Jonah Lehrer:

"I've always been really good at waiting," Carolyn told me.

Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. "At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls.

Low delayers are more likely to have behavioral problems. Low delayers have lower SAT scores.

Intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control.

The key [to self-control] is to avoid thinking about it [the thing you want to delay] in the first place.

Last August, I observed to my Moleskine:

They say delayed gratification isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"We'll see", I tell them. "We'll see."

From March:

Santino, a male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo, planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors. The chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles. The chimpanzee collected the stones in a calm state, prior to the zoo opening in the morning. Hours later, in an 'agitated' state, Santino launched the stones at visitors.

Why don't people pay more attention to the archives?

People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

There is no spoon.

As cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.

If children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

If you're a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. You're not getting to the crux of the problem.