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Willpower training advice from neuroscientists

March 2nd, 2009

You probably seen this big bookstore shelves with a huge amount of self help/motivation literature. Virtually all of them have references to science psychology, neuroscience or even pseudoscience. Now you can this information form first hand. Discover Magazine have series of interviews with top neuroscientists.

But it turns out you can actually build up willpower like a muscle if you can do something that requires effort of will—something as silly as brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand. If you brush your teeth with your nondominant hand for several weeks, you increase this reserve pool of mental something. I’m not going to say what that something is because it’s not known, but that mental something is available for other tasks. You can actually build up whatever it is that is responsible for willpower.

So this business of planning for action and all the things that come before action turn out, like many mental capacities, to be a thing that you can practice at and improve.

Discover Magazine: Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

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