Sugar on the Brain?

I am a morning person.  I function best when I start work before breakfast, or at least I believe that to be the case.

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, would tell me that I should watch out for late night binging.

Why?

Because when morning people get tired, at the end of the day, they have diminished self-control, the part of the brain that regulates behavior simply runs out of energy.

So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun. - Ecclesiastes 8:15

Today's reading from one of my favorite books (Ecclesiastes) treats us to the voice of the cynic who has given up.  He will no longer try to understand the purpose and meaning he inwardly wants to find in life.  In a word, he has grown lazy.

Kahneman uses that hideous four-letter word (lazy) as well, referring to the controller, that inner regulator that runs out of steam.  He says we all have an intuitive side and a rational side, and in each of us, one is dominant over the other.  In all of us, there is a built-in tendency to minimize effort, to expend as little energy in brain-work as possible.

Now, before you react to that and say, "That's obvious, given how people act," consider this.  It makes a lot of sense for us to be built that way, so we can react instinctively without our heads getting in the way.

But that instinctive behavior or intuition could lead us astray, letting us get back to eating, drinking and enjoying ourselves before checking to make sure the decision we just made is correct.

One of the tests in the book is a simple question.

If you can purchase a bat and ball for $1.10, and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

Simple, right?

Well those of us who jump to the easy answer, 10 cents, fall into the trap of the lazy controller.  We take the intuitive way out, rather than apply a bit of logic and reason to the situation.

There are people, however, who don't trust their intuition and automatically assume there is a trick or puzzle here, and they would come up with the correct answer, 5 cents.

What is fascinating about all this is that our friend in Ecclesiastes may actually have hit on something.  It seems our controller also miss fires when we are tired or when we have low levels of glucose in the brain.

That's right, sugar.

It seems that a spoonful of sugar does more than help the medicine go down.  It also reactivates the brain so it can work on difficult tasks more effectively or for longer periods of time.

So, we can eat, drink and be smart too.  That is, unless we go on a late night binge.

More to come...


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