If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
What would be the physical/neurological mechanism powering ego depletion, assuming it existed? What stops us from doing hard mental work all the time? Is it even imaginable to, say, study every waking hour for a long period of time, without ever having an evening of youtube videos to relax? I'm not asking what the psychology of willpower is, but rather if there's a neurology of willpower?
And beyond ego depletion, there's a very popular model of willpower where the brain is seen as a battery, used up when hard work is being done and charged when relaxing. I see this as a deceptive intuition pump since it's easy to imagine and yet it doesn't explain much. What is this energy being used up, physically?
Surely it isn't actual physical energy (in terms of calories) since I recall that the energy consumption of the brain isn't significantly increased while studying. In addition, physical energy is abundant nowadays because food is plentiful. If the lack of physical energy was the issue, we could just keep going by eating more sugar.
The reason we can't workout for 12 hours straight is understood, physiologically. Admittedly, I don't understand it very well myself, but I'm sure an expert could provide reasons related to muscles being strained, energy being depleted, and so on. (Perhaps I would understand the mental analogue better if I understood this.) I'm looking for a similar mechanism in the brain.
To better explain what I'm talking about, what kind of answer would be satisfying, I'll give you a couple fake explanations.
Let me speculate on the answer.
1) There is no neurological limitation. The hardware could, theoretically, run demanding operations indefinitely. But, theories like ego depletion are deceptive memes that spread throughout culture, and so we came to accept an nonexistent limitation. Our belief in the myth is so strong, it might as well be true. The same mechanism as learned helplessness. Needless to say, this could potentially be overcome.
2) There is no neurological limitation, but otherwise useful heuristics stop us from kicking it into higher gear. All of the psychological explanations for akrasia, the kind that are discussed all the time here, come into play. For example, youtube videos provide a tiny, but steady and plentiful stimulus to the reward system, unlike programming, which can have a much higher payout, but one that's inconsistent, unreliable and coupled with frustration. And so, due to a faulty decision making procedure, the brain never gets to the point where it works to its fullest potential. The decision making procedure is otherwise fast and correct enough, thus mostly useful, so simply removing it isn't possible. The same mechanism as cognitive biases. It might be similar to how we cannot do arithmetic effortlessly even though the hardware is probably there.
3) There is an in-built neurological limitation because of an evolutionary advantage. Now, defining this evolutionary advantage can lead to the original problem. For example, it cannot be due to minimizing energy consumption, as discussed above. But other explanations don't run into this problem. Laziness can often lead to more efficient solutions, which is beneficial, so we evolved ego depletion to promote it, and now we're stuck with it. Of course, all the pitfalls customary to evolutionary psychology apply, so I won't go in depth about this.
4) There is a neurological limitation deeply related to the way the brain works. Kind of like cars can only go so fast, and it's not good for them if you push them to maximum speed all the time. At first glance, the brain is propagating charge through neurons all the same, regardless of how tiring an action it's accomplishing. But one could imagine non-trivial complexities to how the brain functions which account for this particular limitation. I dare not speculate further since I know so little about neurology.
I have a hazy memory that there's some discussion of exactly this in Keith Stanovich's book "What intelligence tests miss".
Unfortunately, my memory is hazy enough that I don't trust it to say accurately (or even semi-accurately) what he said about it :-). So this is useful only to the following extent: if Sandi, or someone else interested in Sandi's question, has a copy of Stanovich's book or was considering reading it anyway, then it might be worth a look.