Mick Hartley

Yet another psychologist reaches for the brain scan (see here here and here):

A psychologist who found he could predict children’s prospects by testing whether they could resist eating a marshmallow is to scan their brains to find the neurological roots of temptation.

The “marshmallow test”, one of the world’s simplest and most successful behavioural experiments, was developed by Professor Walter Mischel.

He proved conclusively that the longer a four-year-old child was able to wait before taking a sweet, the better were his or her chances of a happy and successful life.

Mischel has been monitoring the lives of dozens of his subjects since he started the marshmallow experiments at a nursery on the campus of Stanford University, California, in the 1960s.

His findings have proved so compelling that 40 of his original subjects, now in their forties, are preparing to undergo scans in the hope of answering a perplexing human question: why are some of us better than others at resisting temptation?

“Brain imaging provides a very exciting and important new tool,” said Mischel, who now works at Columbia University in New York.

By examining the differences between the brains of subjects who turned out to be good at controlling their impulses and those who wolfed down the marshmallow the moment it was offered, researchers hope to come up with new ways of teaching the benefits of delayed gratification.

It's no surprise that children who've learnt to delay gratification should go on to do better in life than those haven't. It always used to be presented as the classic middle class virtue, as drummed into the heads of generations of children by their concerned and responsible parents: you should always save up your pennies for the future rather than rush down to the sweet shop like the feckless lower orders. There are so many complex social and personal and cultural factors involved in behaviour like this that it seems grotesquely reductionist to think you can scan brains and come up with some kind of explanation for it all. Did our neural circuits all change during the Protestant Reformation?

But now that psychologists have access to those fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)machines, well, they're going to use them, aren't they? They can't keep their hands off, even though, as many scientists now admit, the use of brain scans in psychology experiments is more often than not "a potentially serious oversimplification of how the brain works". They just can't help themselves. They can't wait for the technology to improve, or for our understanding of the development of neurological processes to get to a point where they might be able to make an intelligent contribution. No, they've got to rush in regardless and spend all their research grants on the latest fashionable nonsense instead of being sensible and saving up till they've got a reasonable theory to test. Didn't their parents teach them anything?