This Is What Your Brain Looks Like When You Lose Your Self-Control
You are not a bastion of self-control. Everyone has a set amount of the stuff, and when life saps it, people can break. Now fMRIs from a University of Iowa study show exactly what it looks like when that happens. The anterior cingulate cortex usually sends up the red flag when a situation requires self-control. It goes at a steady rate as long as it needs to. But the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which actually manages self-control, fires less and less the more it does its job. In other words, people know when they're giving in, they just have a hard time doing anything about it after a while. Under Control MRI: A brain doing its best not to lose it University of Iowa To get the images here, neuroscientist William Hedgcock had test subjects perform two self-control tasks while going through an MRI. The first was to ignore words on...