How A Pair Of Cookies Can Help Predict Your Child’s SAT Scores (VIDEO)

How A Pair Of Cookies Can Help Predict Your Child’s SAT Scores (VIDEO)
Posted: 08 Nov 2010 10:07 PM PST
A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of a giant, freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. It’s not a kitchen table — it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly.

“You see this cookie?” Mischel says. “You can eat it right now if you want, but if you wait, you can have two of them. I have to go away for five minutes. If I return and you have not eaten anything, I will let you have both cookies. If you eat this one while I’m gone, the bargain is off and you don’t get the second one. Do we have a deal?” The child nods. The researcher leaves. What does the child do?

Mischel has the most charming, funny films of children’s reactions. They squirm in their seat. They turn their back to the cookie (or marshmallow or other assorted caloric confections, depending on the day). They sit on their hands. They close one eye, then both, then sneak a peek. We took a camera into a preschool to see what would happen for ourselves (watch The Cookie Test):

The children in Mischel’s experiment are trying to get both cookies, but the going is tough. If the children are kindergartners, 72 percent cave in and gobble up the cookie. If they’re in fourth grade, however, only 49 percent yield to the temptation. By sixth grade, the number is 38 percent, about half the rate of the preschoolers.

Welcome to the interesting world of impulse control. It is part of a suite of behaviors under the collective term “executive function.” Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. It engages many parts of the brain, including a short-term form of memory called working memory.

Mischel and his many colleagues discovered that a child’s executive function is a critical component of intellectual prowess. We now know that it is actually a better predictor of academic success than I.Q. It’s not a small difference, either: Mischel found that children who could delay gratification for 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than children who lasted one minute.

A child’s brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other aspects of executive function. But genes are undoubtedly involved. There seems to be an innate schedule of development, which explains why the cookie experiment shows a difference in scores between kindergartners and sixth graders. Some kids display the behaviors earlier, some later. Some struggle with it their entire lives. It’s one more way every brain is wired differently. But children who are able to filter out distractions, the data show, do far better in school.

Learn more about why in my new book, “Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five.” Watch more parenting videos at brainrules.net.http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrainRules

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Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five.

Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad – Brain Rules

Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad

Posted: 14 May 2010 09:32 AM PDT

When my mother got angry (which was rare), she went to the kitchen, washing LOUDLY any dishes she discovered in the sink. And if there were pots and pans, she deliberately would crash them together as she put them away. This noise served to announce to the entire household (if not the city block) her displeasure at something. To this day, whenever I hear loudly clanging pots and pans, I experience an emotionally competent stimulus—a fleeting sense of “You’re in trouble now!” My wife, whose mother never displayed anger in this fashion, does not associate anything emotional with the noise of pots and pans. It’s a uniquely stimulated, John-specific ECS.

Universally experienced stimuli come directly from our evolutionary heritage, so they hold the greatest potential for use in teaching and business. Not surprisingly, they follow strict Darwinian lines of threats and energy resources. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions:

“Can I eat it? Will it eat me?”

“Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me?”

“Have I seen it before?”

Any of our ancestors who didn’t remember threatening experiences thoroughly or acquire food adequately would not live long enough to pass on his genes. The human brain has many dedicated systems exquisitely tuned to reproductive opportunity and to the perception of threat. (That’s why the robbery story grabbed your attention—and why I put it at the beginning of this chapter.) We also are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing our environment for similarities, and we tend to remember things if we think we have seen them before.

One of the best TV spots ever made used all three principles in an ever-increasing spiral. Stephen Hayden produced the commercial, introducing the Apple computer in 1984. It won every major advertising award that year and set a standard for Super Bowl ads. The commercial opens onto a bluish auditorium filled with robot-like men all dressed alike. In a reference to the 1956 movie 1984, the men are staring at a screen where a giant male face is spouting off platitude fragments such as “information purification!” and “unification of thought!” The men in the audience are absorbing these messages like zombies. Then the camera shifts to a young woman in gym clothes, sledgehammer in hand, running full tilt toward the auditorium. She is wearing red shorts, the only primary color in the entire commercial. Sprinting down the center aisle, she throws her sledgehammer at the screen containing Big Brother. The screen explodes in a hail of sparks and blinding light. Plain letters flash on the screen: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

All of the elements are at work here. Nothing could be more threatening to a country marinated in free speech than George Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian society. There is sex appeal, with the revealing gym shorts, but there is a twist. Mac is a female, so-o-o … IBM must be a male. In the female-empowering 1980s, a whopping statement on the battle of the sexes suddenly takes center stage. Pattern matching abounds as well. Many people have read 1984 or seen the movie. Moreover, people who were really into computers at the time made the connection to IBM, a company often called Big Blue for its suit-clad sales force.

What most people remember about that commercial is its emotional appeal rather than every detail. There is a reason for that. The brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect. http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrainRules