew. It was my oxygen. I didn’t know how not to move fast, or how not to state my opinion, or how to just observe something rather than insert myself.

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Well, I do worry about that, but not as an existential threat—more like it will happen, but hopefully, I’ll be in Spain when it does. “I’m a big proponent of being responsible for your own happiness,” I continued, “and have always had a surfeit of dopamine to go along with it, so the only thing I really want to work on is my temper and impulse control…or, at the very least, behavior modification. I’m basically looking for a behaviorist. Like, for a puppy. I’d like to learn how to make my point without yelling.” Our first few sessions consisted of Dan guiding me through meditation, after which I would spend the rest of the time bitching about Donald Trump and what a piece of shit he was.

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I’m not going to pretend I don’t like Bert’s body more than Bernice’s—because I have a type—but I love them both the same. It’s hard for me not to molest my dogs. I know that if I squeeze them as tight as I want to, I’ll cut off their circulation. If I had gotten Bert before I met Dan, and not learned about impulse control, Bert would probably be dead. I didn’t know the snugglefest I was missing out on, because Chunk and Tammy were both affectionate, but they weren’t hedonists. Neither was interested in drawn-out body rubs and would always at some point politely let me know they were done being petted by me.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Another breakthrough occurred in 2008, when Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Charles Limb began using fMRI to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians and freestyle rappers immersed in flow. He found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also deactivated in the state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring and impulse control—both of which are important here. Self-monitoring is the voice of doubt and disparagement, that defeatist nag, our inner critic. Since flow is a fluid state—where problem solving is nearly automatic—second-guessing can only slow that process. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet, those guesses are cut off at the source.

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Creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk taking becomes less frightening. In fact, without this structure deactivated, there would have been no way for Potter to “follow the Voice, no questions asked.” The job of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is to ask those questions, to start the process of second-guessing. It is the enemy of flow junkies everywhere. Impulse control, meanwhile, is another enemy. In normal life, our ability to resist temptation is critical to survival, but flow is an action state: the Voice tells us what to do and we do it. If we are trying to control our impulses, hesitation would creep into the process. The end result would be much less doing and—for athletes like Potter—far more dying.

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This may not sound like that much, but, as fellow Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains: “[That] is as large as the average difference recorded between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families who parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.” But there’s another issue. According to psychologists, by definition, action and adventure athletes are “sensation seekers.” They’re impulsive pleasure junkies. Delayed gratification is not their game. Hell, in a 2009 Outside magazine profile of Shane McConkey, journalist Tim Sohn wrote: “Riding in a backpack as his mother skied, a three-year-old McConkey would shake the pack’s support bars while making known what he wanted: ‘Pow, Mommy, pow,’ or ‘Bump, Mommy, bump.”

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

What he found was that those who had been able to withstand the impulse to eat the first marshmallow were, by most measures, more successful than those who had gobbled it down.4 Those who had given in to temptation had “lower S.A.T. scores, higher body mass indexes, problems with drugs and trouble paying attention.”5 As Mischel and his fellow researchers later argued, “The seconds of time preschool children were willing to delay for a preferred outcome predicted their cognitive and social competence and coping as adolescents.”6 That result suggested something else: the attribute measured by the marshmallow test is, as psychologist Joachim de Posada once told a TED conference, “the most important factor for success.”7 Reams of subsequent studies, often ignored in the midst of our polarized debate over education policy, have supported that supposition. It’s virtually undeniable today that what academics have labeled “noncognitive skills” are the most influential determinants of lifetime achievement.8 The most convincing evidence of the connection between impulse control and long-term success has been documented by Terrie Moffit, a Duke University professor who, with a group of colleagues, spent decades keeping tabs on roughly one thousand subjects born in Dunedin, a city in southern New Zealand.9 What Moffit concluded, looking at her subjects after they had turned thirty-two, was that those who had displayed only a limited capacity to withstand emotional impulses at a young age were much more likely to have developed problems as adults: decades on, they were more likely to be overweight, to have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, to be alcoholics, and to abuse drugs.

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“Psychologists call them personality traits, [but] the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.”14 Inspired broadly by Walter Mischel’s earlier work on the marshmallow test and keyed generally to the concern that contemporary American education fails students too frequently, a field of research has more recently emerged to explore the causes and effects of self-control. Frequently tied to the mission many educators have to break the cycle of urban poverty, a small coterie of scholars has tried to answer the question whether impulse control might explain why certain individuals are able to escape the traps of dysfunction while others are not. At the vanguard of the campaign to determine whether “grit” holds the key to boosting the potential of underprivileged students is Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who developed a “grit scale.”15 After years of research, Duckworth was able to determine that additional grit not only lined up with lifelong success, it correlated with an individual’s proficiency in specific tasks.

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And fortunately, we’re in the midst of an educational revolution that sheds light on that very challenge. Galvanized by the research derived from the marshmallow test, a field of research has emerged more recently on the causes and effects of delayed gratification. Some scholars have come to wonder whether impulse control might offer insights into why certain individuals are able to escape dysfunction while others are mired in counterproductive patterns. At the vanguard of the campaign to instill more grit in students are widely acclaimed efforts like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), and charter-school organizations led by the likes of the “Knowledge Is Power Program” (KIPP) in cities throughout the United States.

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

classic study, epigenetics, fear of failure, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), TED Talk

Boys, on the other hand, were more likely to show decreases in brain matter volume in the caudate region of the brain—an area responsible for impulse control and behavior. Blumberg speculates that the difference in brain changes that occur in girls and boys “might contribute to the relatively greater risk for mood disorders in girls, and disorders of impulse control in boys” who have been exposed to childhood adversity. Certainly girls can have issues with attention and impulse control, and boys can become depressed and anxious in the aftermath of adversity. Any child psychiatrist can attest to that. Moreover, kids who have never been treated harshly can develop depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

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That is, they are killing off brain cells that we need. In a healthy brain, microglia control the number of neurons that the cerebral cortex needs—but unhappy microglia can excessively prune away cells in areas that would normally play a key role in basic executive functions, like reasoning and impulse control. They are essential in a healthy brain, but in the face of chronic unpredictable stress, they can start eating away at the brain’s synapses. “In some cases, microglia are engulfing and destroying dying neurons, and they are taking out the trash, just as we always thought,” says McCarthy. “But in other cases, microglia are destroying healthy neurons—and in that case, it’s more like murder.”

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

So having a diagnosis of social impairment that’s distinct from the diagnosis of autism is the same as having a diagnosis of autism that’s distinct from the diagnosis of autism! Those who previously would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s might learn that they don’t belong in the neurodevelopmental-disorders category at all, at least not officially. They could find themselves in a whole other diagnostic category: disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders. The decision ultimately comes down to an individual doctor’s opinion—and if you say that that doesn’t sound like science, I wouldn’t disagree. First, as a biologist, I find just about this whole diagnostic category scientifically suspect. The category includes six diagnoses.

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As far as I can see, only one has any basis in science: intermittent explosive disorder. Neuroimaging shows that if you lack top-down control from the frontal cortex to the amygdala, you’ll be prone to outbursts that will get you fired or arrested. But as for the other diagnoses in the disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders category? I smell a strong case of “If we label them that, then we don’t have to give them ASD services and we can just let the police deal with them.” The DSM might as well call this category Throw ’Em in Jail. Second, these diagnoses overlook the gifted but frustrated—the typical Aspie or high-functioning autistic who is laboring in a nonsympathetic environment.

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., [>]–[>] D’Argento, Savino Nuccio, [>] Dawson, Michelle, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>] de novo mutations, [>], [>]–[>] detail, attention to, [>]–[>] diagnosis of autism changing criteria for, [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] early, as important, [>]–[>] Kanner and, [>]–[>], [>] limitations of labels and, [>]–[>] potential for biomarkers and, [>]–[>] psychoanalytic approach and, [>]–[>] for TG, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] DSM-III criteria and, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>] DSM-IV criteria and, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] DSM-[>] criteria and, [>] diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), [>], [>], [>]–[>]. See also high-definition fiber tracking (HDFT) disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders (DSM category), [>]–[>] DNA. See genetics of autism Down syndrome, [>] DRD4-7R gene, [>]–[>] drugs cognitive responsiveness and, [>]–[>] environmental triggers and, [>]–[>] focus on effects and, [>] DSM. See Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) DTI.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

When one considers the proportion of our limited time and resources that must be squandered merely to guard against theft and violence (to say nothing of addressing their effects), the problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about.1 “Ethics” and “morality” (I use these terms interchangeably) are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters.2 Clearly, few subjects have greater bearing upon the question of human well-being. As we better understand the brain, we will increasingly understand all of the forces—kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence, intuitions of fairness, impulse control, the mitigation of aggression, etc.—that allow friends and strangers to collaborate successfully on the common projects of civilization. Understanding ourselves in this way, and using this knowledge to improve human life, will be among the most important challenges to science in the decades to come.

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Several regions of the brain will contribute to this impression of moral salience and to the subsequent stirrings of moral emotion. There are many separate strands of cognition and feeling that intersect here: sensitivity to context, reasoning about other people’s beliefs, the interpretation of facial expressions and body language, suspicion, indignation, impulse control, etc. At what point do these disparate processes constitute an instance of moral cognition? It is difficult to say. At a minimum, we know that we have entered moral territory once thoughts about morally relevant events (e.g., the possibility of a friend’s betrayal) have been consciously entertained.

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The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is central to most discussions of morality and the brain. As discussed further in chapters 3 and 4, this region is involved in emotion, reward, and judgments of self-relevance. It also seems to register the difference between belief and disbelief. Injuries here have been associated with a variety of deficits including poor impulse control, emotional blunting, and the attenuation of social emotions like empathy, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. When frontal damage is limited to the MPFC, reasoning ability as well as the conceptual knowledge of moral norms are generally spared, but the ability to behave appropriately toward others tends to be disrupted.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Erratic behavior, unmoored from principle, is the opposite of conservatism, which is, I believe, the animating idea of government and its relationship to the governed as established by our Founders—that government should be limited and prudent in its exercise of the power granted it by the people. It is these principles that I was schooled in and that inspire and humble me every day. In short, there is a significant difference between appearing to have problems with impulse control and actually having impulse-control problems. And so in our own time, in a very different presidency, we would do well to examine anew the efficacy of unpredictability. — On December 2, 2016, at 7:44 P.M., not quite a month after he was elected president, President-Elect Donald J. Trump tweeted this message to his followers: “The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency.

Overcoming Adrenal Fatigue: How to Restore Hormonal Balance and Feel Renewed, Energized, and Stress Free by Kathryn Simpson

impulse control, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meta-analysis, phenotype, randomized controlled trial

This is great for dealing with concrete, short-term dangers, but if stress is chronic and we’re in this state all the time, we jump at every sound and become anxious and irritable. Chronic overproduction of cortisol can also lead to depression (Raber 1998). And both excess cortisol and adrenaline can cause anxiety disorders, panic attacks, phobias, and mood swings (Brown, Varghese, and McEwen 2004). Impulse control and emotional equanimity can also become impaired (Arnsten and Goldman-Rakic 1998). * * * Helen’s Story Helen, a CPA, was forty-six when she came to my clinic with insomnia, fatigue, chronic heartburn, weight gain, and elevated cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure. She had a large stomach and a round face and was forty-five pounds over her optimum weight.

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Although benefits of REM sleep are still somewhat unclear, it obviously plays a fundamental role in sleep. Behavioral Changes Deficient cortisol results in behavior changes that may include increased anger and even psychopathic tendencies (Honk et al. 2003). It’s also associated with aggression, depressed mood, and lack of impulse control and emotion regulation (Stansbury and Gunnar 1994). Studies have shown that low cortisol levels caused by an underfunctioning HPA axis may be the cause of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in adolescents (Kariyawasam, Zaw, and Handley 2002).

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

Doctors would be able to diagnose and get paid to treat Psychosis Risk Syndrome and other disorders, such as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, that were more harbingers of future trouble than present illnesses. Kids labeled bipolar by the Biederman protocol would now have Temper Dysregulation Disorder, and kids diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder would suddenly come down with a case of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, if they were still sick at all. Pathological gambling would no longer be an Impulse Control Disorder, but instead would become a behavioral addiction, joining Alcohol Use Disorder and Cannabis Use Disorder in the Substance-Related Disorders section, which would be renamed “Addiction and Related Disorders.” Pathological gambling would be the only behavioral addiction for now; Internet Addiction had not made the cut, and Money Addiction apparently hadn’t been considered.

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(IED, which got its initials before the war in Iraq made them piquant, is pretty much what it sounds like—a propensity, mostly among children and adolescents, to become quickly and unpredictably enraged, and then quickly return to normal.) He pointed out that IED is one of those “socially constructed, I-don’t-know-what-it-means” diagnoses, one that you would think any major revision would reconsider. But, he explained, no one on the work group seemed interested in IED (or, he added, in two other impulse-control disorders—kleptomania and pyromania). It wasn’t anyone’s pet project, so the criteria had been left unmolested.* On the other hand, he continued, consider Specific Phobia, described in the DSM-IV as a “marked and persistent fear cued by . . . a specific object.” There was apparently no shortage of experts interested in this one, with the predictable result.

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O’Brien ended his talk by pointing out that it’s not just boozers and cokeheads whose addiction (and, presumably, recovery) can be verified by the magic machines. “We’ve listed gambling with the use disorders and we’ve put Internet Use Disorder in the Appendix,” O’Brien said. He’d saved it to the end, but this news was hardly an afterthought. By poaching what the DSM-IV had called Pathological Gambling from the disorders of impulse control work group, his committee had pulled off a coup. It had made official what once was only folk wisdom: that we could be addicted to behaviors as well as to drugs. We could be workaholics and shopaholics, sex addicts and love addicts, hooked on cyberporn and jonesing for carbs. (Indeed, the first question O’Brien fielded was from the head of the Food Addiction Institute, who demanded to know why food addiction hadn’t been included.)

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

That Jeep campaign worked so well because it effectively created a state of peak arousal for its participants and then sold them on an imagined transformation of their lives (starting with the purchase of a 4x4). Under those amped-up conditions, salience—that is, the attention paid to incoming stimuli—increases. But, with the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren’t used to this combination, the results can be expensive. The video game industry may have gone further down this path than anyone. “Games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists42 and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,” Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice.

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In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovered that people4 with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none. When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control,5 long-term planning, and critical reasoning faculties go offline, too. We lose our checks and balances. Combine that with excessive dopamine telling us that the connections we’re making are radically important and must be immediately acted upon—that we’re radically important and must be listened to—and it’s not hard to imagine how this goes wrong.

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The emotions and the stress will still be in your system for some time; do not allow them to unduly influence your life.” 4. In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger: Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr, Peter Krummenacher, and Helene Haker, “Dopamine, Paranormal Belief, and the Detection of Meaningful Stimuli,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8, 2010: 1670–81. 5. When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control: Julie A. Alvarez and Eugene Emory, “Executive Function and the Frontal Lobes: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Neuropsychology Review 16, no. 1 (March 2006). We have oversimplified the relationship between the PFC and executive function; as this meta-analysis suggests, there are more complex relationships between neuroanatomy and consciousness. 6.

Toxic Parents by Susan Forward

impulse control

Sometimes it has less to do with a child’s behavior than with our own exhaustion, stress level, anxiety, or unhappiness. A lot of us manage to resist the impulse to hit our children. Unfortunately, many parents are not so restrained. We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control. Physically abusive parents will assault their children whenever they have strong negative feelings that they need to discharge. These parents seem to have little, if any, awareness of the consequences of what they are doing to their children. It is almost an automatic reaction to stress. The impulse and the action are one and the same.

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The abuser becomes enraged when his child can’t meet his needs. He lashes out. At that moment, the child is more of a surrogate parent than ever, because it is the abuser’s parent at whom the abuser is truly enraged. Many of these parents also have problems with alcohol or drugs. Substance abuse is a frequent contributor to the breakdown of impulse control, though by no means is it the only one. There are many types of physical abusers, but at the darkest end of the spectrum are those who have children seemingly for the sole purpose of brutalizing them. Many of these people look, talk, and act just like human beings, but they are monsters—totally devoid of the feelings and characteristics that give most of us our humanity.

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“I DON’T WANT TO HURT MY CHILD” In chapter 6 I introduced Holly, who was referred to me by the courts after having been reported for physically abusing her young son. I knew that to truly break the cycle, Holly would have to work on two tracks: the past and the present. But in her first few sessions I focused almost exclusively on techniques that would enable her to achieve the impulse control she so desperately needed. She had to regain control of her day-to-day life, which meant gaining control of her anger, before she’d be ready to begin the lengthier process of dealing with the pain of her childhood. I insisted that Holly attend weekly meetings of Parents Anonymous, an extremely supportive self-help group for abusive parents.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

business climate, butterfly effect, complexity theory, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, impulse control, Lao Tzu, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, power law, systems thinking

The big wide clearing led up to tremendous vaulted peaks, which seemed to leap through the gently falling snow and into the low deck of clouds like a ramp to heaven. The desire to ride a fast, open machine such as a motorcycle or a snowmobile is evidence of a certain propensity toward sensation seeking, as the psychologists call it. In addition, that particular group had demonstrated poor impulse control (boldness, or a willingness to take risks, if you like) by racing ahead of the others. Now there they were, with their throttles in their fists and all that physical power ready at a touch. There was more sensory input to urge them on: the throaty animal roar of the engines. The horsepower throbbing between their thighs.

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Gary Hough (chapter 4) pulled out of the Illinois River when he saw 18-inch trees shooting past him at 15 miles an hour, while others drowned. David Stone (chapter 5) was struck by lightning on the southeast buttress of Cathedral Peak because of an inflexible plan, a failure to have a bailout plan, and perhaps even a bit of difficulty with impulse control, a difficulty that all of us who pursue adventure have. Drew Leeman is director of risk management for the National Outdoor Leadership School, which trains the guides and guides the trainers in anything from whitewater kayaking to snowboarding. “You need humility,” Leeman said, in order to resign in time.

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But a climber named Karl Iwen, unfamiliar with Three Fingered Jack, a volcanic mountain in Oregon, which he was descending, left his companions, left the trail, left his ice ax strapped to his pack, and ventured out onto the snow, where he treated his companions to a spectacular show as he slid into the couloir and did a 600-foot Peter Pan. Karl did not die doing what he loved. He died of poor impulse control, or what I call “the rapture of the shallow.” The perfect adventure shouldn’t be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we’ve done everything we can.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

A number of conditions, including living in a temperate zone (where it’s necessary to anticipate seasonal change), living in a stable family or stable economic/political society (where a person learns to trust promises made to him), and becoming educated, can create future-positive-oriented people. In general, future-oriented people do very well in life. They are less aggressive, are less depressed, have more energy, take care of their health, have good impulse control, and have more self-esteem. Those stuck in the past, and locked into negative memories, feel fatalistic about the present and may have lost the ability even to conceive of a hopeful future (future negative). Healthy Versus Unhealthy Time Perspectives Through years of research, we have discovered that people who live healthy, productive, optimistic lives share the following traits—what we call an “ideal time perspective”: • High past positive/low past negative; • Low present fatalism/moderate selected present hedonism; and • Moderately high future-positive orientation.

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Yet, like the tiger, he is unconcerned about the welfare of his target. The pathological emotional problems in sociopathy make one another worse. An inability to have a consistent realistic view of the world, or to maintain emotionally genuine relationships, leads to more paranoia. The weakness in impulse control which arises from enraged reactions to imagined slights and produces reckless, destructive behavior, leads to a greater need to deny criticism with more lies to tell oneself and everyone else, and an increasing distance from reality. The more a sociopath needs to scapegoat others the more he genuinely hates them, making him even more aggressive and sadistic.

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Over the course of the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign, it became increasingly apparent that Donald Trump’s inability or unwillingness to distinguish fact from fiction (Barbaro 2016), wanton disregard for the rule of law (Kendall 2016), intolerance of perspectives different from his own (DelReal and Gearan 2016), rageful responses to criticism (Sebastian 2016), lack of impulse control (“Transcript” 2016), and sweeping condemnations of entire populations (Reilly 2016) rendered him temperamentally unsuitable to be in command of the nuclear arsenal. When Mr. Trump became the president-elect, we, as psychiatrists, had grave concerns about his mental stability and fitness for office.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

As Jules Henry writes There is-a constant interplay between each family and the culture at large, one reinforcing the other; each unique family upbringing gives rise to needs in the child that are satisfied by one or another aspect of the adolescent-and-school-culture. According to Henry and other observers of American culture, the collapse of parental authority reflects the collapse of ancient impulse controls" and the shift "from a society in which Super Ego values (the values of self-restraint) were ascendant, to one in which more and more recognition was being given to the values of the id (the values of self-indulgence)." The reversal of the normal " " " Kenneth Keniston, Philip Slater, and other Parsonian critics of American culture have argued that the nuclear family, in Keniston s words, produces deep discontinuities between childhood and adulthood."

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The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present in varying degrees in everyonea certain protective shallowness a fear of binding commitments a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose a desire to keep one s options open a dislike of depending on anyone an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude Narcissists may have paid more attention to their own needs than , conduct. A number of other observers had come to similar conclusions about the direction of personality change. They spoke of a collapse of Afterword: The Culture of Narcissism Revisited " " impulse controls," the "decline of the superego, " and the grow- ing influence of peer groups. Psychiatrists, moreover, described a shift in the pattern of the symptoms displayed by their patients. The classic neuroses treated by Freud, they said, were giving way to narcissistic personality disorders. You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neu" , , , , ' , , .

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Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965); Herbert Hendin, The Age of Sensation (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 72, 75, 98, 108, 129, 130, 133, 215, 297; Giovacchini, Psychoanalysis of Character Disorders, pp. 60-62. 177 Keniston, The Uncommitted, pp. 309-10; Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), ch. 3. 178 "decline of the superego Jules of " VIII. The Flight from Feeling page Henry, Culture against Man (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 127 (collapse 187 ancient impulse controls ), p. 238 (interplay of family and culture), p-. " " 179 Women (New York: McGraw-Hill 1977), pp. 170-71. espe- , 187 Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (New York: Bantam 1959 [1929]) 188 pp. 127, 137. celebrations of the new marital intimacy changing structure of the superego Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1962 [1923]), pp. 42-43; Henry Lowenfeld and Yela Lowenfeld, Our Permissive Society and the Superego, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 39 (1970): 590-607. " , , " Graham B.

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

Ronald Kessler and colleagues reported the results of the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a household survey that included a diagnostic interview of more than nine thousand representative people across the United States.16 Overall, 26 percent of people surveyed met criteria for a mental disorder in the last twelve months—that’s one in four Americans! Of those disorders, 22 percent were serious, 37 percent were moderate, and 40 percent were mild. Anxiety disorders were most common, followed by mood disorders, then impulse control disorders, which include diagnoses like ADHD. Of note, 55 percent of people had only one diagnosis, 22 percent had two diagnoses, and the rest had three or more psychiatric diagnoses. That means almost half the people met criteria for more than one disorder. Diagnostic overlap is easier to dismiss when we are talking about anxiety disorders, perhaps because anxiety is a mental state we all experience.

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The findings of researchers studying Romanian orphans exemplifies how tragic this can be. The orphanages where these children were housed were profoundly neglectful, and the children who experienced this neglect were found to suffer from a range of diagnostic categories including autism, learning disorders, mental retardation, PTSD, anxiety disorders, impulse control disorders, mood disorders, personality disorders, and even psychotic disorders. Once again, numerous diagnostic categories, not just one. Their brains were deprived of the appropriate opportunities to learn how to be “human” in society and the consequences were sometimes devastating. The malnutrition, stress, and trauma they experienced undoubtedly also played roles, but so did the lack of appropriate learning experiences.

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biopsychosocial model bipolar disorder brain energy theory of and cardiovascular disease contributing causes of diagnosis of with epilepsy and obesity and other disorders rates of risk for treatments for Bipolar Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) blood glucose levels brain(s). see also neurological disorders and behavioral disorders and depression development of and diet effect of infections on energy in functioning of gut-brain axis of healthy people vs. people with mental disorders insulin effects on and intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet and light exposure mental disorders as metabolic disorders of (see also brain energy theory) neuroplasticity of during sleep and symptoms of mental illness brain energy theory applied to mental disorders (see also contributing causes of mental illness) and current diagnostic labels delirium example of linking medical and mental health disciplines in mental disorders as metabolic disorders of the brain (see also metabolic disorders) mitochondrial dysfunction and mental health mitochondrial malfunction leading to mental illness root cause of mitochondrial dysfunction brain photobiomodulation brain surgery bulimia nervosa burnout C calcium cancers brain affected by contributing causes of as risk factor treatment for Cardamone, Maria Dafne cardiovascular disease contributing causes of and other disorders treatments for cascade of events Caspi, Avshalom causation cell death cells development of differences between function of growth and differentiation of hyperexcitable maintenance of roles of mitochondria in (see mitochondria) shrinkage of turning on and off chemical imbalance theory of depression flaws in neurotransmitters psychiatric medications childbirth, mental symptoms and chloroplasts Chouinard, Virginie-Anne circadian rhythms and light therapy and mitochondrial function sleep, light and and symptoms as treatment cognitive problems. see also individual disorders and brain functions contributing causes of Cohen, Bruce common pathway adverse childhood experiences as attempts to identify and bidirectional relationships and comorbidity of different disorders and heterogeneity mitochondria as mitochondrial dysfunction as and overlapping symptoms in psychotic disorders common root cause comorbidity connections contributing causes of mental illness. see also individual causes chemical imbalance depression drugs and alcohol food, fasting, and gut genetics and epigenetics hormones importance of identifying inflammation and metabolic disorders physical activity psychological and social factors sleep, light, and circadian rhythms successful treatments of (see also metabolic treatment plan) themes in tools and principles for exploring and variability in symptoms correlations cortisol cost of mental disorders/illness COVID-19 Cuthbert, Bruce D deaths of despair delirium chronic and transient contributing causes of in unifying example delusions dementia. see also Alzheimer’s disease contributing causes of and other disorders treatments for den Heijer, Alexander depression and brain functions and cardiovascular disease chemical imbalance theory of comorbidities with contributing causes of and diabetes diagnostic criteria for with epilepsy increase in learned helplessness theory of major, brain energy theory of medical disorders related to medications for “normal” vs. as illness and obesity and other disorders physical changes associated with postpartum prevalence of risk for seasonal affective disorder treatments for developmental problems diabetes as chronic metabolic problems contributing causes of ketogenic diet for and medications mental symptoms related to as metabolic disorder and other disorders symptoms of treatments for diagnoses changes over time in and comorbidities debates over in the DSM heterogeneity in overlapping symptoms in Research Domain Criteria for syndromes concept underlying Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnostic labels diathesis-stress model diet and eating behaviors. see also specific diets eating disorders example of fasting food quality gut-brain axis and gut microbiome and obesity starvation as treatment vitamins and nutrients disease-modifying treatments dopamine drug and alcohol use. see also alcoholism; substance use disorders alcohol deaths of despair from and depression marijuana risk for treatment programs for Dutch winter famine dying process E eating disorders and brain functions contributing causes of lack of insight in and other disorders risk for Einstein, Alfred electrical stimulators electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) emotional regulation energy energy creation energy imbalances in the brain (see brain energy theory) and mental or medical disorders metabolic disorders as (see also metabolic disorders) Engel, George environmental toxins epidemiology studies epigenetics epilepsy contributing causes of ketogenic diet for mental symptoms related to and other disorders treatments for estrogen eukaryotic cells evolution exercise. see physical activity/exercise externalizing disorders F fasting fasting-mimicking diets fear symptoms feedback loops fiber fibromyalgia food. see also diet and eating behaviors and circadian rhythms quality of Frankl, Viktor free radical theory of aging Freud, Sigmund functional brain connectivity studies G GABA genes evolution of expression of (see epigenetics) in human DNA mitochondrial and risk for broad range of disorders that cause disorders genetics and “biological” disorders and depression and risk for metabolic disorders gut-brain axis gut microbiome H hallucinations Harman, Denham health, social determinants of. see also psychological and social factors health behaviors heart attacks contributing causes of and mental disorders and metabolic ripple effect and other disorders and peptides heterogeneity high-fat diet (HFD) Hippocrates Holmes, Thomas hormones cortisol and depression estrogen in food production insulin mitochondrial functions related to and sleep thyroid hormone Human Genome Project (HGP) hypoglycemia hypomania hypothyroidism I immune system function impulse control disorders infections brain affected by and inflammation and other physical problems treatment for Infeld, Leopold inflammation brain as common pathway and depression and mental states and metabolism and mitochondria in stress response in treating mental illness inpatient treatment programs Insel, Tom insomnia contributing causes of and relaxation response treatments for insulin insulin resistance integrated stress response interferon “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects” (Yehuda) intermittent fasting (IF) internalizing disorders ion pumps J junk food K Kessler, Ronald ketogenic diet ketones Kim, Kyung Hwa Kozicz, Tamas L Lahey, Benjamin Lane, Nick law of parsimony learned helplessness theory lifespan, mental disorders affecting light and circadian rhythms mitochondria and brain impacted by and sleep and symptoms as treatment logotherapy love. see also psychological and social factors M mania in bipolar disorder contributing causes of hypomania Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl) marijuana Maudsley, Sir Henry medical disorders. see also individual disorders delirium caused by metabolic (see metabolic disorders) neurological (see neurological disorders) relationship of mental disorders and (see relationships of medical and mental disorders) medications as cause of depression delirium caused by for depression and increase in mental disorders “metabolic,” 195–196 metabolic ripple effect with and physical activity psychiatric for psychotic disorders weight gain and Mediterranean diet (MD) memory menopause mental disorders/illnesses. see also specific disorders brain energy theory applied to causes of (see also contributing causes of mental illness) cost of definition of denial of distinctions between as global health emergency increasing rates of and ketogenic diet medical disorders and (see relationships of medical and mental disorders) as metabolic disorders (see also brain energy theory; metabolic disorders) mitochondrial dysfunction leading to normal mental states vs.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Any economic or social system depends on a population made ready and willing to adopt the values, behaviors, and attributes that perpetuate that system.3 When corporate executives talk about reducing friction, some of what they mean has to do with reducing external barriers to buying, but it also means reducing or eliminating our intrapsychic friction—the cognitive and emotional brakes that enable us to set limits on consumption. For that reason, kids are not just fair game for advertisers—they are essential targets. Their immature capacities for judgment and impulse control render them especially susceptible to marketing messages. As I describe in chapter 1, the very structure of a child’s brain is shaped by early experience,4 laying a foundation for future behaviors, attributes, and values—including the ingrained expectation, described earlier in this chapter, that purchasing stuff is routinely part of any excursion.

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The recommendations are likely harder to implement for those working multiple jobs to stay afloat or who are struggling with joblessness or other kinds of stress—or who live in neighborhoods with few safe parks or outdoor play spaces. I also recognize that some kids are more innately challenging to raise, for instance, children who struggle with impulse control more than others their age do. That’s why I believe the following: The tech, toy, and entertainment industries’ practice of monetizing childhood is a problem for all of society that can be solved only through social change. One family alone can’t combat huge conglomerates making use of ubiquitous and irresistible technologies, child psychologists, and billions of dollars to exploit children’s developmental vulnerabilities.

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Each time KK and Maree testified in support the Digital Wellness bill, or met with legislators, they were joined by youth council members who told their own stories about how screen time affects their lives. The authenticity of young people choosing to speak out on social issues that affect them can be powerfully convincing. We can’t expect younger children, whose capacities for abstract thinking and impulse control are still in the early stages of development, to be able to look critically at their experience with tech. But it is possible for teenagers to do that. They can be a potent and influential force in educating peers, parents, and younger kids. It’s encouraging that teens are speaking out and raising their own concerns about the influence Big Tech has on their lives.10 Some young people have formed their own support and advocacy groups, such as the Log Off movement.11 That young people are working to resist the more harmful business practices of major technology companies bodes well for a future generation of adults who recognize the importance of curbing the influence Big Tech has on the lives of children and want to do something about it.

Help for Women With ADHD: My Simple Strategies for Conquering Chaos by Joan Wilder

crowdsourcing, Firefox, impulse control, index card, TED Talk

Sleep deprivation causes ADHD symptoms all by itself. It slows your reaction time as much as being legally drunk. Some experts say that losing just an hour of sleep a day for one week will lower your IQ! Can you afford that? I can’t. When you’re rested, you concentrate and remember better. You’ll have more energy and impulse control, so you’ll eat better, exercise more, feel less stressed, and have an easier time managing your weight. Depending on how severe your symptoms are, seek support from an experienced psychiatrist or psychopharmacologist to explore whether you might do well on medication. It doesn’t work for everybody, but it can help some people a lot.

The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

A survey of 1699 children receiving trauma�focused treatment across 25 network sites of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network [20] showed that the vast majority (78%) were exposed to multiple and/or prolonged interpersonal trauma, with a modal 3 trauma exposure types; less than 25% met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Less than 10% were exposed to �serious accidents or medical illness. Most children exhibited post-traumatic sequelae not captured by PTSD:€ at least 50% had significant disturbances in affect regulation; attention and concentration; negative self-image; impulse control; and aggression and risk taking [20]. These findings are in line with the voluminous �epidemiological, biological and psychological research on the impact of childhood interpersonal trauma that has been published since the mid 1980s, which includes effects on tens of thousands of children. Hence, it is critical to find a way out of this morass of multiple comorbid diagnoses and to Chapter 6: A developmental trauma disorder diagnosis identify a new diagnostic category that captures the profusion of symptoms in these children.

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Functional impairment The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: • scholastic:€underperformance, nonattendance, disciplinary problems, dropout, failure to complete degree/credential(s), conflict with school personnel, learning disabilities or intellectual impairment that cannot be accounted for by neurological or other factors • familial:€conflict, avoidance/passivity, running away, detachment and surrogate replacements, attempts to physically or emotionally hurt family members, nonfulfillment of responsibilities within the family • peer group:€isolation, deviant affiliations, persistent physical or emotional conflict, avoidance/passivity, involvement in violence or unsafe acts, age-inappropriate affiliations or style of interaction • legal:€arrests/recidivism, detention, convictions, incarceration, violation of probation or other court orders, increasingly severe offenses, crimes against other persons, disregard or contempt for the law or for conventional moral standards • health:€physical illness or problems that cannot be fully accounted for by physical injury or degeneration, involving the digestive, neurological (including conversion symptoms and analgesia), sexual, immune, cardiopulmonary, proprioceptive or sensory systems; severe headaches (including migraine); chronic pain or fatigue • vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training):€disinterest in work/vocation, inability to get or keep jobs, persistent conflict with coworkers or supervisors, underemployment in relation to abilities, failure to achieve expectable advancements. These chronic and severe coexisting problems (emotion regulation, impulse control, attention and cognition, dissociation, interpersonal relationships, and self and relational schemas) are best understood as a single coherent pathology. However, in absence of a developmentally sensitive trauma-specific diagnosis for children, these children are instead diagnosed with an average of 3–8 comorbid axis I and II disorders [28].

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We propose that DTD is made up of posttrauma adaptations across these five domains. Affect and impulse dysregulation Approximately 700 studies have documented the increased disturbance of affect and impulse regulation following childhood interpersonal trauma [29]. Dysregulation of affect and impulse control following exposure to interpersonal trauma is manifested in a broad spectrum of symptoms. Affect dysregulation can include lability, explosive anger, self-destructive behavior, psychic numbing and social withdrawal, dysphoria, depression and loss of motivation. Impulse dysregulation is associated with self-injury, risktaking, aggression, eating disorders, substance use, �oppositional behavior and reenactment of trauma.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

From the intimate give-and-take of the attachment bond children learn that other people have feelings and thoughts that are both similar to and different from theirs. In other words, they get “in sync” with their environment and with the people around them and develop the self-awareness, empathy, impulse control, and self-motivation that make it possible to become contributing members of the larger social culture. These qualities were painfully missing in the kids at our Children’s Clinic. THE DANCE OF ATTUNEMENT Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life.

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In February 2009 we submitted our proposed new diagnosis of Developmental Trauma Disorder to the American Psychiatric Association, stating the following in a cover letter: Children who develop in the context of ongoing danger, maltreatment and disrupted caregiving systems are being ill served by the current diagnostic systems that lead to an emphasis on behavioral control with no recognition of interpersonal trauma. Studies on the sequelae of childhood trauma in the context of caregiver abuse or neglect consistently demonstrate chronic and severe problems with emotion regulation, impulse control, attention and cognition, dissociation, interpersonal relationships, and self and relational schemas. In absence of a sensitive trauma-specific diagnosis, such children are currently diagnosed with an average of 3–8 co-morbid disorders. The continued practice of applying multiple distinct co-morbid diagnoses to traumatized children has grave consequences: it defies parsimony, obscures etiological clarity, and runs the danger of relegating treatment and intervention to a small aspect of the child’s psychopathology rather than promoting a comprehensive treatment approach.

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It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

Given that gambling is an ego-syntonic and pleasurable activity (at least initially), the members of the original American Psychiatric Association diagnostic task force for pathological gambling collectively decided that the condition was better classified as an impulse control disorder than a compulsion (APA 1980). Some considered that decision debatable, since gambling typically becomes a problem only at the point when it feels involuntary and driven. The debate is likely to become obsolete with the recent decision to rename pathological gambling “disordered gambling” and to reclassify it as an addiction rather than an impulse control disorder. 98. The Las Vegas Trimeridian clinic, no longer in operation, was conceived in 1997. Investors believed that profit was to be made if insurance companies could be convinced that the pathological gambling diagnosis warranted coverage; they have yet to be convinced.

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Studies based on other jurisdictions estimate that up to 70 percent of gamblers seeking treatment identify electronic gaming machines as their primary, if not exclusive, problem form of gambling (see, for example, Schellinck and Schrans 1998, 2003; Breen and Zimmerman 2002; Gorman 2003, A20). 49. APA 1980. Although pathological gambling was officially listed in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) as an “Impulse Control Disorder Not Elsewhere Classified,” most psychiatrists and clinicians felt that the condition was best conceived as an addiction, and the category of psychoactive substance dependence was used as a model when the criteria for pathological gambling were modified in a later revision of the manual (APA 1994, 4th ed.; see also Castellani 2000, 54; Lesieur and Rosenthal 1991).

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While the 1980 version of the DSM used the language “unable to resist impulses,” this was changed to “failure to resist impulses” in the 1987 revision of the manual (APA 1987). As Castellani discusses, this change in language (not to mention the initial classification of the condition under “Impulse Control Disorders”) had to do with concerns that the diagnosis could be used as the basis for insanity pleas in courts of law (2000, 125). For more on the “pathological gambling” diagnosis, see the introduction. 14. See Brandt (2007) for an exhaustive history of the tobacco industry and its strategic positioning toward the question of smoking addiction.

Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Neuroticism will make it harder for you to achieve your goals. If neuroticism is kryptonite, conscientiousness is a superpower. Here is a breakdown of the facets or sub-traits that psychologists consider part of conscientiousness21: Orderliness / order / tidiness Industriousness / hard work / energy Reliability / responsibility Impulse control / self-control Decisiveness (opposite of procrastination) Persistence / perseverance With the knowledge that these facets of conscientiousness are major predictors of life success, think about how you can improve in one or more of these areas. This will help you not just as a trader, but as a human being.

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So yes, decisiveness is like courage and risk appetite, but here I mean it more as the specific ability to press buttons once you have an idea. Trigger happy vs. gun shy. Do you find it easy to put on a trade once you have a good idea? Or do you hesitate? Does this hesitation lead to worse entry points and tactical weakness, or is it healthy calibration and impulse control? If you gave yourself a 10 out of 10 score on decisiveness, there is a good chance you are too impulsive, overconfident, or both. Here is how I would describe the continuum from decisive (10) to hesitant (1): 9-10 Probably trigger happy. Risk of overconfident and impulsive trading. If it is too easy to decide and pull the trigger every time, perhaps you need to hesitate a bit more?

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Gawande), 95, 491 Cheer Hedge, 172, 204 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), 284 China deval (2015), 441 China/US Trade War (2018—2019), inaccurate media accounts about, 98 Citi Pain Index, 345 clustering illusion, 217 See also apophenia CME Market Profile guide, 294, 331 CNBC, 83, 104, 235, 243, 259, 407 CNN Fear and Greed indicator, 345, 443 coach, trading, 106, 121, 122 Coates, John, 132, 491 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 62, 65—66, 69, 70, 71, 179, 186, 249 COMEX, 286 commissions, 277 commodity trading advisors (CTAs), 159, 301, 312 common knowledge, questionable, 259—265 bad economic news and stocks, 263—264 examples, 260—265 gold, 262-263 interest rates, 260, 261 stock market crashes, 264—265 stocks and bonds, 260—261 company earnings, idea generation and, 395 Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART), 62 confidence, calibrated, 34, 180—181 as trader attribute, 72, 75, 81 See also overconfidence confirmation bias, 80—81, 171, 197—203, 346 endowment effect and, 199 filtering trade ideas and, 410 highly intelligent people and, 63 how to combat, 199—203 narrative cycle and, 299 Stanford experiment, 200 conformity, social, 82—83 conformity bias, 83 conscientiousness, 47—48, 72, 383 academic achievement and, 51, 52 age and, 48, 48, 76 decisiveness as sub-trait of, 56, 119 growth mindset and, 95 how to boost, 56—58 impulse control as sub-trait of, 56 income and, 49, 50, 51 industriousness as sub-trait of, 56 orderliness as sub-trait of, 56 organized people as, 95 persistence as sub-trait of, 56 reliability as sub-trait of, 56 sport achievement and, 51, 52 success, 52, 56, 58, 71 See also self-control; self-discipline continuation patterns, 161 continuous improvement mindset, 58, 91 contrarians, 32, 34, 82, 83, 233—234, 300, 345 conviction, 107, 112, 113, 194, 256, 323, 355, 365, 369—370, 379, 493 See also conviction levels conviction levels, 370—377 Type I normal trade, 370, 372, 373, 375 Type II unique trade, 370—373, 374 Type III outlier trade, 373—374, 376—377 cooling off levels, 118—119 Corgnet, Brice, 66 correlated markets, filtering trade ideas and, 409 correlation and intermarket analysis, 162 costs.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

PSYCHOPATHS DREAM IN BLACK-AND-WHITE It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the nineteenth century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans delire”—insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn’t until 1891, when the German doctor J. L. A. Koch published his book Die Psychopatischen Minderwertigkeiter, that it got its name: psychopathy. Back in the old days—in the days before Bob Hare—the definitions were rudimentary. The 1959 Mental Health Act for England and Wales described psychopaths simply as having “a persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including subnormality of intelligence) which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient, and requires or is susceptible to medical treatment.”

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One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a huge label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory. I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I’d been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

The penny-pinching apparently didn’t extend to nightlife. The pair got along well that summer, Smeall says, in part because “we both had trouble saying no—to one more drink, to one more place to go. It was fun to have someone who could keep up with you in that sort of way, who had the social stamina. “A lot of it was impulse control, or lack of it,” recalls Smeall, a Chinese scholar with an MBA degree as well. “He’s very different now. We both are.” The computer-networking job didn’t last long. A casual approach to showing up for jobs on time and a know-it-all attitude exhausted the patience of the managers of small firm in Queens.

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He cited numbers from the Global Burden of Disease Study, a collaboration of health experts worldwide, showing that mental health ranks third in terms of deaths and disability—behind infectious and parasitic diseases and cardiovascular disease. “It’s huge, huge crisis from my perspective,” Hammerbacher told the audience. In the United States, 46 percent of the population will develop a mental disorder over the course of their lives. The leading categories are anxiety, impulse control, mood swings, and substance abuse. Pointing to the 46 percent figure, Hammerbacher said, “It is one of those numbers that causes you to reevaluate what it means to be human and what it means to be sane and what it means to be crazy.” The opportunity, Hammerbacher said, is wide open. The causes of most mental disorders are little understood, and there are puzzling debates over the definitions, symptoms, and diagnosis.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

My research team and I decided to conduct a study in which we scanned people’s brains while they were viewing and choosing food items, and then rated how much they desired each one. We hypothesized that changes within the brain may help explain this unhealthy shift in food preference caused by a lack of sleep. Was there a breakdown in impulse-control regions that normally keep our basic hedonic food desires in check, making us reach for doughnuts or pizza rather than whole grains and leafy greens? Healthy, average-weight participants performed the experiment twice: once when they had had a full night of sleep, and once after they had been sleep-deprived for a night.

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The encouraging news is that getting enough sleep will help you control body weight. We found that a full night of sleep repairs the communication pathway between deep-brain areas that unleash hedonic desires and higher-order brain regions whose job it is to rein in these cravings. Ample sleep can therefore restore a system of impulse control within your brain, putting the appropriate brakes on potentially excessive eating. South of the brain, we are also discovering that plentiful sleep makes your gut happier. Sleep’s role in redressing the balance of the body’s nervous system, especially its calming of the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch, improves the bacterial community known as your microbiome, which is located in your gut (also known as the enteric nervous system).

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Lean and toned is unlikely to be the outcome of dieting when you are cutting sleep short. The latter is counterproductive of the former. The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting. SLEEP LOSS AND THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM If you have hopes of reproductive success, fitness, or prowess, you would do well to get a full night’s sleep every night.

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

The daters were overwhelmed by the variety and so did nothing. Dimoka studied the brains of volunteers engaged in complicated, combinatorial auctions. As early information began to roll in, so did brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain implicated in decision-making and impulse control. But as the researchers gave the participants more and more information, the brain activity suddenly fell off, as if snapping a circuit breaker. “With too much information,” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.” Ever had a hankering for sweets only to arrive in the candy aisle and become totally overwhelmed by your options?

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Between 1938 and 2007, the levels of psychopathology in the US, as measured by the MMPI, have risen greatly. Specific areas on the rise include: Moodiness Restlessness Dissatisfaction Instability Narcissism Self-centeredness Anxiety Unrealistically positive self-appraisal Impulse control For all the societal progress made over that time, it would appear that emotional wellbeing remains more elusive. Arbitraging emotionality seems to be an enduring form of investing advantage – one that may actually be increasing. Emotion impacts our assessment of probability One of the things that makes adhering to probabilities so difficult (and profitable) for an investor is that emotion has a pronounced impact on how we assess probability.

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

It can impair “executive functions, such as decision-making, working memory, behavioral self-regulation, and mood and impulse control.” It “may result in anatomic changes and/or physiologic dysregulations that are the precursors of later impairments in learning and behavior as well as the roots of chronic, stress-related physical and mental illness.” Toxic stress can literally wear you down and, in the end, kill you. Memory loss is very common in people who have been exposed to the conditions Rae has faced. And she certainly has impaired mood and impulse control. She takes medication for her high blood pressure and is going blind in her right eye.

The New Sell and Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit From Price Declines by Alexander Elder

Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, double helix, impulse control, low interest rates, paper trading, short selling, systematic trading, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, uptick rule

It is better to celebrate even partial achievements and soberly take stock of your shortcomings. In my own trading, I have a reward system for celebrating successful trades, but do not punish myself for losses. • Some traders are destined to fail The markets produce endless temptations, which is why people with a history of poor impulse control are likely to lose in trading. Those who are actively drinking or using substances are highly unlikely to succeed. They may have a few lucky trades, but their long-term forecast is grim. If your drinking, eating, or other behavior is out of control, you are better off not trading until you resolve your addiction problem.

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Wishful thinking causes traders to “see” non-existent technical signals. 4. A bullish trader is more likely to overlook sell signals. Question 10—Trading Discipline Discipline is essential because the markets present an endless parade of temptations. Please identify the incorrect statement among the following:1. People with a history of poor impulse control are likely to fail in trading. 2. AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) provides a useful model for dealing with market temptations. 3. If you have a good trading system, discipline is not really an issue. 4. Some traders have personality flaws that make them destined to fail. Question 11—Dealing with Losses Traders feel ashamed of their losses.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Overall, it looks as if differences in inequality tally with more than threefold differences in the percentage of people with mental illness in different countries. For our nine countries with data from the WHO surveys, we can also look at sub-types of mental illness, specifically anxiety disorders, mood disorders, impulse-control disorders and addictions, as well as a measure of severe mental illness. Anxiety disorders, impulse-control disorders and severe illness are all strongly correlated with inequality; mood disorders less so. We saw in Chapter 3 how anxiety has been increasing in developed countries in recent decades. Anxiety disorders represent the largest sub-group of mental illness in all our countries.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Beasley tells me about a study conducted by Alfred Heilbrun, a psychologist at Emory University, back in the 1980s. Heilbrun analyzed the personality structures of more than 150 criminals and, on the basis of that analysis, differentiated between two very different types of psychopaths: those who had poor impulse control, low IQ, and little empathy (the Henry Lee Lucas type); and those who had better impulse control, high IQ, a sadistic motivation, and heightened empathy (the Ted Bundy or, if you like, Hannibal Lecter type). But the data concealed a spine-chilling twist. The group, in fact, that exhibited the most empathy of all, according to Heilbrun’s taxonomy, comprised high-IQ psychopaths with a history of extreme violence.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

By alternately punishing short-termism and rewarding patience, society was able to embrace more sophisticated survival strategies (such as trade, irrigated farming, and manufacturing) with longer time frames, bigger operating scales, and better efficiencies. And with the greater wealth that these more efficient strategies generated, society could develop even more finely tuned forms of impulse control. The story of civilization is arguably the story of societies getting better and better at persuading, coercing, or otherwise inducing individuals to repress their impulsiveness and myopia, or repress them sufficiently, to keep civilization moving forward. That story became much more complex in the sixteenth century, with institutions such as capitalism, liberal democracy, and Protestantism.

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In place of “character,” we were now encouraged to pursue “personality,” or the “enhancement of self through the compulsive search for individual differentiation,” usually through serial consumption.24 Such complaints were often voiced by social conservatives and prudes—and the social norms they mourned were frequently repressive, unfair, discriminatory, or medieval. But those moral codes had served a purpose: impulse control—and now they were being eradicated as impediments to efficient consumption. And where it might have been conceivable to replace those old-fashioned norms with something less medieval, we never got the chance. In many cases, those old constraints had been removed without any conscious deliberation, or any careful weighing of costs and benefits, but automatically, reflexively—because the market happened to be offering yet another increment of efficient, and profitable, self-expressive power.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Gail Steketee, Randy Frost

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dumpster diving, Ford Model T, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, impulse control, McMansion

Hoarders don't seem to respond to the same treatments as people with classic OCD symptoms, and they show more severe family and social disability, as well as less insight into the nature of the problem. In fact, the mixture of pleasure and pain hoarding provides distinguishes it from all of the anxiety and mood disorders. In many ways, hoarding looks like an impulse control disorder (ICD). ICDs are characterized by the inability to resist an urge or impulse even though the behavior is dangerous or harmful. In fact, compulsive buying, a major component of hoarding, is considered to be an ICD, as is kleptomania. Because pathological gambling, like compulsive buying, is classified as an ICD, we wondered whether it, too, would be related to hoarding.

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To find out, we put an ad in the newspaper looking for people with gambling problems. We found that people with serious gambling problems reported problems with clutter, excessive buying, and difficulty discarding things at much higher rates than people without gambling problems. What may unite these disorders, besides a lack of impulse control, is a psychology of opportunity. One gambler from our study described his experience to me: "Seeing the scratch tickets over the counter at the convenience store leads me to think, One of those tickets is surely a winner, maybe a million-dollar winner. How can I walk away when the opportunity is there?"

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demand response, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, financial independence, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, Google Chrome, helicopter parent, impulse control, Jean Tirole, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, meta-analysis, Minecraft, New Journalism, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, working poor

When a person has been stretched to their limit, they may start to seem flaky and checked-out. They might come in to work late or cancel plans with friends at the last minute. They’ll have less drive to do chores or cook meals and may take frequent naps or zone out by playing repetitive video games. In general, they’ll have worse impulse control and far less energy than they used to. These aren’t signs that someone is a screwup or a failure. They’re signs of a person pushed to the brink. Though these “lazy” behaviors have been demonized for centuries, there’s actually nothing evil or damaging about them. Slacking off is a normal part of life; people require idle time in order to remain clearheaded and healthy.

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Even after a burned-out person leaves the situation that caused them to burn out, they may remain emotionally detached and apathetic for months to come. In some cases, burnout erodes relationships so severely that they never recover. Not only that, but being burned out actually makes us worse at thinking and making decisions across the board. Burned-out people drink more60 and have worse impulse control in general, which means they’re more likely to make bad decisions like gambling or having illicit affairs.61 They experience far more depression and anxiety, and burnout can exacerbate the symptoms of any other mental illness they already have.62 Burned-out people don’t sleep as well, which means they’re likely more irritable and more prone to getting sick.63 Because they see life as purposeless, burned-out people take more risks, which can lead to terrible consequences (burned bridges, wrecked cars) that they really don’t want.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The first agenda item would be unfettering individuals from the bonds of society, allowing the Boomers’ true priorities, license and indulgence, to flourish. The Hedonist at Home: Sex and Drugs [Sociopaths] may have a history of many sexual partners… They may have associated disorders… substance use disorders… and other disorders of impulse control… [They] also often have personality features that meet criteria for other personality disorders, particularly borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. —DSM-V2 As we’ve seen, the Boomers’ engagement with Vietnam faded along with the draft. The Boomers’ growing emphasis on personal satisfaction proved more enduring.

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The fact that many Boomers have relatively little net worth compared to their retirement needs (data we do have on a cohort basis) also tests the idea that lower income savings could be offset by gains in homes and stocks, though these assets have been prone to bubbles the Boomers have been keen to inflate.40 Failures in impulse control also manifested in gluttony. As American travelers know, and Europeans delight in observing, the United States is an unusually heavy place. This is so measured against international peers and against America itself, at least the America of sixty years ago. Relatively few adults were obese before the 1960s, about one in ten.

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What changed, then, is not the employment prospects for scientists and engineers, or some mass shuttering of American engineering schools; what changed was the culture. Part of the problem was caused by the difficulty of STEM, which is more challenging for the average student than other disciplines. Difficult things do not sit well with people for whom immediate gratification and impulse control present problems, i.e., sociopaths. That the empirical disciplines are hard was bad enough, but their embrace of reality posed the greatest challenges. These—like the fact that the sun does not revolve around the earth, or less facetiously, that humans are warming the planet—can be inconvenient for people who hold opinions contrary to reality.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis Phd

dark matter, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, impulse control, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

My limbic system was operating on its own, without guidance. This was one version of the state we’ve called dissociation. Dissociative drugs serve to dissolve the bridges between the cortex and limbic system, and the dACC is one of those bridges. That’s how the dACC imposes sense on meaning to achieve its function of impulse control. But tonight I managed to shut down the bridge without drugs. I was in a dream. I’d gone limbic. I saw a dark house, a large dark house, that reminded me of something from my childhood, and beside it was a kind of TV antenna, popular in those days, with triangular rungs that you could climb as easily as any ladder.

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Fight or flight Firing patterns Flexibility, loss of Freaking out, fear of Fred Mom and motorcycle accident and Freud, Sigmund: cocaine and Frisch, Ron: dismissal by GABA alcohol and Gay men Gelsthorpe, Thomas advice from drugs and girlfriend of living with smoking with the Heap and visiting Getting too much wanting and Getting down Ginsberg, Allen Giving up, joy of Glutamate alcohol and dopamine and drugs and nitrous oxide and OFC and pathways slowing/halting Goals conflicting emotional potency of pursuing Gombak Hospital described drugs from Granic, Isabel Guilt Hallucinations Hannah, sex with Hash smoking Have to, want to and Heap, the described drugs and end of marriage of memories of problems with sexual activities of visiting Hedonism Heroin brain and buying depression and dreaming about effects of high on overdosing on receptor sites and red rock and scoring using withdrawal symptoms from Highs codeine heroin methamphetamine searching for Hippies Hippocampus Hitchhiking Homosexuals Hopkins, Dr. concern from meeting with Howard Johnson’s restaurant, arrest at Huxley, Aldous Hydrocodone Hyperarousal Hyperrealism Hypothalamus anger and brain stem and changes in fear and norepinephrine and opioids and peptides and Identity damage to searching for Impulses controlling Independence Indian Room Information LSD and excess incoming sensory serotonin and Inhibition neuronal Inner world, exploring Insight therapy Internal dialogues. See also Voices, internal Isolation Jail acid trip in release from time in James, William Jim death of described heroin and marriage of PCP and Pumpkin and Ralph and Jimmy departure of falseness of hanging out with heroin and meeting Joints, swallowing Junkies Ketamine Krishnamurti Kuala Lampur arrival in leaving Kubrick, Stanley Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital dismissal from internship at Laos, visiting Laura Learning corrupted synapses and Lebanese Blonde, smoking Leonard (marriage counselor), seeing Libido Liking, wanting and Limbic system cortex and dissociatives (DM, nitrous oxide) and meaning and Lisa being with dopamine and drinking with wanting/getting Loneliness addiction and anxiety and learning about persistent sting of Love addiction to looking for LSD.

The End of Illness by David B. Agus

confounding variable, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, Danny Hillis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, epigenetics, germ theory of disease, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, personalized medicine, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method

In the spring of 2010, this promising young student-athlete hanged himself in his off-campus apartment after what friends and family described as a sudden and uncharacteristic emotional collapse. He had no previous history of depression. A brain autopsy revealed the same trauma-induced disease found in more than twenty deceased National Football League players: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease linked to depression and impulse control primarily found in NFL players, two of whom also committed suicide in the last ten years. The doctors who examined Thomas’s brain tissue cautioned that his suicide should not be attributed solely or even primarily to the damage in his brain, given the prevalence of suicide among college students in general.

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He played freshman football and then started the last two seasons on the varsity, earning second-team all–Ivy League honors in 2009 and helping lead the Quakers to the Ivy title. Popular, charismatic, and destined for success, Thomas left no note and still had his cell phone in his pocket at the time he killed himself, a potential sign that he was acting on impulse, not forethought. Lack of impulse control is a consistent manifestation of how executive function can be compromised by CTE, which is characterized by the presence of twisted proteinlike formations in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex that resemble the plaques found in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains. His brain fogged by these intrusive proteins, Thomas’s ability to think rationally was compromised.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, game design, haute couture, impulse control, index card, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, patient HM, pattern recognition, power law, randomized controlled trial, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, Tenerife airport disaster, the strength of weak ties, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Walter Mischel

For example, it would have been sufficient for a participant to have been counted as a pathological gambler if they simply: 1) had gambled to win money that they had previously lost gambling, and 2) on some occasions they gambled more than they had intended to. We used a very low threshold to classify our subjects as pathological gamblers.” 9.25 circuitry involved in the habit loop M. Potenza, V. Voon, and D. Weintraub, “Drug Insight: Impulse Control Disorders and Dopamine Therapies in Parkinson’s Disease,” Nature Clinical Practice Neurology 12, no. 3 (2007): 664–72; J. R. Cornelius et al., “Impulse Control Disorders with the Use of Dopaminergic Agents in Restless Legs Syndrome: A Case Control Study,” Sleep 22, no. 1 (2010): 81–87. 9.26 Hundreds of similar cases are pending Ed Silverman, “Compulsive Gambler Wins Lawsuit Over Mirapex,” Pharmalot, July 31, 2008. 9.27 “gamblers are in control of their actions” For more on the neurology of gambling, see A.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 1.7 million American children currently have unsafe levels of lead in their blood.61 Although adults absorb only 8 percent of the lead they ingest, as compared to 50 percent for children, lead exposure can also cause serious health problems in adults.62 These include infertility, high blood pressure, muscle and joint pain, digestive and nerve disorders, memory loss, and concentration problems.63 Lead exposure in adults has also been linked with impulse-control problems and violent behavior.64 Compared with the toxic effects of lead, those of manganese have been less widely studied. It has long been known, however, that high levels of exposure can damage the central nervous system in ways that produce clinical symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease.65 At lower levels of exposure, neuronal uptake of manganese reduces neuronal levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, and has been associated with impulsive violence and other impulse-control disorders.66 The serious consequences of exposure to toxic metals in our water supply are entirely preventable.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Look at which people are the most likely to seize the current benefit, rather than waiting more patiently for a superior reward in the future. It’s the young, the uneducated, and also people with lower IQs and people who measure as having problems of cognition or self-control. Those same people are also more likely to have problems with obesity, gambling, impulse control, and even violence. These correlations don’t philosophically prove that their impatient choices are incorrect (maybe the gamblers are the wise ones and the rest of us are fools for missing out on their risky delights), but it does lend support to the idea that they are making a mistake. They are failing to imagine the future and its import.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

If you are the kind of person who is inclined to seize the current benefit, you will do best if you can find a way to link these immediate rewards to a superior payoff in the future. Young people, uneducated people, and those with lower IQs and problems with cognition or self-control find it hardest to make this connection. Those same people are also more likely to have problems with obesity, gambling, impulse control, and even violence. These correlations don’t philosophically prove that their impatient choices are incorrect (maybe the gamblers are the wise ones and the rest of us are fools for missing out on their risky delights), but they do lend support to the idea that these individuals are making a mistake.

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Some even suggest that poor Americans inhabit an entirely separate culture, a “culture of poverty,” one that manifests itself, according to anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in seventy-five distinct traits. Among them, we find a hatred and fear of the police; the absence of participation in mainstream institutions (and a distrust of them); low marriage rates; a “present-time” and fatalistic orientation; territoriality; early sexual activity; female-centered families; a lack of impulse control; a “tolerance for pathology”; and feelings of marginality, helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. 1 It is the urban poor, others have argued, who are especially distinct, and their inability or unwillingness to alter these “pathologies” is the chief cause of their poverty. As Jacob Riis professed long before Lewis:The thief is infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the very fact of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man.2 It is the supposed passivity among the very poor that often draws the attention of politicians, reformers, and critics of welfare.

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About half of all spells of homelessness lasted from one month to one year, with 13 percent for more than a year.15 Between 1987 and 1995, one in twenty New Yorkers used a homeless shelter at least once; between 1987 and 1992, it was one in ten for African American children.16 Mental illness is also more widespread than point-in-time measures might suggest: almost half of all Americans will experience an officially recognized (DSM-IV) anxiety, mood, impulse control, or substance use disorder, usually for the first time as children or adolescents.17 Hardships are part of our national experience, and poverty is not the exception, but the rule; it is not an anomaly confined to some marginal and marginalized population. In America, poverty is endemic. Relative Poverty Some will insist, however, that poverty isn’t what it used to be.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

On the other hand, the media’s power is an open secret within Anonymous, a topic routinely discussed by the activists themselves. In hindsight, and for better or worse, I believe some element of the trickster spirit nudged me to accept CSIS’s invitation. Tricksters, like the Norse god Loki, have poor impulse control. They are driven by lust or curiosity. Intrigue propelled me to visit CSIS, despite my anxiety and reservations. I had a burning question that I needed answered: would they would laugh at the lulz? So I guess, like trolls, “I did it for the lulz.” Thanks to my glimpse inside Canada’s spy agency, I got my answer: the infectious spirit of the lulz knows no bounds.

…

The shapeshifter Loki of Nordic mythology has recently reappeared in Hollywood films, mostly as a bland version of his mythological self, and still serves as a reminder of the capricious, vindictive role the trickster can perform. Tricksters are united by a few characteristics, such as the burning desire to defy or defile rules, norms, and laws. Often lacking both impulse control and the capability to experience shame, they are outrageous and unfiltered in their speech. Some tricksters are driven by a higher calling, like Loki, who sometimes works for the gods (though true to his fearsome nature, he sometimes causes problems for them). Many are propelled by unbridled curiosity and voracious appetite.

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

Focus perception on specific stimulus is the strategy of seeing every detail on the page or in the environment. It is the strategy of identifying everything noticed by the five senses. Control impulsivity is the strategy of stopping action until one has thought about the task. There is a direct correlation between impulse control and improved behavior and achievement. Explore data systematically means that a strategy is employed to procedurally and systematically go through every piece of data. Numbering is a way to go systematically through data. Highlighting each piece of data can be another method. Use appropriate and accurate labels is the use of precise words and vocabulary to identify and explain.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

Culturally, dangerous hires can be toxic to an organization with cancerous complaining and subverting of others. Dangerous hires pose a severe risk to a business, especially smaller organizations where each person matters. Jason suggests looking for signs of issues in their personal life, including a lack of impulse control and discipline. Nuisance hires are less dangerous, but still pose challenges. These people can be annoying and suffer from poor communication skills. They tend to blame others when something goes wrong and dwell on failure instead of success. On the investing front, nuisance hires lack original ideas, have low conviction, and cower in the face of adversity.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

This affects a variety of cognitive systems, including memory, pattern awareness, cognitive control (the ability to resist obvious but wrong answers), and verbal facility. Poor children are also much less likely to live with two biological parents in the home. Research with small mammals has found that animals raised without a father present were slower to develop neural connections than those raised with a father present, and as a result have less impulse control. It is not only a shortage of money and opportunity. Poverty and family disruption can alter the unconscious—the way people perceive and understand the future and their world. The cumulative effects of these differences are there for all to see. Students from the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree.

…

The test presented kids with a conflict between short-term impulse and long-term reward. The marshmallow test measured whether kids had learned strategies to control their impulses. The ones who learned to do that did well in school and life. Those that hadn’t found school endlessly frustrating. The kids who possessed these impulse-control abilities had usually grown up in organized homes. In their upbringing, actions had led to predictable consequences. They possessed a certain level of self-confidence, the assumption that they could succeed at what they set out to do. Kids who could not resist the marshmallows often came from disorganized homes.

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

The areas of the brain that are particularly sensitive to early life stressors include the hippocampus, involved in the formation and retrieval of memories and imaginings; the amygdala, involved in vigilance and detection of emotional significance; the anterior cingulate cortex, involved in error detection, impulse control, and allocation of mental resources; the corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres; and the prefrontal cortex, particularly the medial and orbital prefrontal cortices, which are involved in long-term decision-making, evaluating situations, and emotional self-regulation.58 Each of the brain areas has a different sensitive period in which stress can do the most damage.

…

Psychologist Bruce Ellis and colleagues argue that individuals who have grossly unmet safety needs may prioritize skills and abilities that make sense in context even though such skills may make them less likely to do well on standardized tests of academic achievement.76 According to his Theory of Successful Intelligence, intelligence researcher Robert Sternberg emphasizes the importance of viewing intelligence in context.77 The kinds of executive functioning skills (such as attention and impulse control) that support doing well in school may not be the same skills necessary for survival in one’s local ecology. According to Sternberg: Successful intelligence is one’s ability to choose and successfully work toward the attainment of one’s goals in life, within one’s cultural context or contexts. . . .

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

“And the younger you get a phone”—all of them said they had gotten smartphones in the sixth and seventh grades—“the more impulsive your decisions are, and then you get older and you just keep doing the same things from there,” said Carrie. When I talked to Paul Roberts, the author of The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification, he spoke of the lowered impulse control teenagers have due to the stage of their brain development. Teenagers have highly reactive limbic systems—the brain’s complex set of cortical and subcortical structures that influence emotional response—and so are thought to be more emotional and bigger risk-takers than either adults or children.

…

They’re less able to control their actions in regard to their sense of right and wrong, according to studies, especially if it has anything to do with winning the admiration of peers. “They have a kind of future blindness,” Roberts said. “It’s, What will doing this get me now? Not, What are the consequences?” But this depiction of teenagers’ lack of impulse control could also describe what Roberts believes has happened to American society overall, as seen in everything from the culture of Wall Street (“short-term performance” focus and collateralized debt obligations) to Washington’s failure to take serious action on the threat of global warming. As I read his book, it occurred to me that it’s as if we’ve become a nation of teenagers, from the limbic point of view.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

It often results in financial hardship, distress 15 AFFLUENZA and family difficulties. Psychologists have also noticed some interesting patterns of co-morbidity, that is, the simultaneous presence of other disorders. Individuals afflicted by oniomania often suffer from eating disorders, drug dependence, and other impulse-control disorders such as anorexia among women and gambling among men.21 The research shows that most compulsive buyers have histories of depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse. Yet ‘shopping til you drop’ is seen as the sign of a happy-go-lucky disposition rather than a meaningless life. Like alcohol, shopping has become both an expression of our discontent and an apparent cure for it.

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, Robert M. Pressman

delayed gratification, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, impulse control

The second are marginally successful but often seek treatment because of difficulty in maintaining long-term relationships or general feelings of aimlessness and dissatisfaction. The third group are those who are probably diagnosed with borderline personality disorder; they function clearly on a borderline level and manifest severe problems in the areas of impulse control, anxiety tolerance, and sublimation." These narcissists also evidence paranoid traits (masked by haughtiness or detachment), believing others to be always lurking, waiting for opportunities to persecute them.2" While Kernberg is clearly a classical Freudian and tends to use medical terms (such as malignant and terminal) that cannot help but convey the severity-if not hopelessness-of the narcissistic condition, his exposition on what the narcissist faces in middle age (what the layperson would dub a "midlife crisis") is compassionate and empathic.

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life by Alexander Green

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, behavioural economics, borderless world, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cognitive dissonance, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, endowment effect, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, financial independence, fixed income, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, hindsight bias, impulse control, index fund, interest rate swap, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, mental accounting, Michael Milken, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

In his book Emotional Intelligence, he writes, “As we all know from experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and our actions, feelings counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought . . . Passions overwhelm reason time and again.” Unfortunately, passion is how great investment plans often come undone. Goleman argues that two key aspects of emotional intelligence are impulse control and persistence. These are exactly the two qualities that will keep you from letting periods of poor market performance cause you to abandon your investment strategy in a panic. In short, investment success is more often attributable to your EQ (emotional quotient) than your IQ. Here are four ways you can keep your emotions under control:1.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal From Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

emotional labour, impulse control, theory of mind

They’ve differentiated from their original family relationships sufficiently to build a life of their own (Bowen 1978). They have a well-developed sense of self (Kohut 1985) and identity (Erikson 1963) and treasure their closest relationships. Emotionally mature people are comfortable and honest about their own feelings and get along well with other people, thanks to their well-developed empathy, impulse control, and emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995). They’re interested in other people’s inner lives and enjoy opening up and sharing with others in an emotionally intimate way. When there’s a problem, they deal with others directly to smooth out differences (Bowen 1978). Emotionally mature people cope with stress in a realistic, forward-looking way, while consciously processing their thoughts and feelings.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How by Daniel Coyle

Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, deliberate practice, experimental subject, impulse control, Kaizen: continuous improvement, longitudinal study, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every time a KIPP student imagines himself in college, a surge of energy is created, not unlike that created in South Korea when girls imagine themselves to be Se Ri Pak. Every time a KIPP student forces himself to obey one of these persnickety rules, a circuit is fired, insulated, and strengthened. (Impulse control, after all, is a circuit like any other.) Every time the entire school screeches to a halt to fix misbehavior, skills are being built as surely as they were when Clarissa did her start-stop attack on “Golden Wedding.” No wonder Daniel Magana is such a polite, well-disciplined young man—he has been ignited to deep-practice those qualities.

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border by Francisco Cantú

Corrections Corporation of America, Google Earth, immigration reform, impulse control, independent contractor

In 1962 the woman’s peaceable grand-uncle, a teacher at an institution for the learning disabled, traced the violence in his family as far back as 1870, identifying nine male family members and ancestors with a history of such behavior. For over a decade, geneticists at the University of Nijmegen conducted research on the woman and her family. In 1993, after fifteen years of investigation, researchers identified a deficiency in a gene that produces an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, a key regulator of impulse control. Individuals with low levels of MAOA, it seemed, were predisposed to violence, and researchers came to refer to them as carriers of a “warrior gene.” Since the occurrence of this deficiency is tied to a defect in the X chromosome, men—possessing only one X chromosome, while women possess two—are more prone to the defect, although women may carry it and pass it on to their sons.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

In the autopsy, coroners discovered that Junior had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease. CTE is believed to be caused by repetitive head trauma, in Junior’s case, from the many hits he endured while playing football.11 The brain disease—symptoms include “memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia”—appears to have altered Junior’s demeanor from selfless joy to inescapable depression.12 The sport through which he brought us joy removed his. Sadly, his case appears to be part of a larger pattern. Thirty-three of the first thirty-four brains of deceased NFL players studied at Boston University showed signs of CTE.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living by Brock Bastian

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cognitive dissonance, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, placebo effect, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, sugar pill, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce

., Burklund, L. and Lieberman, M. D. (2009). Inhibitory spillover: Intentional motor inhibition produces incidental limbic inhibition via right inferior frontal cortex. NeuroImage, 47 (2), 705–12. 18 Tuk, M. A., Trampe, D. and Warlop, L. (2011). Inhibitory spillover: Increased urination urgency facilitates impulse control in unrelated domains. Psychological Science, 22 (5), 627–33. 19 Fenn, E., Blandón-Gitlin, I., Coons, J., Pineda, C. and Echon, R. (2015). The inhibitory spillover effect: Controlling the bladder makes better liars. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 112–22. 20 Bastian, B., Jetten, J. and Hornsey, M.

Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health by David Nutt

Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, impulse control, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, microbiome, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Preventing suicide and self-harm is very difficult, but for people with underlying depression antidepressant medications can be very effective and for those where the primary driver is alcohol, stopping drinking through medication or psychological treatments will be helpful. Other mental health conditions and alcohol ADHD/IMPULSIVITY People who are very impulsive – they may have been diagnosed with ADHD or an impulse control disorder – may be more vulnerable to abusing alcohol. For example, studies suggest that the likelihood of becoming alcoholic for an adult diagnosed with ADHD is five to ten times higher than in the general population.9 ADHD is thought to occur because the top-down control of behaviour from the brain’s frontal cortex isn’t sufficient to control the bottom-up drives and impulses.

The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

As well as intuition and balance, other functions where scientists have discovered that the prefrontal cortex has a critical part to play in decision making include the following: We create conscious awareness here – when we are at our most alert and aware, this part of the brain is highly active. It is the seat of our self-awareness, giving us the capacity for metacognition – the power to observe our own thoughts and reflect on ourselves to assess our understanding and performance – and thereby for emotional balance, impulse control and behavioural flexibility. It enables us to give meaning to our emotions and move beyond the sensory concerns of the physical world, to a model of our environment which is constructed in our mind. Empathy seems to arise here. It is the enabler of our understanding of abstract information, without which we could only plan based on concrete data.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

It found moderate improvements in depression, anxiety, and pain, and very small reductions in stress, but there were few other measurable benefits.51 Another major trial on MBCT — conducted by an advisor to the Mindfulness Initiative, Willem Kuyken — found no evidence that it was more effective at preventing relapses than antidepressant medication.52 It was not even more cost-effective, despite suggestions to the contrary in Mindful Nation UK. Just Stop and Drop A core group of about twenty British politicians attends a weekly drop-in mindfulness class at Westminster. Teachers also offer twice-yearly silent practice days. Politicians enthuse about the positive effects on their attention spans, impulse control, kindness, and meta-cognition skills. One Labour member of the House of Lords, Andrew Stone, says being mindful helps him have “different kinds of conversations.”53 A Conservative MP, Tim Loughton, takes hour-long baths and expenses his water bill to taxpayers, saying: “I also reserve a little part of ablution time for some mindfulness.”54 The director of The Mindfulness Initiative, Jamie Bristow, parses such comments in Kabat-Zinn-ese: “This increased familiarity with inner experience in the act of political discourse represents a significant, if not profound shift towards less tangible insights into the human condition, that may offer a key to some of society’s most pressing problems.”55 For now, British politicians are spreading the gospel of mindfulness training, addressing other parliaments around the world.

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

That is because adolescents’ general tendency to explore and experiment (or more colloquially, “engage in reckless behavior”) is partially due to underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex. This region, right above the eyeballs, is most responsible for “adult” abilities, such as delay of reward, abstract reasoning (including statements like “if I spend the rent money on a zone bag, then…”), and impulse control. By some ill-timed developmental plan, the prefrontal cortex is the last brain region to reach its mature state. What’s more, this area of the brain is one of the regions most affected by a substance use disorder. What a pickle! Though it feels a bit like shouting into the wind, I’ve nonetheless implored my own children as well as my many students to carefully consider the evidence.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

Although many people who vent their problems to us only want someone with whom to commiserate, a caring friend would be more likely to help them solve their problems than to validate and encourage their maladaptive responses. Bloom argues that the people we typically think of as lacking empathy - psychopaths - are generally more lacking in impulse control, and that exceptional altruists are more likely to be high in self-control than in empathy.45 Those who praise empathy need to keep in mind that however noble it may seem, it is still an emotion. It does not consider facts or consequences, and if you do not maintain conscious control over your compassion, it will not serve a useful purpose.46 The effective altruism movement encourages people to look at how much good their actions will do, rather than simply donating money or time to whichever advertisement or cause more effectively stirs up their empathy.47 Following these principles may cause you to seem cold at times, but remember that emotions must be tamed to be used intelligently and effectively.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

By contrast, deciding to accept a low offer—the rational and self-interested thing to do—seems to take much careful consideration. When placed under time pressure for their responses, individuals from these societies reject more of the unfair offers. In one experiment, researchers used drugs to reduce people’s impulse control (serotonin depletion). Loss of their impulse control resulted in more rejections of low offers, but not of 50/50 offers. Negative emotional reactions are our automatic and unreflective response to norm violations and norm violators.15 Figure 11 3. Graph showing average percentage contributed in three treatments. Under time pressure people cooperated more.

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

Joined a club or purchased a golf membership or organization, just to be seen in the right places with the “right kind of people,” but can ill afford to do so. 85. Sees flaws in others routinely, but none in herself. 86. Does not like to be critiqued, even when it is helpful. 87. Sees personal problems in others as signs of inferiority, weakness, or poor impulse control. 88. Consistently brags or boasts about expensive purchases (jewelry, toys, properties, cars, etc.). 89. At work, repeatedly overstates to management his value and contributions. 90. Very easily sees weaknesses in others and is quick to exploit those weaknesses. 91. Is in a parasitic or exploitative relationship, taking advantage of someone financially (refuses to work or contribute although healthy and capable). 92.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

It is common, though by no means universal, that autistics have difficulty with speaking intelligibly or that they are late talkers or that they understand written instructions better than spoken instructions. Some researchers include “weak executive function” (a bundled function of strategic planning, impulse control, working memory, flexibility in thought and action, and other features) as part of the cognitive profile of autism. Other research focuses on the question of “weak central coherence,” or failure to see the “bigger picture.” But it seems these are secondary traits, more common in autistic subgroups than in autism per se.

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It by Craig Brandon

Bernie Madoff, call centre, corporate raider, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, impulse control, new economy, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, said college campuses are the third leading location for hate crimes, after homes and highways. 121 Young people are viewed as more racially tolerant because schools have taught them about multi-culturalism and diversity since they were children, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an African American studies expert from Princeton. “On the other hand, young people lack impulse control, drink heavily and stand around outside.”122 In October 2005, Steve Wessler, the executive director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, conducted a series of focus groups at Keene State College in New Hampshire, a college that has a black president but whose student body is 98 percent white.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

The letter then smoothly transitioned into full J’accuse mode, briefly outlining some of the more shoddy workmanship evident in the functioning of Homo sapiens: the vulnerability to disease and injury and death, for instance, the ability to function only in highly circumscribed environmental conditions, the limited memory, the notoriously poor impulse control. The author—addressing Mother Nature as the collective voice of her “ambitious human offspring”—then proposed a total of seven amendments to “the human constitution.” We would no longer consent to live under the tyranny of aging and death, but would use the tools of biotechnology to “endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date.”

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

Like how deeply it depresses you to obsess about this sort of food and gorge on it. Only days ago, I was hiding sweet and chocolate wrappers in a jacket pocket because I didn’t want my partner to know I had been bingeing again. Yes, there are millions of people who enjoy McDonald’s in moderation. But for people of my disposition, with serious impulse control problems, emotional eating is not only dangerous but also soul-destroying. The thought at the end of the meal is always the same: I don’t know why I did that. This cycle of emotional discomfort and self-defeating behaviour extends to many other areas of my life. For many years, I believed my lifestyle and associated health problems – fatigue, depression, anxiety, gum disease, insomnia, toothache, obesity, sexual dysfunction, alcoholism and substance misuse – were by-products of capitalism.

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis Phd

behavioural economics, deep learning, delayed gratification, helicopter parent, impulse control, language acquisition, meta-analysis, no-fly zone, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

Brain change underlies the transformations in thinking and feeling that characterize early adolescence. In fact, developmental neuroscientists estimate that “as many as 30,000 synapses may be lost per second over the entire cortex during the pubertal/adolescent period.”24 Brain change is necessary for language acquisition and impulse control in early childhood, and for learning to drive a car, play a musical instrument, or appreciate opera later in life. Brain change underlies religious conversion, becoming a parent, and, not surprisingly, falling in love. Brains have to change for learning to take place. Without physical changes in brain matter, learning is impossible.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, impulse control, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, zero-sum game

Anything that helped you maintain power was by definition right, even if it wasn’t always fair. NYMA also reinforced Donald’s aversion to vulnerability, which is essential for tapping into love and creativity because it can also expose us to shame, something he could not tolerate. By necessity he had to improve his impulse control, not only to avoid punishment but to help him get away with transgressions that required a little more finesse. * * * Freddy’s senior year was one of the best and most productive years of his whole life. The BA in business was the least of it. He’d been made president of Sigma Alpha Mu, and he completed ROTC and would enter the Air Force National Guard as a second lieutenant after graduation.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

They recalled the time Gracias made him put his phone in a hotel safe overnight, with Gracias punching in the code so Musk couldn’t get it out to tweet during the wee hours; Musk woke up at 3 a.m. and summoned hotel security to open the safe. After the launch, he displayed a touch of self-awareness. “I’ve shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots,” he joked. Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button. It was a pleasing concept: an impulse-control button that could defuse Musk’s tweets as well as all of his dark impulsive actions and demon-mode eruptions that leave rubble in his wake. But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is?

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

The “unusual experiences” component contributes to one’s creative output (for example, poems, paintings, songs, and so forth), which may serve as a kind of display to attract mates in the way that birdsongs do. (It’s not lost on teenagers that one of the best ways to find romance is to join a rock band.) Another is “impulsive nonconformity,” which describes people who don’t conform to social norms or expectations and who are low in impulse control. These characteristics can make schizotypes seem odd, sometimes to the point where they cause discomfort or discord. Nevertheless, many of the best managers and leaders in business, education, and other walks of life realize that creative ideas tend to come from unusual people and that if an organization wants to be innovative, then it must accept their quirkiness.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, impulse control, index card, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific worldview, the scientific method

Q: I have recently read in a newspaper article that operations of the nerve system in a brain are much slower than present-day computers and the unit in the nerve system is much smaller. Do you think that the computers you have talked about today have something in common with the nerve system in the brain? A: There is an analogy between the brain and the computer in that there are apparently elements that can switch under the control of others. Nerve impulses controlling or exciting other nerves, in a way that often depends upon whether more than one impulse comes in–something like an AND or its generalization. What is the amount of energy used in the brain cell for one of these transitions? I don’t know the number. The time it takes to make a switching in the brain is very much longer than it is in our computers even today, never mind the fancy business of some future atomic computer, but the brain’s interconnection system is much more elaborate.

Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography by Limmy

imposter syndrome, impulse control, pirate software, placebo effect

She must have felt that I was a right waste of her time. A waste of her life. But I didn’t care. I cared a bit, but not enough. And I still don’t. What I mean is, whatever it is that prevents the average person from becoming an alky, whether it’s pride or decency or common sense or restraint or impulse control or remorse or just plain old fucking happiness, I don’t have it. I’m trying to imagine how she must have felt, and I can’t. I can say the words, but I don’t feel it. When I got kicked out the motor, there was the feeling that I’d done something wrong, that I’d drunk too much. But now I’d been given the opportunity to drink some more.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

This type of social brilliance is one of the evolutionary gifts bestowed on us by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection in a world where humans were viewed as food by more physically capable species. Our edge over white-collar robots is our innate embrace of team-building practices like fairness and reciprocity, and empathy and impulse control. Most of us actually enjoy working cooperatively. In short, humans are social-math geniuses; computers aren’t. A second critical workplace skill that arose from evolutionary pressure is the ability to detect cheating and assign trust. Social cooperation slips very quickly into social exploitation and free riding.

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A rambunctious tomboy, she mostly hung out with boys in the early grades, including black boys—and she spent a lot of time on the time-out bench with them in kindergarten and first grade. A black friend suggested that she was being punished for befriending black kids, but I couldn’t see it that way. My girl was a handful. She wound up the only white kid in a special Kwanzaa study group that doubled as a small-group session on impulse control. The dad of one of the black boys in her group told me his son was there because he was just wired differently, being black. He couldn’t sit still, and he shouldn’t have to. Of course, white parents don’t think that about their fidgety kids: once it was believed they just needed discipline; now they all apparently needed Ritalin.

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

The Psychopathy Checklist is predictive of future bad behavior not because it assesses empathy and related sentiments but because, first, it contains items that assess criminal history and current antisocial behavior—questions about juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, parasitic lifestyle—and, second, it contains items that have to do with lack of inhibition and poor impulse control. This conclusion about psychopaths fits well with what we know about aggressive behavior in nonpsychopaths. As we discussed in an earlier chapter, a meta-analysis summarized the data from all studies that looked at the relationship between empathy and aggression, including verbal aggression, physical aggression, and sexual aggression.

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance

classic study, fixed income, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hive mind, impulse control, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, nocebo, personalized medicine, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, side project, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Yogi Berra

Not only do addicts have less dopamine from drug overuse, but also their dopamine receptors are affected (either changing their numbers or changing how well they transmit messages). Additionally, regular drug use actually twists our memories so that we crave both the drug and the circumstances surrounding the drug use (which is why people crave a cigarette and also pulling it from the pack and lighting it). Meanwhile, addiction causes the brain’s impulse control centers to shut down, guaranteeing relapse. Remember how Karin Jensen trained people’s brains to release a placebo response when they saw an image of a face flicker so quickly they couldn’t consciously register it? The same thing happens with cocaine addicts. Show them an image of blow for just 33 milliseconds—too fast for the conscious brain to take in—and they will have immediate cravings.

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

illegal immigration, impulse control

Their lives are full of turmoil, and the extent to which their children may be endangered depends upon the level of functioning of both parents. Unfortunately, males with BPD tend to be unfaithful husbands. They may defend against their fear of abandonment by seeking serial relationships with females, avoiding the possibility of being completely abandoned or alone. Poor impulse control is primarily responsible for self-destructive behavior such as infidelity, drug or alcohol abuse, compulsive gambling, overeating, homicide, and suicide. Steve Downs, the father of the three children shot by his ex-wife, Diane Downs, may have suffered from BPD. According to one source (Rule 1988), he abused alcohol, had affairs, and preferred drinking with his buddies to taking care of his small children.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

These folks already gave me millions of dollars; of course they have my best interests at heart. After all, these are young and impressionable developers. At age nineteen or twenty, the prefrontal cortex isn’t even fully developed yet.42 That’s the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control. These are the years when one’s ability to weigh priorities against one another is developed. The founders’ original desires for a realistic, if limited, success are quickly replaced by venture capital’s requirement for a home run. Before long, they have forgotten whatever social need they left college to serve and have convinced themselves that absolute market domination is the only possible way forward.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

Funderburk said, “In my experience, the physically abusive parent has the same goals as a normal parent; it’s their method and their ideas that are wrong. They think that their child is woeful, because they told their 3-year-old to just play in the front yard, and then he wandered off into the street. And they don’t understand that a 3-year-old might forget an instruction, or might not have that kind of impulse control, so they think they have to punish the child for his own good because he was disobedient and dangerous.” Earlier, we said that what looks like stubbornness or opposition may actually be a lack of clarity. The PCIT intervention suggests that child abuse, too, may be partly the result of a lack of understanding, a lack of clear instruction or guidance on what to do.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

This is a new version of the old debate about nature versus nurture. Nor do we understand precisely how long children should be able to wait. We think a four-year-old who is only capable of waiting a second or two before scarfing down a marshmallow might be in trouble because children without impulse control are more likely to encounter emotional problems. It makes sense that a kid who can wait several minutes for a second marshmallow would end up better off, because that amount of delay reflects a useful degree of willpower and self-control. However, these experiments don’t tell us how short is too short, how long is too long, or which factors affect the ideal amount of delay.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

More than 15,000 studies link sleeping less than seven hours per night with coronary heart disease, stroke, asthma, atherosclerosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, arthritis, depression, high blood sugar, diabetes, and kidney disease, even after adjusting for other factors like smoking and obesity.37 Simultaneously, sleep shortage disrupts the hormones regulating hunger and impulse control, increasing your chance of being obese by 55 to 89 percent.38 And the link between poor sleep and cancer is so strong that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified night-shift work as a “probable carcinogen,” alongside sinister-sounding suspects like vinyl fluoride and diethyl sulfate.39 Want to die early?

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Alexander Shulgin, call centre, David Attenborough, hive mind, impulse control, job-hopping, Norman Mailer, Rubik’s Cube, tech billionaire

The whole room popped and for a moment the darkness became bright like a supernova. I woke up on the floor, muffled voices filtering into my consciousness; I’d been flung across the room, what a fucking idiot. I was absolutely compelled to stick my finger into that live socket, perhaps this is a valuable insight into my powerful lack of impulse control. Brett also went on the school canal trips, and was the main reason really that I wanted to go. From my first year at secondary school until the fifth year when I left we went on the annual canal trip. It was a week over the Easter holidays with the groovy gang from the school’s canal club travelling different routes around the highways and byways of Britain’s majestic canal network.

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

Newby-Clark, “Construing the Past and Future,” Social Cognition 16: 133–50 (1998). 23. N. Liberman, M. Sagristano, and Y. Trope, “The Effect of Temporal Distance on Level of Mental Construal,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38: 523–34 (2002). 24. G. Ainslie, “Specious Reward: A Behavioral Theory of Impulsiveness and Impulse Control,” Psychological Bulletin 82: 463–96 (1975); and G. Ainslie, Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States Within the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 25. The first author to notice this was Plato, who used this fact to make his case for an objective measurement of happiness: “Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance?

Among Chimpanzees by Nancy J. Merrick

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, experimental subject, Global Witness, Google Earth, impulse control, language acquisition, microcredit, profit motive, the scientific method

Early learning was also essential, allowing young chimps to learn from their family and community how to groom, collect termites, hammer open an impenetrable nut or fruit, build a nest for sleep, and perform all the many other skills necessary for survival. Overall, we were learning a vast array of scientific morsels that, when you inspect them, speak to how much chimps resemble humans. Their hypermuscular bodies, easily excitable natures, and poor impulse control almost seem to make them caricatures of humans, emulating both the best and worst of our behavior. But they are—along with humans, orangutans, bonobos, elephants, and dolphins—one of a handful of beings capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, they are the only other creature besides humans that will search out and kill others of their kind militia-style, and they, along with the bonobos, are the animals whose genome so closely matches our own.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

They, in turn, gain greater access to sexual privileges as a form of political patronage. So while attaining and maintaining alpha status definitely requires genetic brawn, it also depends on a genetic endowment for the kinds of executive-control functions that, as we have seen, are challenged by feelings of social exclusion: attention focus, self-restraint, impulse control, social awareness, even social sensitivity. Alpha status depends on male-male cooperation, so even among apes, senior management requires insight, trust building, ability to detect treachery, and reciprocation. This is the only way that the leadership can establish and maintain “minimally winning coalitions” that preserve important roles, and attractive benefits, for all members of the team.

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

However, Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, behaved more like the rest of the irritated world leaders: she condemned the publication as illegal, and Assange’s actions as “grossly irresponsible”. The cables themselves revealed an unflattering view of Australia’s political class. The former prime minister – now foreign minister – Kevin Rudd was called an abrasive, impulsive “control freak” presiding over a series of foreign policy blunders. Was the Big Leak of the cables changing anything? As the year ended, it was for the most part too early to say. The short-term fall-out in some cases was certainly rapid, with diplomats shuffled and officials made to walk the plank.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest—the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “Executive Function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous. Both those mechanisms weaken a child’s capacity to learn during the day.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

He argues that we have “a moral obligation to overcome our moral limitations.” People, he says, evolved to form groups of about 150 individuals, and to be violent to those outside their tribe. “We’re far from perfect,” he says, but “science offers us the opportunity … to directly overcome those limitations” by producing embryos with improved “intelligence, impulse control, self-control—some level of empathy or ability to understand other people’s emotions, some willingness to make self-sacrificial decisions for other people,” all qualities that “have some biological bases.”18 Left to themselves, he insists, democracies can’t solve climate change, “for in order to do so a majority of their voters must support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing to make such sacrifices.”19 Also, our ingrained suspicion of outsiders keeps us from working together globally.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

cotton gin, impulse control, Mason jar, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, Y2K

And also to show you the difficult truth about the pain of living with a mental illness. Mostly that first part, though. And basically this entire paragraph is what it’s like in my head all the time. So, yeah. It’s a goddamn mess in here. I thank God, though, that I do at least possess the good side of my brain, because I once had a neighbor who lost the impulse-control part of his mind in a car accident and would randomly yell strange things at me when I’d go check the mailbox. Things like “Hi, pretty lady! Your butt is getting bigger!” and “I’d still plow that ass!” I’d always just force a smile and wave at him, because, yes, it was kind of insulting, but I’m fairly sure he meant it to be complimentary.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

As few parents would want to have a child who suffered depression serious enough to induce suicide, if great artistic talent and depression are genetically linked (and if pharmaceutical technology couldn’t alleviate this kind of depression), then embryo selection will likely reduce the number of future great artists. How would you like this kind of offspring: “The manipulative con-man. The guy who lies to your face, even when he doesn’t have to. The child who tortures animals. The cold-blooded killer”?215 Sociopaths are “characterized by an absence of empathy and poor impulse control, with a total lack of conscience.”216 An estimated 1 percent of humans are sociopaths, and the condition appears to have strong genetic roots.217 If given the choice, almost all parents would select against sociopathic genes. But I wonder if sociopaths have a kind of genius society sometimes benefits from.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

In these circumstances, they are exposed to “toxic stress” and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy. Peer-reviewed studies have found that five-year-olds who have experienced serious adversity have thinner frontal cortexes on average, and as a result less impulse control, less emotional regulation and less working memory. Given the scale of substance abuse in America, it’s also inevitable that large numbers of children are exposed prenatally. Almost one-fifth of children born in West Virginia have been exposed in the womb to drugs or alcohol, and research, while not conclusive, suggests that later in life they will be much more susceptible to substance abuse.

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

Here’s the real gift from your excellence and devotion over the sixty-six or so days: the willpower you were using to lay down the early-rising habit is now freed up for another world-class behavior, so you have the chance to grow even more productive, prosperous, joyful and successful. This is the hidden secret of all pro athletes, for example. It’s not that they have more self-discipline than the average person. It’s just that they capitalized on whatever impulse-control they had for sixty-six days until the game-winning routines got installed. After that, they redirected their willpower to something else that would improve their expertise. Another practice that would help them lead their field and achieve victory. One habit installation after another habit installation is how the pros play.

The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep by Dr. Guy Leschziner

23andMe, Berlin Wall, British Empire, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

The pleasure associated with shopping or gambling, for example, is mediated by dopamine. But ropinirole and other drugs in this class of dopamine mimics, termed dopamine receptor agonists, can mess up this reward system and cause it to go haywire. In recent years, we have become aware of a side effect of these drugs called impulse control disorders. Occasionally, patients on dopamine receptor agonists show striking changes in behaviour, involving activities that generate reward — things like compulsive gambling, excessive shopping, compulsive eating or hypersexuality. And patients are often not aware that their behaviour is different.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

These behaviors are not always illegal, but they are all more common in people who also commit violent crimes. All together, we pooled information on nearly 1.5 million people and tested whether individual SNPs were associated with an overall propensity for what psychologists called “externalizing,” which is a persistent tendency to violate rules and social norms and to struggle with impulse control. Using the results of our GWAS, we found that those who were high on the externalizing polygenic index, compared to those low on the polygenic index, were more than 4 times more likely be convicted of a felony and almost 3 times more likely to be incarcerated (figure 10.1). They were also more likely to use opioids and other illegal drugs, to have an alcohol use disorder, and to report symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, which is a psychiatric condition characterized by recklessness, deceitfulness, impulsivity, aggressiveness, and lack of remorse.10 Again, I should emphasize that our research was focused on differences within groups of people who all share European genetic ancestry and who would likely identify as White.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

Autism is associated with specific and pervasive differences in the brain, which result in us diverging from neurotypical standards, in terms of how our brains filter and make sense of information. Autistic people have differences in the development of their anterior cingulate cortex,[14] a part of the brain that helps regulate attention, decision making, impulse control, and emotional processing. Throughout our brains, Autistic people have delayed and reduced development of Von Economo neurons (or VENs), brain cells that help with rapid, intuitive processing of complex situations.[15] Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are.[16] To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a “nuisance variable” that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room).

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

B bought every Johnny Cash CD and DVD he could get his hands on. But when the electrical stimulator was off, he could not for the life of him recall what was so important about Johnny Cash.53 Not all side effects were as endearing, though. People with Parkinson’s implants have reported an increase in impulse control disorders, such as excessive gambling and hypersexuality.54 This reflects a somewhat uncomfortable open secret about DBS: despite all the complicated talk about the function of precise areas of the brain, no one is sure exactly how DBS works.55 As recently as 2018, academic reports described DBS as an effective but “poorly understood” treatment, even in Parkinson’s and the other motor diseases it has been approved to treat for decades.56 “If you think of neurons executing the neural code as playing a melody on a piano,” says Kip Ludwig, a former director at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), “then DBS is like playing that piano with a mallet.”

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Wood, senior administrator at the center, describes how they chose to tackle their problem with an unconventional solution: Did you know that back in the early twenty-first century, one of the most interesting strategies for reducing recidivism rates was a group literary reading program used in Brazil and Houston? The idea was that by reading classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, prisoners would develop more empathy and tolerance, and improve their literacy skills. It seemed to me that this strategy could address problems with impulse control and noncognitive deficits as well. We began our own group literary reading program, using storytelling modification and narrative injection to personalize the books and make them feel more relevant to individual prisoners. To be honest, it wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped. While Dr. Wood’s intervention at South San Jose showed glimmers of early promise, its effects were minor.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

They predict a wide range of behaviors in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics. Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Overconscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other “impulse control” disorders. Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extroversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

<3S AND MINDS September 11, 2015 IN THAT JUNE Q&A SESSION, Mark Zuckerberg also offered a peek into the future of interpersonal communication: “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.” Wow. That’s really going to require some incredible impulse control. Your inner filter is going to have to kick in not between thought and expression, as it does now, but before the formation of the thought itself. I mean, would you really want to share your raw thought-stream with another person, even a friend? Zuck may want instantaneous thought-sharing, but I’m thinking there’s going to have to be some kind of broadcast delay built into the system, like they have on talk radio.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

How many kids were you willing to wound, or injure, or kill with an automatic antitheft “armed response”? After all, the kids were just kids … kids were always trying to look around … explore … do some graffiti … throw some bricks through the glass windows … steal some furniture … vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground. Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites—they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing. So many places like that in Los Angeles … in every big town really … where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

Forty years later, the students who’d scored highest on conscientiousness had longer telomeres than the ones who were the least conscientious.29 This finding is important, because conscientiousness is the personality trait that is the most consistent predictor of longevity.30 Part of conscientiousness is having good impulse control, being able to delay the lure of immediately rewarding (and often dangerous) things like overspending money, driving too fast, excess eating, or alcohol use. Having high levels of impulsivity is associated with shorter telomeres as well.31 Conscientiousness in childhood predicts longevity decades later, and in a study of Medicare patients, those with high self-discipline lived 34 percent longer than their less conscientious counterparts.32 Perhaps that’s because conscientious people are better able to control impulses, engage in healthy daily behaviors, and follow medical advice.

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

Moreover, the objective evidence shows it is men, not women, who are more emotional and less strategic, to steal Barbara Stanny’s turn of phrase, about their investments and money, something anyone who has ever had the misfortune of hanging around a group of Wall Street investment bankers comparing notes during bonus season might guess. When Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (which merged with BlackRock in 2006) looked at the investment habits of high-income individuals, they found it was men, not women, who suffered from lack of impulse control when it came to their investments, buying “hot” stocks without performing due diligence and ignoring the tax consequences of their investment decisions. Women, it seems, were also much less attached to their picks and were quicker to dump a losing stock than their male counterparts. Those studying the behavior of men versus women during the dramatic stock market swoon of 2008–2009 also came to believe that female investors reacted to the ongoing stock market train wreck in a more rational fashion than their male counterparts.

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

If she takes either hand off the table or moves either foot while she is standing, I will shoot you. If you understand, nod.” You feel yourself nodding. This can’t be happening, can it? He’s about three metres away, too damn far to try and get to him—he’d shoot one of you first. If it was just you, you might try something (poor impulse control said Miss Fuller in elementary fourth, a damning diagnosis of potential heroism), but he’s aiming at Elaine, and just the thought of him putting a bullet in her makes your heart hammer and turns your vision grey at the edges. “Do it,” he says. “Ms. Barnaby first.” Elaine puts her hands on the table and tenses, rising out of her chair slowly.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

The second library was called the Library of Cleopatra and was built around a couple of hundred thousand manuscripts that were given to her by Marc Antony in what was either a magnificent gesture of romantic love or a shrewd political maneuver. Marc Antony suffered from what we would today call “poor impulse control,” so the former explanation is more likely. This library was wiped out by Christians in AD 391. Depending on which version of events you read, its life span may have overlapped with that of the first library for a few years, a few decades, or not at all. Whether or not the two libraries ever existed at the same time, the fact remains that between about 300 BC and AD 400, Alexandria was by far the world capital of high-quality information.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

WILLPOWER AND BRAIN CAPACITY Most of us are confused about what willpower really is; we tend to think some people have it in spades and that others—like those with chemical and behavioral addictions—are lacking in it. That’s exactly how I saw myself, as a person with no self-control or willpower, which was not at all true. While impulse control was indeed a skill I had to hone (for instance, through meditation and mindfulness—staying present with feelings and reactions), willpower (as in repressing or inhibiting a desire) isn’t a skill; it’s a finite cognitive function known as inhibition. To understand a little bit more how willpower or inhibition works, a few pieces of information will help.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

If she were breaking down hourly, riddled by intrusive thoughts, and couldn’t sleep or function, that would be entirely different. But crying can be cathartic, even onstage. “Adults will always think of ten thousand reasons why you can’t do something,” Dr. Ley said. “Kids won’t do that. That’s what’s glorious about young people: the still-developing impulse control. They see something, they see a cause, and they say, ‘I’m going to do what’s right. You’re not going to stop me.’” Still, the responsibility the kids had hoisted onto their shoulders posed risks, Dr. Ley said. So did the painful glare of the spotlight and the abject cruelty of their adversaries.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony. Bannon had come to rationalize Trump’s reality distortions. Trump’s hyperbole, exaggerations, flights of fancy, improvisations, and general freedom toward and mangling of the facts, were products of the basic lack of guile, pretense, and impulse control that helped create the immediacy and spontaneity that was so successful with so many on the stump—while so horrifying to so many others. For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness. “Politics,” said Bannon with an authority that belayed the fact that until the previous August he had never worked in politics, “is a more immediate game than he ever played it.”

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. “That’s what you’re voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him from impeachment.” The legal threat, however, might be moving faster than the election. And to Bannon—who knew more about the president’s hankerings, mood swings, and impulse-control issues than almost anyone—you could not have produced a needier or more hapless defendant. * * * Since coming aboard in the summer of 2017, the president’s legal team—Dowd, Cobb, and Sekulow—had delivered the message their client insisted upon hearing, that he was not a target and would shortly be exonerated.

Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud

delayed gratification, fear of failure, impulse control, trickle-down economics

Then you become a “wet blanket.” It’s revealing to talk to the “wet blanket” who is married to a practicing child. No job is more tiring. Proverbs 7:7 describes the youth stuck in the practicing stage: “I saw among the simple, I noticed among the young men, a youth who lacked judgment.” This young man had energy, but no impulse control, no boundaries on his passions. He becomes sexually promiscuous, which often happens to adults who are caught in this phase. And he ends up dead: “till an arrow pierces his liver, like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it will cost him his life” (Prov. 7:23). Practicers feel that they’ll never be caught.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

For sex differences in impulsivity, risk-taking, and sensation seeking (men higher), see Marcus Roth, Jörg Schumacher, and Elmar Brähler, “Sensation Seeking in the Community: Sex, Age and Sociodemographic Comparisons on a Representative German Population Sample,” Personality and Individual Differences 39, no. 7 (2005): 1261–71; Elizabeth P. Shulman, K. Paige Harden, Jason M. Chein, and Laurence Steinberg, “Sex Differences in the Developmental Trajectories of Impulse Control and Sensation-Seeking from Early Adolescence to Early Adulthood,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 44, no. 1 (2015): 1–17; Marvin Zuckerman, Sybil B. Eysenck, and Hans J. Eysenck, “Sensation Seeking in England and America: Cross-Cultural, Age, and Sex Comparisons,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 46, no. 1 (1978): 139; and Catharine P.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In their 2014 bestselling book The Triple Package, Chua and Rubenfeld highlight the successes of various American immigrant groups.1 They emphasize that Mormons, Jews, Indians, Chinese, Nigerians, and other ethnic groups attend elite educational institutions, earn high incomes, and obtain other positive outcomes more often than the typical American. According to Rubenfeld and Chua, these immigrant groups outperform other groups because they see themselves as superior, hold deeply rooted insecurities they seek to disprove, and have impulse control that other groups lack. These ideas are dangerous. Any claim that an ethnic group’s superior outcomes are the result of having superior qualities other groups lack must be evaluated as a racist claim. Asian Americans do have higher median incomes than white Americans, but they are still less economically secure than the median white American.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

I remember potential customers grossed out by seeing animated representations of their guts. I also remember feeling the joy of entrepreneurship. Invent. Bring it to people. Enjoy. Repeat. In the 1990s, after VPL’s demise, Walter became interested in VR as a tool for research and treatment, especially in behavioral medicine. He’s since used VR to work with gang members on violent impulse control, and other fascinating applications. And in the new century he introduced me to my wife. “She’s like Betty Boop” were the first words I heard about her, and they were true. Legitimacy, Hair, a Giant’s Shoulder It sounds ridiculous now, but around age twenty-two I was enjoying all I have described, and yet I also feared that I was an irredeemable failure.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and a few other nations have seen homicides rise: most nations have seen murder become less frequent, including El Salvador and Nicaragua, not long ago violent lands. IS THE UNDERLYING REASON FOR less crime the reduction of lead in products and pollution? Lead is a potent toxin, associated with reduced IQ and loss of impulse control. Leaded paint can peel off walls and be eaten by children. Beginning in the 1920s, lead was blended into gasoline to boost octane. When consumer use of gasoline soared following World War II, lead levels of the atmosphere rose—and though most toddlers don’t eat peeled paint, everyone breathes, rendering atmospheric lead an exposure pathway.

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

Mark’s Place, the former punk rock mecca, and Tompkins Square Park, which filled up with cute teen runaways in the summer. The creaky, dark, small building was above a strange Polish restaurant and a porny video shop; there was also a McDonald’s and a combination Dunkin’ Donuts/Baskin Robbins on the block. The setup screamed “mice.” But of course I screamed “impulse control problems.” “I’ll take it!” I exclaimed. It reminded me of a treehouse. I loved the weird shelves built into corners and the wood-paneled walls. There were three closets, which was crazy for four hundred square feet. And I liked that the treetops were right outside my windows. It was special to have a green view in downtown New York!

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

The brain, in short, develops as a social organ, not an isolated computer. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists have identified an especially important set of brain-based skills that they call “executive functions,” that is, the air traffic control activities that are manifest in concentration, impulse control, mental flexibility, and working memory. These functions, concentrated in the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, allow you to put this book down when your cell phone rings, make a mental note to pick up the kids after soccer, and then resume reading where you left off. Deficiencies in executive functions show up in such conditions as learning disabilities and ADHD.

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

But there is no clear evidence that their parents did express prejudiced attitudes, and even if they did, why would their siblings, who share the same genetic ancestry and family environment, have been less affected? Maybe the answer can be found in mental illness after all. Although it remains unclear whether or not Franklin and Copeland were mentally ill at the time of their crimes, it is possible their childhood traumas interfered with the normal development of emotional response, arousal and impulse control. There is a physiological consequence to deeply traumatic childhood histories. Childhood stressors, or traumatic events like child abuse and witnessing repeated violence, trigger the release of glucocorticoids that are in part responsible for triggering the ‘red alert’ fight-or-flight response.28 A young brain being flooded with glucocorticoids has an amplifying effect on the amygdala, making it more resistant to the influence of the executive control area (prefrontal cortex) that slams on the brakes, which in turn makes it more likely that fear of the stimulus is committed to long-term memory.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

As months passed, the stories continued to pile up, a mix of the sordid, sad, and appalling: an elderly man in his seventies who had uploaded more than eighty child abuse videos; a man in his early twenties with traumatic brain damage, deemed to have the same level of cognitive development as the preteens whose abuse he had watched, and whose medication had heightened his sexual appetites and reduced his impulse control; a New Jersey man whose communications, when they were revealed through a search warrant, seemed to show his negotiations to purchase a child for his own sexual exploitation. Thomas Tamsi, as the lead HSI agent on the case, coordinated more Welcome to Video arrests than anyone else—more than fifty, by his count—and was present for enough of them that they became a blur in which only the most jarring moments remain distinct in his mind: the mostly nude defendant he found in a basement; the suspect who told him he had been involved in the Boy Scouts and that “children had always been attracted” to him; parents of victims who vehemently denied that a family friend could have done the things Tamsi described, and whose faces then went white as he slid printouts of redacted screenshots across the table.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

However, even if we accept that emotions and motivation are fundamentally linked, and the former regularly produces the latter,§ what we’re eventually motivated to do is regularly determined by our cognition. The smarter, more recently evolved regions in the brain’s frontal lobe, particularly those of the prefrontal cortex, grant us the gift of executive control. Executive control is a general term for several functions,12 including impulse control, problem solving, working memory, self-regulation and assessment, and more. Executive control is the ability to overrule our more primitive, animalistic traits, like emotions, and instead use reason and logic to guide our thinking and behaviour. This is the ‘intellectual’ part of our psyche, and it has a substantial role in motivation.

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

Although demographic variables such as sex and education make little difference, there is evidence that level of functioning is significantly related to the ranking of therapeutic factors, for example, higher-functioning individuals value interpersonal learning (the cluster of interpersonal input and output, catharsis, and self-understanding) more than do the lower-functioning members in the same group.107 It has also been shown that lower-functioning inpatient group members value the instillation of hope, whereas higher-functioning members in the same groups value universality, vicarious learning, and interpersonal learning.108 A large number of other studies demonstrate differences between individuals (high encounter group learners vs. low learners, dominant vs. nondominant clients, overly responsible vs. nonresponsible clients, high self acceptors vs. low self acceptors, highly affiliative vs. low affiliative students).109 Not everyone needs the same things or responds in the same way to group therapy. There are many therapeutic pathways through the group therapy experience. Consider, for example, catharsis. Some restricted individuals benefit by experiencing and expressing strong affect, whereas others who have problems of impulse control and great emotional liability may not benefit from catharsis but instead from reining in emotional expression and acquiring intellectual structure. Narcissistic individuals need to learn to share and to give, whereas passive, self-effacing individuals need to learn to express their needs and to become more selfish.

…

Despite your group orientation, you must retain some individual focus; not all clients need the same thing. Some, perhaps most, clients need to relax controls; they need to learn how to express their affect—anger, love, tenderness, hatred. Others, however, need the opposite: they need to gain impulse control because their lifestyles are already characterized by labile, immediately acted-upon affect. One final consequence of more or less unlimited therapist transparency is that the cognitive aspects of therapy may be completely neglected. As I noted earlier, mere catharsis is not in itself a corrective experience.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

A bipartisan group of congressmen stood up for children and against the chemical industry, and by the 1990s lead had been completely removed from gasoline.55 This simple public health intervention worked miracles: lead levels in children’s blood dropped in lockstep with declining levels of lead in gasoline, and the decline has been credited with some of the rise in IQ that has been measured in recent decades.56 Even more amazingly, several studies have demonstrated that the phaseout, which began in the late 1970s, may have been responsible for up to half of the extraordinary and otherwise unexplained drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s.57 Tens of millions of children, particularly poor children in big cities, had grown up with high levels of lead, which interfered with their neural development from the 1950s until the late 1970s. The boys in this group went on to cause the giant surge of criminality that terrified America—and drove it to the right—from the 1960s until the early 1990s. These young men were eventually replaced by a new generation of young men with unleaded brains (and therefore better impulse control), which seems to be part of the reason the crime rate plummeted. From a Durkheimian utilitarian perspective, it is hard to imagine a better case for government intervention to solve a national health problem. This one regulation saved vast quantities of lives, IQ points, money, and moral capital all at the same time.58 And lead is far from the only environmental hazard that disrupts neural development.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

There are indeed times when we must protect ourselves, especially to avoid carrying the weight of every negative thing that moves us to respond. Instead of always questioning the impulse behind the reaction, we must do the opposite—understand and accept the impulse yet challenge and question the response before we act. This is the consequential thinking that is key to impulse control: the conscious and rational interpretation of feelings and events, which is also the cardinal rule of cognitive psychotherapy. Events happen and stimuli collide with us all the time; this is something we can only partially control. We must take greater control of how we interpret what triggers and stirs up our emotions.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Working Paper 15898, National Bureau of Economic Research. ———, Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff. 2012. “Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment.” Working Paper 18237, National Bureau of Economic Research. Fudenberg, Drew, and David K. Levine. 2006. “A Dual-Self Model of Impulse Control.” American Economic Review 96, no. 5: 1449–76. Gabaix, Xavier, and David Laibson. 2006. “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2: 505–40. Gawande, Atul. 2010. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Someone might defect because he believes—rightly or wrongly—that others are already defecting at his expense and he can't stand being seen as a sucker. Broker Rhonda Breard embezzled $11.4 million from her clients, driven both by greed and the need to appear rich. Other psychological motivations. This is a catch-all category for personal interests that don't fit anywhere else. It includes fears, anxieties, poor impulse control, genuine laziness, and temporary—or permanent—insanity. Envy can motivate deception.1 So can greed or sloth. People do things out of anger that they wouldn't otherwise do. Some pretty heinous behavior can result from a chronic deprivation of basic human needs. And there's a lot we're still learning about how people make risk trade-offs, especially in extreme situations.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

Eva Irle, Claudia Lange, and Ulrich Sachsse, “Reduced Size and Abnormal Asymmetry of Parietal Cortex in Women with Borderline Personality Disorder,” Biological Psychiatry 57 (2005): 173–82. 32. Leanne M. Williams et al., “‘Missing Links’ in Borderline Personality Disorder: Loss of Neural Synchrony Relates to Lack of Emotion Regulation and Impulse Control,” Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 31, no. 3 (2006): 181–88. 33. Irle, Lange, and Sachsse, “Reduced Size.” 34. M. I. Posner et al., “An Approach to the Psychobiology of Personality Disorders,” Development and Psychopathology 15, no. 4 (2003): 1093–1106. M. I. Posner et al., “Attentional Mechanisms of Borderline Personality Disorder,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 25 (2002): 16366–70. 35.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

As a result, psychiatric patients with a history of excess reactive aggression can be helped by taking “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs), drugs that increase serotonin concentration.38 By contrast, no successful psychopharmacological interventions have been found to influence proactive aggression in humans.39 The regulatory action of serotonin depends not only on its concentration but also on the density of the relevant kind of serotonin receptors. People with a high level of impulsivity (who are therefore liable to reactive aggression) tend to have unusually high densities of a particular kind of receptor (the 5-HT1A receptor) in parts of the prefrontal cortex associated with impulse control. Sex steroids (such as androgens and estrogens) also regulate the serotonin system. Men with low brain serotonin are more likely to be aggressive if they produce a high ratio of testosterone to the stress hormone, cortisol. Women show changes in the distribution of 5-HT1A receptors associated with changes in levels of circulating hormones across phases of the menstrual cycle.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

A good summary of the evidence can be found in James Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte Madrian, and Andrew Metrick, “Saving for Retirement on the Path of Least Resistance,” in Behavioral Public Finance: Toward a New Agenda, Edward J. McCaffrey and Joel Slemrod, eds. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 304–51. 11. George Ainslie, “Impulse Control in Pigeons,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 21 (1974): 485–89. 12. Samuel M. McClure, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Rewards,” Science (Oct. 15, 2004): 503–7. 13. Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings,” Journal of Political Economy (Feb. 2004): pt. 2, S164–S187. 14.

Woman On The Edge Of Time by Piercy, Marge

clean water, impulse control, planned obsolescence, sugar pill, War on Poverty

Alice snapped her teeth. Under the sheet she wriggled her long body. “Behold, Francis,” Dr. Redding said genially. “Patients recognize hesitation. You were reluctant to include Alice in the experiment because of the very violence that makes her a suitable subject. Your fears are groundless. Poor impulse control has brought this subject into repeated scrapes with society. The very lack of control that has stunted her development, we can provide her.” “You just saying I do what I want. Don’t you wish you just sometime know what you be craving to do? Mr. Beardo there, he poor at controlling impulses too.

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

bread and circuses, call centre, East Village, fear of failure, impulse control, land reform, Lao Tzu, Socratic dialogue, the medium is the message

He was leaning forward intensely, his mouth, after he had finished his short sentence, dangling open. `Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger. Dr Rhinehart nodded gravely to Dr. Moon and resumed. 'Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop a consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality: ha would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.' 'He would be insane,' came Dr. Peerman's high-pitched voice from his end of the table. His thin, pale face was expressionless. `Let us hear the man out,' said Dr. Cobblestone. `Go on,' said Dr.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Let’s call them Telepaths. Imagine, then, that these Telepaths enslave humans and use us for sport, as beasts of burdens, as food or subjects for medical experimentation. To justify this, they would cite our primitive forms of communication, our weak forms of reason and weaker judgement, our poor impulse control and reliance on instinct. They might recognize us as individuals, as selves – after all, we do pass the mirror test – but they would deny we have the kind of complex capacities which would justify legal personhood. Such an acknowledgement would be a clear affront, even a danger, to their own elevated status.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

There are indeed times when we must protect ourselves, especially to avoid carrying the weight of every negative thing that moves us to respond. Instead of always questioning the impulse behind the reaction, we must do the opposite—understand and accept the impulse yet challenge and question the response before we act. This is the consequential thinking that is key to impulse control: the conscious and rational interpretation of feelings and events, which is also the cardinal rule of cognitive psychotherapy. Events happen and stimuli collide with us all the time; this is something we can only partially control. We must take greater control of how we interpret what triggers and stirs up our emotions.

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Menlo Park, Necker cube, p-value, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, stem cell, Tragedy of the Commons

But that they are generated, and that genes contribute significantly to their variation are incontrovertible facts, and those facts are all we need in order to make neo-Darwinism coherent. Goodwin might just as well say that, before Hodgkin and Huxley worked out how the nerve impulse fired, we were not entitled to believe that nerve impulses controlled behaviour. Of course it would be nice to know how phenotypes are made but, while embryologists are busy finding out, the rest of us are entitled by the known facts of genetics to carry on being neo-Darwinians, treating embryonic development as a black box. There is no competing theory that has even a remote claim to be called coherent.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In essence, the reason is that in the general population, there are a wide variety of attitudes and motivations, and among all this variety there are some individuals with unusually high degrees of physical confidence, unusually low concern for their own physical safety, and unusually low capacity for impulse control – a collection of traits often referred to as ‘recklessness’.5 Business managers, however, are considerably more uniform than the general population. They tend to share two traits in particular: a strong desire to generate profits for their businesses, and a reasonable awareness of the effective means of doing so.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Freeman, Richard, and Wei Huang. 2015. “Collaborating with People Like Me: Ethnic Co-authorship Within the U.S.” Journal of Labor Economics 33 no. S1: S289-S318. Fudenberg, Drew, and David Levine. 1998. Theory of Learning in Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fudenberg, Drew, and David Levine. 2006. “A Dual-Self Model of Impulse Control.” American Economic Review 96: 1449–1476. Gammill, James F., Jr., and Terry A. Marsh. 1988. “Trading Activity and Price Behavior in the Stock and Stock Index Futures Markets in October 1987.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 3: 25–44. Gawande, Atul. 2009. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

The second reason is that we rely on stereotypes as “mental shortcuts” to help us make sense of complex environments in which there is little time to develop subtle evaluations. This is not necessarily bad: A driver who sees a small child standing on the roadside may make a stereotypical judgment that “children have no impulse control” and assume that the child may dash out. The driver slows. It does not take a great leap to imagine, however, the problems of seeing something that does not conform to our expectations. Consider the results of one well-known psychological study. People were read a word describing a personal attribute that confirmed, countered, or avoided gender stereotypes.

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Ada Lovelace, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, financial independence, impulse control, LNG terminal, operational security, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, trade route, Upton Sinclair

Wood watched the heading indicator on the sonar plot swing. The Pogy was turning rapidly, but not rapidly enough to suit him. The Red October—only he and Reynolds knew that she was Russian, though the crew was speculating like mad—was coming in too fast. "Ready, sir." "Hit it." Palmer punched the impulse control. Ping ping ping ping ping! The Red October "Skipper," Jones yelled. "Danger signal!" Mancuso jumped to the annunciator without waiting for Ramius to react. He twisted the dial to All Stop. When this was done he looked at Ramius. "Sorry, sir." "All right." Ramius scowled at the chart.

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

Share the prizes.”71 Generations of readers have wondered why Homer interrupts the siege of Troy with wrestling and other sports, but Achilles’s message exemplifies Richard Wrangham’s argument: the Greeks need to stop fighting among themselves and instead cooperate if they are to end their ten-year siege. They should stop being reactively aggressive with each other and be only proactively aggressive toward the Trojans. As with war, suppressing reactive aggression and following rules are fundamental to most sports. Indeed, sports might have evolved as a way to teach impulse control along with skills useful for hunting and controlled proactive fighting. What is more unsportsmanlike than punching an opponent who scores a goal or, even worse, punching a teammate who scores instead of you? Professional tennis players aren’t even allowed to say rude things on court. Surely other hominins including Neanderthals engaged in play, but I hypothesize that sports evolved when humans became self-domesticated.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Many commercial logos from the 1950s featured mushroom clouds, including Atomic Fireball Jawbreaker candies, the Atomic Market (a mom-and-pop grocery store not far from MIT), and the Atomic Café, which lent its name to a 1982 documentary on the bizarre nonchalance with which the world treated nuclear weapons through the early 1960s, when horror finally began to sink in. Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man’s willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy. An incident from 1950 illustrates the change. President Harry Truman had seen an unkind review in the Washington Post of a performance by his daughter, Margaret, an aspiring singer. Truman wrote to the critic on White House stationery: “Some day I hope to meet you.

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Hardness of heart /Hardness of life: The stain of human infanticide. New York: University Press of America. Mischel, W., Ayduk, O., Berman, M. G., Casey, B. J., Gotlib, I., Jonides, J., Kross, E., Teslovich, T., Wilson, N., Zayas, V., & Shoda, Y. I. In press. “Willpower” over the life span: Decomposing impulse control. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. Mitani, J. C., Watts, D. P., & Amsler, S. J. 2010. Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees. Current Biology, 20, R507–8. Mitzenmacher, M. 2004. A brief history of generative models for power laws and lognormal distributions.

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan M. D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, disinformation, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Firefox, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, impulse control, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral panic, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, smart cities, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons

According to a recent study appearing in the Public Library of Science, oxidative stress (an inevitable consequence of a high-vegetable-oil diet) correlates with lower “emotional IQ.”335 The study, conducted on a sample of fifty female psychology students, investigated the possible correlation between each participant’s antioxidant enzyme activity and parameters of emotional intelligence. What the researchers found was that the women showing the highest antioxidant enzyme activity scored significantly higher in six variables: optimism, self-regard, reality-testing, stress tolerance, happiness, and impulse control. In the next chapter, I’ll discuss in detail how vegetable oil and sugar work together to predispose you to weight gain and metabolic syndrome. This study shows how the combination of sugar and vegetable oil form a perfect, biochemical weapon of addiction—reminiscent of “impact boosting” used by cigarette manufacturers—to turn junk foods, and other processed foods, into effective delivery systems of metabolic disease.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day