In 1960s, I believe, there was a great psychologist Walter Michelle who did a famous clinical study called the marshmallow test where he left second graders alone in a room with one marshmallow seated on a plate before them.

How cruel could you be!

And the instructions to the children were, if you can withstand 10 minutes alone with this marshmallow, when I return I will give you a second marshmallow.

And this was obviously a famous test on impulse control.

And when they crunched the numbers and did follow-up tests, they found that this test, even at second grade was an excellent

predicator to note whether children would be able to succeed in school or whether they would drop out,

whether they would be diligent students, or they would succumb to the ways of drugs and alcohol such as I did in my early years and all based on this one test you could predict. So in fact it became

such an accurate predictor that they eventually abandoned even doing the research

and just taught the kids strategies to develop in Comp pulse control because up to this point they didn't realize

how fundamentally important it would be to be with a thought or an impulse and not have to give into it. A couple of years after that,

there was a movie, Ghostbusters and as memory serves it's been 20 years. So I'm just riffing on this but in 20 but I remember there was a scene where there is this malevolent force called the goser that is evil and

it is threatening the ghostbusters and it demands that they think up a form that the

goser will take because it's a shapeshifter it can take any form that people think.

So the ghostbusters try desperately not to think about anything.

Unfortunately, Dan Ackroy thinks of the stay puffed Marshmallow man.

And so the those turns into this huge

marshmallow creature that destroys New York.

After that, in the 1990s,

the great Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegener did a famous study based on, I love this one, the Polar Bear, the White Bear

study.

He read that quote by Dust Cleefsky, there's nothing more impossible to do than to not think about polar bears when you try to not think about them.

So he gave an instruction to people.

...