The Procrastination Equation Page 5

  OF BABES AND BEASTS

  Procrastination increases whenever our more recently acquired prefrontal cortex is compromised.9 The less potent the prefrontal cortex, the less patient we become.10 Those with brain damage can provide particularly vivid examples of this, Phineas Gage being the most famous.11 Gage was a shrewd, responsible, hardworking, methodical railway foreman who, in a workplace accident in 1848, had over three feet of iron rod blown through the top of his skull and the front of his brain. He recovered, incredibly, but he became a man of the moment: impatient, vacillating, profane, inconsiderate, uninhibited, and uncontrollable. The iron rod had severed the connection between Gage’s limbic system and his prefrontal cortex. The planning part of the brain needs the fast and accurate input from the limbic system to understand the world, and that’s what Gage lost. A more modern example is Mary J. who was completely transformed within a year by a brain tumor that debilitated her prefrontal cortex.12 Before the tumor, she was a quiet teetotaling Baptist, on the dean’s list at an Ivy League university, and engaged to be married. Until the tumor was surgically removed, she was angry and extremely promiscuous, failing school, drinking hard, and using drugs. Her executive function was disabled and she became all impulse, ruled by whatever temptation was put before her.

  There is a way people can experience Phineas' or Mary’s predicament, and happily it doesn’t involve a nail gun. We can temporarily lesion the prefrontal cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses electromagnetic induction to briefly knock out focused sections of the brain.13 Alternatively, taking alcohol, amphetamines, or cocaine either hypercharges the limbic system or hinders the prefrontal cortex’s ability to perform, creating actions that “seemed like a good idea at the time” but later prompt regrets.14 Or, the prefrontal cortex can simply become exhausted through sleeplessness, stress, or resisting other temptations; by fighting one enticement, we often become more susceptible to another.15 Finally, if you are a teenager, you might not need to go to any of these extremes, since your prefrontal lobes are still receiving their final touches.16 Combining the effects of youth, stress, and alcohol together, the most impulsive and uninhibited place on this planet is a group of teenagers celebrating the finish of a willpower-depleting stretch of studying with a weeklong drink-fest. Indeed, Phineas Gage would fit right in during Spring Break in Cancún, with wet T-shirt contests, drinking games, and random hook-ups. If you don’t diminish the prefrontal cortex, you can’t have Girls Gone Wild.

  If you can’t make it to Spring Break to see the limbic system dominate action, there are good alternatives closer to home. In fact, they are likely in your home. Do you have a pet or a child? Both are heavy on the limbic system, making owning a pet the neurobiological equivalent of raising a child.17 We are their external prefrontal cortices. We have to be the ones providing patience and doing our best to coax it out of those who don’t have much of it or who are still developing it.

  THE NOW OF BABES

  There is a rhyming biological heuristic that goes “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” It means that the way we develop within our lives roughly reenacts the course that human evolution has taken over millions of years. When in the womb, more or less, we morph from fish to reptile before eventually emerging as a mammal. But the process isn’t done yet. The last aspect of us to evolve is the prefrontal cortex, which continues to develop after birth.18 For those who have children, and as I write this, I have two still in diapers, we don’t need a biology degree to know that infants aren’t born with the ability to plan ahead and put their immediate needs on hold for the benefit of some future goal. Just try asking for patience from a hungry baby or a little one with a full diaper and my point will be made. They are merciless in their need.

  As children develop, their prefrontal lobes grow too and eventually they achieve the ability to put things off just a bit. You can’t ask a baby to put off a feeding, but eventually you may ask a toddler to say “Please” before getting a treat. It takes the development of the prefrontal cortex for this modicum of control to appear—which happens all too slowly for my taste. Year-old children have almost no executive control, instantly batting down any pile of blocks or grabbing your eyeglasses, but just one year later, brief moments of patience become possible, say twenty seconds. By the age of three, children are routinely waiting a full minute and by four they are piling their blocks high, putting off the blast until they can enjoy the big burst of noise when their soaring towers tumble.

  At the age of four, children can play “Simon Says.” This is a significant advance, because the game is all about self-control, about inhibiting the immediate impulse from the limbic system so that the prefrontal cortex can mull over whether Simon has actually said “Simon Says” before they respond. How well this acquired ability transfers into kindergarten is another matter, because kindergarten requires sitting when you want to run, listening when you want to shout, and taking turns when you want it all to yourself. Fortunately, between the ages of four and seven there is a burst of development in children’s executive function. They are progressively better able to make plans for tomorrow, to pay prolonged attention to more than the television set, and to shut out distracting events other than parents calling them to come in for dinner.

  The normal maturation of the prefrontal cortex is assisted by endless hours of patient teaching by parents trying to get their little ones to put off their needs for just a moment without tears or the stomping of feet. Unwearyingly insisting that gifts can be unwrapped only at Christmas and then only your own, that dessert comes after dinner, or that toys must be shared with others coaxes a little more from the prefrontal cortex and a little less from the limbic system. Unfortunately for parents, their role as their children’s external prefrontal cortices is a long one. It can last until about the age of nineteen or twenty, when the biological basis of self-control is finally fully in place. Until then, parents can only herd their teenagers away from all the vices that impulsiveness ensures youth will find especially tempting: risky sex, excessive alcohol, petty crime, reckless driving, and, of course, procrastination.19 The younger you are, the more you seek instant gratification, from socializing late into the night and then facing tomorrow’s exam half asleep to dillydallying so long you have to pack your bags in a flurry and almost miss your plane. Though the young act as if they will live forever, they really are living just for today.

  The novelist Elizabeth Stone has written that having a child “is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,” but our role as walking prefrontal lobes comes to an end at this point. As adults, our children no longer need us for guidance and any mental inequalities between us go into a long lull, perhaps broken briefly by the arrival of grandchildren if they are forthcoming. We can expect apologies from our kids as they try to raise a few of their own and learn firsthand the vigilance required to be a parent. And then, long later and hopefully not at all, our roles may change entirely. As we grow older so do our brains, losing the snap they had in earlier years, especially the prefrontal cortex—following the last in, first out rule.20 Though some avoid this fate, remaining razor sharp into their final years, others get it worse, assisted by the senility of frontotemporal dementia that affected my grandmother Eileen.21 I am well aware that I too might encounter a second childhood and once again be as vulnerable as my two young sons are now. Indeed, we'd better raise our kids well, as their love might be the only thing that stands between us and a world that views us as prey made easy through old age and a compromised mind.

  BIRD BRAINS

  Animals might be our fellow procrastinators. After all, we share many other “human” personality traits with dozens of other species, from rhesus monkeys to octopi. Wild great tits, for example, exhibit varying degrees of aggressiveness and risk taking, traits that enable greater environmental exploration.3a The bolder birds expose themselves to more danger but also reap the gains of better nesting places, food sources, and choice of mates.22 For
another example, just ask any dog or cat owner if their pets have a unique personality; the owners will rightly insist that their furry friends differ in terms of affection, anxiousness, aggressiveness, and curiosity.23 Significantly, this list of shared traits includes impulsiveness, the cornerstone of procrastination.24 But this doesn’t necessarily translate into procrastination itself.

  Whether they are meowing, barking, or chirping, animals are clearly limbic-heavy in their decision making. But that’s only half the story. You need some prefrontal cortex or its equivalent to procrastinate, for without it you can’t make plans that you later irrationally put off. Do animals have this mental capacity? Apparently some do, showing the ability to anticipate and plan for the future, especially regarding food.25 Scrub jays can anticipate being denied breakfast tomorrow and will cache food to snack on later. Rats seem to have some sense of time, being able to recall where and when feeding events occur.26 Chimpanzees can wait up to eight minutes to exchange a small cookie for a large one, showing slightly more patience than a young human child.27 Male chimps will invest in future mating opportunities by sharing meat with a female, with the hope of being favored when she comes into heat.28 Also, consider Santino, a particularly farsighted chimpanzee from the Swedish Furuvik Zoo. He will spend his morning collecting stones to hurl at annoying zoo visitors in the afternoon.29 In combination with impulsiveness, all the pieces for procrastination are there: animals can make plans for the future and, what’s more, they can impulsively put them off, despite expecting to be worse off for it.

  James Mazur, a Harvard-trained psychologist, has directly demonstrated procrastination in animals. He trained pigeons to two different work schedules and then gave them a choice of which to pursue. Both schedules delivered a tasty treat at the same time, but the first started with a little work followed by a long delay, while the second started with the long delay and ended with a lot more work, up to four times as much. Essentially, the birds had to choose between doing a little hard work now (followed by rest and recreation) and taking it easy immediately (followed by a lot of hard work). The pigeons proved to be procrastinators, putting off their work despite having to do more of it to obtain their reward in the end.30 Like a twisted version of a Cole Porter song, birds delay doing it and even chimpanzees in the zoo delay doing it. Since most animals, including pigeons, have the capacity for procrastination, procrastination is pretty well confirmed as a fundamental part of our motivational firmament.31 The last time we all went to the same family reunion was over 286 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, before the time of the dinosaur.

  Inevitably, then, having an animal as a pet is largely an exercise in dealing with this limbic-heavy decision making. Dogs, for example, naturally act in the moment and grab food that isn’t theirs, chase stray animals across busy streets, and bark or whimper incessantly by the door waiting for you to open it. It would be easier in the short run to let the dog be, but patience and long-range thinking on our part can make all the difference for a life with any four-legged friend. This is what expert dog trainers stress, like Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, or Andrea Arden, author of Dog-Friendly Dog Training: the primary responsibility of an owner is “to convince your dog that waiting for something—which is typically not a natural instinct for dogs—is the best option.”32 The big trick is convincing owners to do this in the first place. Teaching impulse control uses a lot of our prefrontal cortex, a resource we often don’t have a surplus of to begin with.

  EVOLUTIONARY PROCRASTINATION

  By all appearances, from the evidence of brain science to animal studies, the capacity to procrastinate is engrained in us. It’s even in our genetic code: several studies indicate that about half of most people’s lack of self-discipline has a genetic origin.33 This makes sense, given that DNA allows adaptive genetic mutations to be passed down through subsequent generations, a process known as “descent with modification.” Without a genetic component, the ability to procrastinate couldn’t easily be passed on.

  We evolved to be procrastinators, but why? Procrastination is an irrational delay, whereby we voluntarily put off tasks until later despite expecting to be worse off for the decision. By definition, procrastination is harmful and should have been culled long ago from our gene pool rather than filling it to the brim. Are we the butt of some cosmic joke? Maybe. But there is another possibility to consider. Some traits occur as by-products of other once-more-adaptive processes. For example, belly buttons are a by-product of being born, and though they can be pretty, they don’t have any pressing purpose in themselves. Since procrastinators are above all else impulsive, the evolutionary explanation for impulsiveness is the one to focus on. Procrastination is a by-product.34

  Essentially, impulsiveness is about living for the moment. Long-term desires and tomorrow’s deadlines are ignored until they become imminent—until the future becomes the now. Though today impulsiveness isn’t usually a helpful trait, evolution operates through hindsight; that is, it custom fits us to the environment we were in, with no anticipation or prediction. This is known as ecological rationality, in that what is rational depends upon the environment you operate in. It is like getting a tailored suit for your wedding day. You look magnificent in it, but try it on again twenty years later and it pinches in all the wrong places. Likewise, procrastination may be steeped within our existence because having an impulsive mindset made a lot of sense when we were hunter-gatherers. When our ancestors needed to do the basic four “F”s of survival—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating—it would aid their cause if they also wanted to. Let’s briefly consider the last and first of these four: what we have for dinner and who we seek to spend the evening with afterward.

  FAST FOOD

  From our teeth, which chew it up, to our intestines, which digest it, food has played a major role in our evolution. We have evolved to love the taste of fats and sugars because, in a world where starvation and predation were constant concerns, stocking up on high-caloric foods was once an adaptive preference. When the food supply was sporadic, we would have to gorge when the going was good, focusing on energy foods rich in sugar and fat. There were no Neanderthals on self-imposed diets. Consequently, for most of human history, being “overweight” has been considered beautiful, affluent, and enviable.35 The exigencies of eating may explain how we all became so impulsive and, consequently, procrastinators.

  Let’s consider two types of primates, common marmosets and cotton-top tamarins, which are almost identical except in their choice of food.36 Marmosets are gummivores, which scratch tree bark and then sip on the sap that flows. Tamarins are insectivores; they pounce on bugs whenever they can find them. Marmosets show a lot more self-control than tamarins, as they are selected for it. Sap takes a while to flow, demanding patience, whereas the hunt for jumping and scurrying bugs requires immediate action. For animals in general, the fine tuning of impulsiveness to their food source is called optimal foraging.37 We are optimized to get the most calories in the shortest time; consequently, the longer it takes to kill, eat, and digest, the less impulsive a species typically becomes. In short, we develop the self-control we need to ensure our next meal.3b

  Being omnivores and at the top of the food chain, humans are superstars of self-control. We have the patience to kill and eat almost anything that lives. Birds' ability to delay gratification, in comparison, hardly registers; even a ten-second wait is remarkable. Similarly, ten minutes of patience is an eternity for a chimp. For all our superior self-control, though, in today’s whirlwind, we don’t have enough. We have been favored with enough patience for a world without grocery stores or refrigerators, enough for hunting animals or gathering berries. Yet, we have a relatively small window compared to what we currently need. Procrastination results from a disconnect in our genetic inheritance, as we now pursue projects and plans that require weeks, months, and years to complete, timelines for which we are motivationally mismatched. In the forest, a bird in the hand might be worth two in the bus
h, but in the city, the discount rate is far more slender; invest in a bird today and tomorrow you are lucky to earn a chicken wing’s worth of interest.38

  JUST SAY YES

  Now on to the second example, the one you've been waiting for—sex. Evolution is steeped in sex, as those who succeed breed. Since procrastinators' impulsive nature is ingrained in their DNA, it can be passed on to their offspring and, if it lets them have more kids, the trait quickly becomes common. Just consider my family. The males on my mother’s side tend to have children later in life. My great grand-dad was Owen Owen, who people in the UK might remember from his string of similarly named though now-defunct department stores.39 Since Owen Owen was born in 1847 and I had my son Elias in 2007, each generation of my family tree is spaced forty years apart. If we were in a stork race with another family that started a new generation every twenty years (thereby reproducing twice as fast), by now there could easily be over eighty of them for every one of us. Getting an early start on baby making makes a big difference.

  Sure enough, procrastinators' impulsiveness has been linked to an early start for parenthood through teen pregnancy as well as sexual promiscuity.40 The one thing that procrastinators don’t tend to put off is “getting some.” No wonder. The fun part of copulation comes immediately, while the harder part of child raising . . . well, that’s almost a year away. This state of sexual affairs also helps explain why men tend to be more impulsive and procrastinate more than women.41 Reproduction strategies favor a quality versus quantity split—that is, raising a few kids well or having lots in the hope some of them work out. Since it is easier for men to invest less in their offspring, they definitely lean toward the quantity option. As Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, wrote: “Men are more motivated to have short-term sexual flings with multiple partners than women are.” Women tend to favor the quality strategy, taking a longer-term and more responsible perspective. She waits patiently for Mr. Right while he impulsively wants Ms. Right Away.