WAIT
FERGUS GREER
FRANK PARTNOY is the author of F.I.A.S.C.O., Infectious Greed, and The Match King. Formerly an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and a practicing corporate lawyer, he is one of the world’s leading experts on market regulation and is a frequent commentator for the Financial Times, the New York Times, NPR, and CBS’s 60 Minutes. Partnoy is a graduate of Yale Law School and is the George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance and the founding director of the Center for Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego.
ALSO BY Frank Partnoy
F. I. A. S. C. O.
Infectious Greed
The Match King
THE USEFUL ART OF PROCRASTINATION
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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For Fletch, again
Introduction
0 First
1 Hearts and Minds
2 Superfast Sports
3 High-Frequency Trading, Fast and Slow
4 Frontal Nudity in Fight Club
5 Bad Call
6 A Slice Too Thin
7 DON’T PANIC
8 First Dates and Fighter Pilots
9 When to Eat Crow
10 At Last, Procrastination
11 Master Class
12 Get Off the Clock
13 A Lifetime of Innovation
14 Go Long
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
The dog on the cover of this book—let’s call her Maggie—is a role model for those of us who want to make better decisions. Maggie could have devoured the biscuit resting on her snout in the blink of an eye. Instead, she is holding back, showing us she can keep her instincts and emotions in check, delaying the pleasure of the snack she can smell all too well. Although this book is mostly about human beings, not animals, its central point is that we can learn a lot from Maggie.
Maggie is, in a limited way, thinking about the future. She is acting a lot like my own dog, Fletch, a fourteen-year-old yellow Labrador retriever I trained as a puppy not to immediately go for a treat. Fletch probably can’t think about the future for more than a few minutes, but his limited ability to anticipate consequences and delay gratification has served him well. If anyone in my family leaves food on the table after dinner, Fletch won’t leap for it right away, when we probably would catch him. Instead, he’ll quietly follow us into the living room and lie down at my feet. We won’t realize he has moved until we hear the crash of dishes from the kitchen.
Recent experiments confirm that Fletch and Maggie are not exceptional. In 2012 researchers from Scotland and France published a study demonstrating what many pet owners know: dogs of various breeds are able to make future-oriented decisions about food.1 Most dogs can learn to suppress their snap reactions for at least ten to twenty seconds if doing so gives them a chance at a better or bigger treat. Many have much longer tolerance. One working sheepdog held a small chicken chew treat in her mouth for more than ten minutes while waiting for a chance to trade it for a piece eight times bigger.2
In recent years, scientists have made great progress in comprehending how we make decisions. Psychologists have suggested we have two systems of thinking, one intuitive and one analytical, both of which can lead us to make serious cognitive mistakes. Behavioral economists have said our responses to incentives are often irrational and skewed, sometimes predictably so. Neuroscientists have taken pictures of our brains to show which parts react to different stimuli.3
Yet we still don’t understand the role time and delay play in our decisions and why we continue to make all kinds of timing errors, reacting too fast or too slow. Delay alone can turn a good decision into a bad one, or vice versa. Much recent research about decisions helps us understand what we should do or how we should do it, but it says little about when. Sometimes we should trust our gut and respond instantly. But other times we should postpone our actions and decisions. Sometimes we should rely on our quick intuition. But other times we should plan and analyze.
Although time and delay have not occupied a prominent spot in decision-making research, these concepts lurk behind the scenes, especially in discussions about human nature. Many scientists say the key skill that distinguishes human beings from animals is our superior ability to think about the future.4 However, thinking about the future is different from predicting it.
As a professor, I have studied law and finance for more than fifteen years. In 2008, when the financial crisis hit, I wanted to get to the heart of why our leading bankers, regulators, and others were so shortsighted and wreaked such havoc on our economy: why were their decisions so wrong, their expectations of the future so catastrophically off the mark? I also wanted to figure out, for selfish reasons, whether my own tendency to procrastinate (the only light fixture in my bedroom closet has been broken for five years) was really such a bad thing.
I interviewed more than one hundred experts in different fields and worked through several hundred recent studies and experiments, many as yet unpublished, in divergent areas of research. I noticed that decision researchers with different types of expertise do not cross paths very often.5 Frequently, they haven’t heard of each other. Decision research has become so sprawling that experts in one sub-area often don’t know experts in another, even if they are tackling the same questions.
I decided, after a couple of years of thinking about decision-making and time, that in order to understand these concepts we should not look only to psychology or behavioral economics or neuroscience or law or finance or history—we should explore them all, simultaneously. I tried to assemble the mass of evidence from these disciplines as any good lawyer would, to illuminate and clarify arguments we might not see if we look from only one perspective.
The essence of my case is this: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don’t, or can’t, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We feel its crush every day, both at work and at home. Yet the best time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For good decision-makers, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock.
During superfast reactions, the best-performing experts instinctively know when to pause, if only for a split-second. The same is true over longer periods: some of us are better at understanding when to take a few extra seconds to deliver the punch line of a joke, or when we should wait a full hour before making a judgment about another person. Part of this skill is gut instinct, and part of it is analytical. We get some of it from trial and error or by watching experts, but we also can learn from observing toddlers and even animals. As we will see, there is both an art and a science to managing delay.
Throughout this book we will return to two questions that are central to decisions in our personal and professional lives. First, how long should we take to react or decide in a particular situation? Then, once we have a sense of the correct time period, how should we spend our time leading up to the moment of decision? We will begin by exploring these questions at superfast speeds, when reactions take just a split second. Then, as the chapters move along, we will telescope out to longer-term decisions.
As we will see over and over, in most situations we should take more time than we do. The longer we can wait, the better. And once we have a sense of how long a decision should take, we generally should delay the moment of decision until the last possible instant. If we have an hour, we should wait fifty-nine minutes before responding. If we have a year, we should wait 364 days. Even if we have just half a second, we should wait as long as we possibly can. Even milliseconds matter.
So, what do you think of this book so far?
Stephen Porges, a psychiatry professor and neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago,1 believes the key to our psychological development as human beings lies not solely in our brains but below them, along the nerve that serves as the two-lane racetrack for the signals that zip back and forth between our brains and the rest of our bodies. He focuses on the tenth cranial nerve, known as the vagal nerve, a strip of fibers that originates in the medulla oblongata, a part of the brain stem, and winds around the most important parts of our bodies, from the head and throat to the lungs, heart, and digestive system.2 It’s like a miniature speedway running around our most vital organs. Not very many people understand the crucial role it plays in our decisions.
Porges began his doctoral research on this neural racetrack during the late 1960s, just as the discipline of psychology was splintering: some researchers were advocating psychotropic drugs, while others were preoccupied with death. Porges joined the Society for Psychophysiological Research, a relatively obscure cluster of practical-minded academics who wanted to combine psychology and physiology. The dream of this group’s members, including Porges, was to improve our understanding of human behavior by monitoring people’s bodies in real time. They were frustrated by the increasing reliance on subjective questioning and self-reporting, and they had limited interest in having patients lie on sofas and talk about their childhood three times a week.
Instead of trusting the words that came out of patients’ mouths, these researchers wanted to test the changes in patients’ bodies. As Porges explained it to me, “The goal was to understand patients’ psychological states without having to talk to them.”
Porges decided to study the heart. He thought the high-speed nerve connections between our brains and hearts were central to understanding human emotion. He wanted to prove he could assess our psychological health simply by measuring the changes in our heart rates to the nearest millisecond. He envisioned that future psychologists might diagnose, and even predict, mental disorders simply by timing the hearts of their patients.
Like many genius insights, Porges’s ideas seem downright crazy at first. Why would tiny changes in our heart rates matter to our mental health? Yes, our hearts beat faster when we are agitated and slower when we are calm, but we barely perceive any of that; the variance is a fraction of a second. And although it’s interesting to know that our heart rates go up when we inhale and down when we exhale, it doesn’t affect our sanity or emotional health. Our heart rates vary, but the changes don’t suddenly make us go crazy. Try it: Breathe in and out. In, out. In, out. You can’t feel that your heart is speeding up when you breathe in and slowing down when you breathe out, but it is. Nor will you feel more or less manic or depressed, because you aren’t. So what was Porges thinking?
Before Porges wrote his dissertation on heart rate variability and reaction time, research on the topic hadn’t progressed much since Charles Darwin, over a hundred years ago, speculated, based on the earlier writings of French physiologist Claude Bernard, that human emotional states might be driven by a rapid-fire brain-heart feedback loop. Just as Darwin anticipated so many later discoveries in other areas, he suggested in one passage that the vagal nerve, then called the pneuma-gastric nerve, was a road carrying signals from the brain to the heart and back. As Darwin wrote in 1872:
When the mind is strongly excited, we might expect that it would instantly affect in a direct manner the heart; and this is universally acknowledged . . . when the heart is affected it reacts on the brain; and the state of the brain again reacts through the pneuma-gastric nerve on the heart; so that under any excitement there will be much mutual action and reaction between these, the two most important organs of the body.3
During the following century, scientists didn’t know enough to confirm or deny Darwin’s theory. In 1969, when Porges attended his first meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, the precise workings of the brain-heart feedback loop were still speculative. The field needed less theory and more practice.
Porges designed new heart rhythm tests.4 He recorded how his subjects’ heart rates changed when they focused on a task. He recruited students, hooked them up to Beckman cardio tachometers, and figured out a reliable way to measure heart rate variability, which he tested against a range of psychological factors, particularly in infants. He studied heart rate patterns of various living creatures, from rats to babies. More than one hundred laboratories around the world adopted his method of quantifying variations in heart rates.
In one study, Porges and his colleagues tested a group of kids, first as infants (at nine months) and then as toddlers (at three years).5 At the initial stage of the experiment, the infants sat quietly in their mothers’ laps for three minutes. Then they were presented with toys, blocks, and shapes as part of the standard Bayley Scales of Infant Development evaluation. Meanwhile, Porges measured their hearts’ responsiveness by timing their heartbeats to the nearest millisecond. Finally, the mothers completed several standard questionnaires about how their children behaved. More than two years later, Porges retested the children as toddlers. Once again, his team gathered data about the kids’ behavior. Then they compared the two sets of results.
They found that the infants’ behavior indicated in the answers on the questionnaire at age nine months was unrelated to their later behavior. You couldn’t tell whether a toddler would be depressed or aggressive or destructive at age three by asking his parents whether he had behavioral problems at age nine months. Babies who refused to play turned out just fine, whereas once-beatific nine-month-olds became three-year-old monsters.
But the infants’ heart rate patterns told a more compelling story. According to the study, “the best predictor of behavior problems at 3 years of age was the infant’s ability to decrease cardiac vagal tone during the Bayley test.”6 In other words, the infants who had the most flexible heart rates—who could quickly accelerate and brake their snap reactions while they confronted new toys, blocks, and shapes—had fewer behavioral problems later. The infants who instantly regulated their heart rates had fewer difficulties later with social withdrawal, depression, and aggression. The ability to manage their heart rates over a few hundred milliseconds at nine months helped these kids operate more smoothly at three years.
This study embodied Porges’s goal of understanding patients’ psychological states without relying on their opinions. Of course, nine-month-old babies don’t say much, so listening to them is not fruitful. But Porges found that listening to their mothers isn’t helpful either. Nor is observing the babies’ behavior for several seconds or minutes. Instead, what matters is what is happening inside their bodies, where their little hearts are shifting gears millisecond by millisecond.7
Over more than two decades, to the surprise of many psychologists, Porges repeatedly showed that heart rate variability—having a wide range of heart rate acceleration and deceleration—is a measure of good mental health in the same way blood pressure or cholesterol generally are measures of good physical health.8 It is especially true of babies and children. As infants, we watch new visual stimuli longer and are less easily distracted when our heart rates are more variable.9
Young children with a resting heart rate of 100 are less likely to suffer emotional distress later in life if their heart rate varies in a wide band from 90 to 110 when they are surprised or scared than if it varies more narrowly from 95 to 105. It isn’t the resting rate that matters, but how much the rate varies in response to stimulus. Children who have a wider range of instant heart response have a more efficient feedback system, and this increased efficiency helps them regulate their emotional state: their hearts speed up more when they are excited, and slow down more when they are calm.
Think of the heart as being like the engine and brakes of a car. If you are driving down a winding two-lane road in a car that doesn’t reliably accelerate or slow down, your travels are going to be unpleasant and stressful. If it gets dark or the weather turns bad, you might panic and overreact. But if you are confident that you can easily speed up to pass or slow down at a dangerous curve, you will be more secure about your maneuvers. You won’t necessarily gun the accelerator all the time or slam on the brakes. But sometimes you will need a wide range of variation, maybe a burst of speed followed by several minutes at a calm and steady pace. A car’s superior performance will give you a lot of comfort during the drive.
When I first read that milliseconds-long reactions in our hearts affect longer-term responses in our brains, which is tantamount to saying how we react and make decisions, I was skeptical. Porges’s experiments weren’t cited in the leading books on decision-making. The top decision-making researchers I interviewed hadn’t even heard of him. Yet numerous studies, by him and others, confirm the benefits of high heart rate variability, particularly for children. And low heart rate variability is bad—it is associated with higher levels of anger, hostility, stress, and anxiety.10 It is a counterintuitive result, but having a heart that can respond rapidly helps us delay gratification and remain calm, even in the face of great temptation or fear. Being fast in our heart helps our brain go slow later.
John Gottman, the scientist made famous in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink for his ability to assess marriages by watching couples for just a few minutes, learned about Porges’s theory and wanted to see how kids’ hearts responded to disapproval from their parents. Sure enough, he and his colleague Lynn Katz found that four- and five-year-olds who are better at quickly, and unconsciously, adjusting their heart rates in response to stressful interactions with their parents are better able to regulate their emotions later at age eight. Gottman and Katz didn’t observe the kids’ conscious reactions or behavior at all. Instead, they looked at what was going on inside the kids’ bodies and found that children are emotionally better off if they can tweak their heart rates in response to criticism from Mom and Dad.11
Another group of researchers asked sixty-eight cohabiting heterosexual couples to sit on a sofa and talk about their relationships, sort of like the couples from the film When Harry Met Sally, except that their bodies were wired with electrodes connected to a four-channel bio-amplifier that continuously measured their heart rate responses.12 As they talked about their partner’s character and behavior and what it was like to be away from him or her, computers recorded millisecond-by-millisecond changes in their heart rates. Then, over the next three weeks, the couples kept detailed records of their interactions and how they felt about each other.
Although the results were complicated and differed by gender, the overall pattern was that both women and men reacted more favorably and recorded more positive interactions when their partner’s heart was more responsive. Somehow, people sensed what was happening inside their partner’s body. These results suggest that heart rate variability matters not only to our own emotional reactions but also to our partners’ reactions to us. Our hearts really do skip a beat when we’re in love.
Stephen Porges’s experiments inspired a generation of new research that connected heart rate variability to emotional good health. But in September 1992—just after Porges had published an article showing that healthy full-term newborns have more variable heart rates and premature babies less variable ones—he received a letter from a neonatologist that forced him to rethink everything he had discovered. The letter said Porges’s article was interesting and helpful. But the neonatologist also noted that the results seemed to contradict something he had learned in his practice: quick reactions from the central nervous system’s fast track could be extremely dangerous. A highly responsive heart rate could be bad for newborns. So bad that it killed them.
The neonatologist was referring to bradycardia, a sudden and massive slowing of the heart rate that deprived an infant’s brain of oxygen. He said the vagal nerve caused this decline. In other words, the same neural speedway Porges was studying seemed to carry two very different kinds of signals to the infant heart, with opposite effects. Sometimes the signals were healthy for a baby because they caused its heart to be speedier and more resilient, but sometimes the signals slowed down a baby’s heart so much that they put it at risk of sudden death.
Porges says, “I had gone through an intellectually expansive period, with many discoveries, and I thought I had it. I had solved a big problem. My data showed that heart rate variability was always helpful. But this letter was a confrontation. I was totally challenged, and was forced to rethink everything.”
Porges put the letter in his briefcase, where it stayed for two years.
In 1994 Porges was invited to give the presidential address at the Society for Psychophysiological Research. It was a kind of intellectual homecoming, a great honor from a group that had grown just as much as he had during the previous twenty-five years. By October 8 of that year, he had figured out how to respond to the neonatologist’s challenge and was finally ready to propose a new big-picture theory that covered both the positives and negatives of highly responsive heart rates.
In his speech, Porges said the vagal nerve that runs from our brain stem throughout our bodies is really two tracks of fibers wound together: one crude strand we inherited from our common ancestry with reptiles, and one sophisticated strand we developed more recently as mammals.13 Both operate at high speed, within milliseconds, but they do very different things. The crude reptilian part controls our digestive and reproductive systems, while the more modern mammalian part controls the muscles of our head and face, along with our cardiovascular system. Basically, the old stuff controls our gut, and the new stuff controls everything above it.14 But, Porges carefully noted, both systems are connected to the heart.
The reptile part of the nerve has an early evolutionary history; imagine tiny tortoiselike signals traveling up and down that strand. The mammal part of the nerve evolved later; imagine tiny harelike signals traveling up and down that strand. Both signals race back and forth along these two interwoven tracks. Both are superfast. The strange part about the race between them is who wins when, and why.
According to Porges, when we confront a stimulating event—something scary or exciting—both strands of the nerve affect the heart, but in opposite ways. The tortoise part instantly sends signals to withdraw and shut down, like the emergency brake of a car. Porges cites iguanas, whose heart rate plummets when they confront fear, and hog-nosed snakes, whose heart rate drops so precipitously when stimulated that they appear to be dead. Although reptiles are among the slowest animals in the world, their nervous reactions of withdrawal are really fast. Many scientists refer to a fight-or-flight response, but Porges thinks of it as “fight, flight, or freeze.”
In contrast, the mammal part of the vagal nerve reacts to stimulation more flexibly, revving up and slowing down the body, as appropriate. It also can let up on the reptilian brake, which otherwise might shut everything down. So while the old reptile part of the nerve immobilizes, the newer mammal part of the nerve mobilizes. One nervous response is like a panic freeze; the other is to heighten our awareness so we’re at our most alert and ready to face whatever the newly challenging situation is. We inherited both reactions, so our vagal nerve responds in two wholly different ways. According to Porges, the reptile part acting alone would either slow our heart rate so much that we would faint or perhaps stimulate our gut so much that we would defecate—rarely ideal responses, in childhood or adulthood.
With this new theory, Porges could answer the challenge posed in the neonatologist’s letter. Infants generally are healthier when their hearts are more variable—when the mammalian signals are more active. But if the reptilian signals predominate, the infant is in trouble. Reptilian signals aren’t slow and steady—they are superfast protective reflexes that shut the heart down when they sense danger. That is why infants in fetal distress have virtually no observable variation in heart rate. The old part of their nervous system, sensing peril, flips off the switch.15
These vagal responses, although just milliseconds long, might explain all kinds of physical disorders and emotional problems, particularly those related to stress. Asthma, for example. A reptile, with its primitive brain stem, needs to radically conserve oxygen when it is under attack. But that same shutdown could be lethal for an oxygen-hungry mammal. An asthma attack might be a defensive move by the reptile side of the nervous system, when it senses that the cardiovascular system has been working too hard in response to a dangerous situation.16
Or autism. Although the idea is controversial, some studies suggest that autistic children have less responsive heart rates and are more vulnerable to the reptilian shutdown response. Apparently, when the reptilian part of the vagal nerve dominates, it doesn’t necessarily shut down the heart entirely, but it can shut down the mammalian response. According to Porges, stimulating the newer mammalian part of the nervous system—making the heart more responsive—can reduce autistic-like behaviors in some patients.17 Autism might be an example of the tortoise winning the battle, shutting down the emotional and social responses that otherwise would be available to a child.18
Or borderline personality disorder. Researchers have found a correlation between heart rate responsiveness and BPD. In one experiment, when a control group viewed some highly emotional film clips, their heart rate variability increased. But when subjects with BPD viewed the same film clips, their heart rates became less responsive than they were before. Why? Again, the reptilian part of the vagal nerve seemed to be the culprit: it appeared to be blocking the mammalian part of the vagal nerve, which otherwise would have instantly caused the heart to beat faster during a scary scene and slower during a calm one.19 According to Porges, in each of these instances, there was a deficit in how the mammalian strand of the vagal nerve regulated the heart.
Measuring heart rate variability is now a straightforward process: it takes just a few minutes, and the equipment is virtually foolproof. If heart rate variability proves to be as important as studies suggest, we might add it to newborn tests such as the APGAR (Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration) assessment. We also might test the heart responsiveness of young children to understand which ones are at greatest risk of mental disorders. For adults, we might add a measure of heart rate variability to our standard battery of periodic medical tests, such as blood pressure or cholesterol, to see how much our hearts speed up and slow down when we are stimulated. Psychologists and doctors could consider heart rate variability as a factor in their diagnoses, just as we all might develop some intuition about when our own heart rate becomes more or less variable, or when its fluctuations influence others, particularly our loved ones.
Since the research is new, we shouldn’t draw too many absolute conclusions. Nor should we panic if our children have relatively stable heart rates. There is no need to rush out to test the heart rate responsiveness of a potential spouse. Not yet, anyway.
One of the most important applications of this new research is the treatment of trauma victims. People who have reported being abused as children have less variable heart rates later in life, the idea being that a traumatic event not only shut them down then, but also persists in their memory, continuing to mute their heart’s responsiveness.20 The cliché about the broken heart might, it seems, have a large measure of anatomical truth to it.
Some of the most successful trauma treatments today are designed to teach victims techniques to control their heart rate, from yoga programs that help traumatized women manage their breathing patterns to innercity theater programs that help traumatized teenagers learn rhythmical movements and sounds. Although slow breathing, meditation, and exercise all help increase heart rate variability, the extent to which these therapies can repair the damage done by a traumatic event remains unclear. If nothing else, the new research on hearts and mental health gives us yet another reason to engage in activities we should be doing anyway for our physical health—in case you need another reason to jog or do yoga.
I asked Porges what his research says about raising children. Unsurprisingly for a researcher who prefers to observe physical responses rather than listen to verbal cues, he focused on the physical. He spoke of the environment that surrounds children, especially very young ones, who are least able to consciously understand their circumstances and rationalize their experiences: “Avoid loud sounds and traumatic situations. Pay attention to physical details. Think about how your actions might cause them to shut down. Be as aware as you can of their bodily states, as well as your own and those of friends and family. Pay attention to children’s physical reactions.”
We like to think we know what safety means. But what an adult considers a threat might be different from what a child’s body actually experiences as one. Just the perception of danger to a child is enough—it doesn’t have to be real.21 We already know that many psychological disorders are related to traumatic early life experiences, such as sexual abuse and family dysfunction. But children also withdraw because of less blatant, even unintentional behavior; an angry reprimand or a scary Halloween costume could be enough to trigger this reaction. We might think it’s a good idea to shout “No!” when we see a small child reach toward a hot stove or a sharp knife. Or we might not think about shouting at all. But our reactions can hurt our children’s longer-term emotional well-being.22 The lesson, according to Porges, is that we should provide babies and children with a safe environment where they can develop their central nervous system’s ability to respond quickly without shutting down.
Porges’s discoveries arrived just as the interest in children’s decision-making and self-control was catching fire. Much of that interest was stoked by a widely publicized series of experiments at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School, where researchers presented four-year-old children with one marshmallow and gave them a choice: eat the marshmallow right away or wait fifteen minutes and get two marshmallows instead. They tested these children later in life and found that those who were able to delay gratification performed better on standardized tests in high school, were less prone to impulsive behavior, and were more likely to become emotionally well-adjusted adults.23
Since those tests, researchers have found, again and again, that children who can delay their reactions end up happier and more successful than their snap-reacting playmates: they are superior at building social skills, feeling empathy, and resolving conflicts, and they have higher cognitive ability.24 Kids with good preschool-age delay skills have higher self-esteem later in life, cope better with stress, are less likely to use cocaine and crack, and aren’t as fat.25 Children who can decide to wait do better.
Educators and parents are well aware of these results—often too well aware. Many schools emphasize self-control as part of their curriculum. The KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy in Philadelphia gives its students shirts emblazoned with the slogan DON’T EAT THE MARSHMALLOW.26 Obsessive mothers and fathers fret about whether they have a (doomed) One-Marshmallow Child or a (triumphant) Two-Marshmallow Child. Blogs such as Raising CEO Kids and Growing Rich Kids advise how to teach children about the pecuniary blessings of delayed gratification. Some parents have taken to rewarding good behavior not with immediate praise or presents but with tickets that are redeemable only at a later date.
Yet concluding that children are better off delaying gratification doesn’t tell us why waiting is so much easier for some than others. The marshmallow tests might be widely known, but their results are not well understood. Although we have some understanding of the brain regions that are triggered by these kinds of tests, we don’t really know whether some four-year-olds are naturally able to wait fifteen minutes to get a second marshmallow and therefore do better in life, or whether we can save impatient children by training them to delay gratification for a few extra minutes. This is a new version of the old debate about nature versus nurture.
Nor do we understand precisely how long children should be able to wait. We think a four-year-old who is only capable of waiting a second or two before scarfing down a marshmallow might be in trouble because children without impulse control are more likely to encounter emotional problems. It makes sense that a kid who can wait several minutes for a second marshmallow would end up better off, because that amount of delay reflects a useful degree of willpower and self-control. However, these experiments don’t tell us how short is too short, how long is too long, or which factors affect the ideal amount of delay. Arguably, we should worry less about the impatient child who grabs the marshmallow right away than the one who is still staring it down hours later, obstinately refusing to give in. We might conclude that such an obdurate child is more likely headed for prison than Princeton.
Experts assume the time periods that matter most to a child’s mental health are at least a few seconds long. Assessments of pervasive developmental disorder and attention deficit disorders—including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—examine children’s reactions over that sort of period. Psychologists who diagnose these disorders watch children as they play, talk, fidget, squirm, and become bored, all of which take at least several seconds, often longer.27
Brain research concentrates on a similar time frame. Scientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging to map our brains’ reactions, showing that different regions “light up” as our responses change.28 But the changes in blood and oxygen flow that fMRI machines capture do not occur until several seconds after our neurons fire. Although many techniques allow scientists to track brain changes faster, until recently even the fastest fMRI machines could not take pictures more often than once per second.29
All of this means that when we think about delay and child development, we tend to focus on time periods that last at least a few seconds. We overlook Porges’s time frame—of the milliseconds-long responses carried by the vagal nerve. But what if a child’s ability to manage superfast delays of just a fraction of a second is the key to his or her emotional development and psychological health?
Neither kids nor their parents and teachers are even aware of this kind of unconscious time management. No one wears shirts that say DON’T REACT IN MILLISECONDS. Ultrarapid reactions seem more like animal responses than human emotions. We can’t even begin to reason during half a second, any more than my dog Fletch, though moderately well trained, can think through what to do when I toss a hunk of steak in his direction. At such fast speeds, any response seems automatic and unconscious, what the philosopher William James labeled “passive-involuntary.”
However, children react faster than “marshmallow time” in ways that are crucial to the ultimate decision to eat or not to eat a marshmallow right away. Our understanding of how we make decisions is incomplete if we overlook the essential physical contribution that our bodies make during the milliseconds of preconscious time when a threat or a temptation is first put in front of us. In decision-making, our hearts can be at least as important to our ability to wait as our minds.
Time is a slippery concept, and we are often wrong about it. If we focus on how our brains react over the course of seconds and minutes, we will not see quicker reactions. This is a general problem we have with thinking about decision-making, for both children and adults. All too often, we find ourselves looking in the right places at the wrong time.
Research on the vagal nerve has revealed a high-speed world inside our bodies, one so fast that we cannot consciously access it. Yet when we are asked to make a decision, such as whether to eat a marshmallow right away, it is these rapid-fire responses that help determine what kind of a decision we will make. A speedy response in our hearts can help us delay a speedy response in our brains and bodies. It is a strange idea, but being fast at first really can help us go slow later on.
Heart rate variability is a tool that helps us manage delay at very high speeds. It is an unconscious skill that we can use, as children and adults, when we need to be patient. Medical science has not shown us exactly how to optimize the split-second changes in our heart rates—not yet. We cannot give four-year-old children a pill or procedure to enhance their heart rate variability and help them wait fifteen minutes for a second marshmallow. We don’t have the tools to manage the timing of our superfast reactions. All of this helplessness can be unsettling.
And yet some human beings are nevertheless able to manage their ability to delay their quick reactions beautifully, even at preconscious speeds. Their bodies instinctively react at precisely the right time, even when they have only a split-second. That skill makes them some of the most admired and widely watched people in the world.
In 1974 Jimmy Connors won the Wimbledon men’s singles title, and Chris Evert won the women’s title. He was twenty-one; she was nineteen. Each of them had grown up in a tennis family and studied with professional coaches. They met, played mixed doubles, started a romance, and got engaged. He ultimately won 148 titles; she won 157. Both were ranked first in the world for more than five years. But what they shared most, even after the wedding was called off, was an incredible ability to return serves.
A tennis court, baseline to baseline, is seventy-eight feet long. First serves are launched, by men and women alike, at over one hundred miles per hour. A player returning serve has just four to five hundred milliseconds from when the ball leaves the server’s racquet until it hits his or her own. Just half a second.
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist, and regionally ranked junior tennis player, was an expert on service returns. He recognized that of all the shots played in tennis, apart from quick volleys, the return of serve is unique because the decision about how and where to return the ball must be made in a time period so short that it precludes deliberation: “Temporally, we’re more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought. And yet an effective return of serve depends on a large set of decisions and physical adjustments that are a whole lot more involved and intentional than blinking, jumping when startled, etc.”1
Wallace was pointing out that returning serve is a paradoxical act. On one hand, it is a largely unconscious physical reaction. It has to be, given the speed of the ball. There is not enough time to consider spin or angle. Conscious contemplation takes at least half a second, so anyone who even tries to think about how to return a serve will end up helplessly watching the ball fly by.
On the other hand, returning serve involves a range of sophisticated and creative responses. Ideally, a player should react to both the placement and trajectory of the ball. The position and movement of the server are crucial. Great tennis returners respond to the information cascade of a serve as if they had taken time to process it consciously, even though we know that is not possible.
Connors and Evert knew precisely where the ball would hit the ground and how it would spin. They processed huge amounts of data and then often hit a perfect return. If you hired a dozen physicists and coaches to analyze recordings of Connors and Evert in slow motion, you could not plot better reactions. (Computer sports game programmers understand this, which is why they increasingly rely on video of top players instead of mathematical algorithms.)
How did Connors and Evert do it? One way to understand their success is to divide the time available to return a serve into two parts. The first part is the time it takes the brain to react to seeing the ball after it is served—the purely visual reaction time. We can measure visual reaction time by having a tennis player simply press a button when he or she first sees the ball leave the racquet.
Visual reaction time is about the same for all of us. Most people can react to a visual stimulus in about two hundred milliseconds, but no faster, and the range of reaction times is surprisingly consistent across people and activities.2 A teenage driver sees a red brake light. A middle-aged stock trader sees a low price. A professional athlete sees a ball coming. All of them, and all of us, can react at top speed in about two-tenths of a second, roughly half the time it takes an eye to blink. That means virtually anyone who can see a distance of seventy-eight feet can react to the visual stimulus of a ball being served in plenty of time to meet the incoming serve, even if it is zooming in from Andy Roddick or Venus Williams.
The remaining period of, say, three hundred milliseconds is the time we have to react physically—to adjust ourselves to what we know about the ball’s flight and then try to hit it how and where we’d like. The split between the time available for visual reaction (we’ll call that “see”) versus physical reaction (we’ll call that “hit”) looks something like this:
As even the slowest video gamer can attest, if all you had to do was “see” and then press a button to swing—if you didn’t even have to get off the sofa—anyone could return a professional-speed serve. The difficulty in real tennis arises in the second stage of the service return.
The “hit” part is a serious problem for most of us. The physical reaction time available to hit a professional serve is barely long enough for us to adjust our racquet by a few inches. Amateurs cannot move to the correct spot and produce a swing with accuracy or power in three hundred milliseconds. Many solid professionals cannot do it either. Andy Roddick, who held the record for the fastest serve ever recorded in professional tennis, 155 miles per hour, until March 2011 (when Ivo Karlović hit one 156 miles per hour), says that even if a court surface is slow, “if you hit it 140, hit your spot, it’s going to be an ace.”3
Connors and Evert did not successfully return every serve. But for most of their returns, they had plenty of time. They were so skilled and practiced that they could produce near-instantaneous muscle contractions to move their bodies and execute a swing in perhaps one hundred milliseconds. For them, the physical part of returning a serve was almost as easy as pressing a button.
To understand why some tennis professionals are so good at returning serve, I made an appointment to see Angel Lopez, one of the most sought-after tennis coaches in the world and a return-of-serve guru. Lopez has coached numerous professionals and is a contemporary of Jimmy Connors; they trained with the same instructor and coached World Team tennis against each other.
Lopez explained how Connors revolutionized the return with his speed and focus: “Connors put pressure on the server. He trained to be really quick, and violent. He practiced repeatedly at high speed. It’s all training, to get a feel for where the ball is going. That’s why they say you only get better at returning serve by returning serve. He focused his vision on the precise point where the ball leaves the strings. He didn’t worry about what the server’s body was doing. His eyes were fixed at the point of impact. And his eyes were huge, like Charles Manson’s. Connors looked like a mass murderer when he returned serves.”
Lopez’s mantra is “ball identification”—the preparation phase that precedes the decision about exactly how to hit the ball back. He told me to watch his eyes as they darted around and then froze. “Most players train their hands and feet. But you need three things to be fast: hands, feet, and eyes. Fast means fast eyes too. That doesn’t just mean picking the ball up—this isn’t a video game. It means focusing on the ball, and then translating that focus into an attack.”
According to Lopez, ball identification is becoming even more important with advances in technology and serving skill. “At the highest levels, you can’t get any information from what the server does before the ball hits the racquet. Nothing. I’ve analyzed Pete Sampras in detail with other coaches, in super-slow motion. You can’t see anything. He’s like a great baseball pitcher disguising his release. Everything looks exactly the same, regardless of where the ball is going. So you have to focus on impact. The theory of returns used to be that you should hit the ball as early as possible. But as players got faster and equipment improved, they learned to hang back and hit harder returns. They spend more time on ball identification, getting a chance to read the ball, and then really punish it.”
Connors and Evert didn’t have substantially faster visual reaction times; no one does. But they were much faster at reacting physically. Their physical speed freed up time for them to prepare during the phase Lopez calls “ball identification.” This was when they absorbed the crush of data generated after the ball left the server’s racquet. They split up the time available during a service return; because they were so fast, they had extra time to gather and process information. Finally, at the last possible instant, they committed to their choice of return and swung. They sandwiched a lot of preparing between seeing and hitting.
Because Connors and Evert needed less time to hit a return, they had more time to gather and process information. They saw, they prepared, and finally, only after they had processed as much information as possible, they hit. Their preconscious time management—what their brains did during the “prepare” period—was crucial to their success. Their talent enabled them to stretch out a split-second and pack in a sequence of interpretation and action that would take most of us much longer.
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