Patricia Churchland on Self Control

Nigel Warburton (0:02)

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David Edmonds (0:05)

And me, David Edmonds.

Nigel Warburton (0:07)

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David Edmonds (0:19)

Self-control is an essential quality for everyone. There's evidence that people who are good at self-control are good, are successful at life. Philosophically, the issue of self-control plays into the free will debate. If we can't control ourselves, in what sense are we free? Pat Churchland is a philosopher famous for incorporating into her writings and into her ideas developments in neuroscience. She's happy to call herself a neurophilosopher. Appetite wetted?

Can't control yourself any longer? Unable to defer gratification?

Here she is.

Nigel Warburton (0:55)

Pat Churchland, welcome to Philosophyh Bites.

Pat Churchland (0:57)

Oh, it's super to be here. I love being in London.

Nigel Warburton (1:00)

The topic we're going to focus on is neuroscience and self-control. What do you understand by self-control?

Pat Churchland (1:08)

Usually as a good working definition, we have sort of four things in mind. That if someone or an animal can display deferred gratification, that is deferring smaller value now for something greater later, if they can maintain a goal despite distraction, if they can suppress impulses that are inappropriate, if you're a predator, for example, you mustn't rush at your prey too soon, and if you can cancel an action once started, when you see that following through with the action would be a disaster.

Nigel Warburton (1:44)

And I suppose the opposite of self-control would be something like impulsivity or possibly addiction.

Pat Churchland (1:50)

Yes, I think that addiction, which of course has been very closely studied, both in humans, but particularly in the brains of rodents, addiction is an example where there are structural changes to the reinforcement learning system that actually change the behavior with respect to the drug in question. And so impulsivity will be shown there. But notice that even drug addicts can be very careful and organized when it comes to a particular goal, namely getting their drug.

So this actually has prompted some neuroscientists to wonder whether some of these features of self-control are actually dissociable.

Nigel Warburton (2:35)

You mentioned these four marks of self-control. Is it the same mechanism underlying all these, do you think?

Pat Churchland (2:42)

It kind of looks like not, which is sort of interesting, because we tend to think of self-control or free will as a sort of single-capacity disposition.

And it does look like they can come apart. So for example, Trevor Robbins, who studies both the behavior and the circuitry in rodents, has the following experiment. If you put in a food tower where the rat can come into the area, poke his nose on a button, he'll get a pellet. Put in a second food tower. If he goes to the second one instead of the first and pokes his nose on the button, he gets five pellets. Well, that's a good idea. But now what Trevor Robbins does in order to test for deferred gratification is he introduces the delay between when the rat knows pokes and when the pellet comes down. And the question was, can rats learn to do this? The answer is very interesting. Some rats will wait, and they will wait and wait. And other rats cannot. Now a different kind of test is, can rats cancel an action they've started? So you have your food tube, the rat goes in and pokes his nose and gets a pellet. The rat is trained so that if he hears a tone, he stops.

Then you can figure out how close can the rat get and still stop.

And the answer is some rats can get really close. The nose is right up there and some rats cannot. Now, are the rats that can cancel the same as the rats that can defer gratification? There's some overlap, but not entirely. So then what Robbins and his crew did was looked at the circuitry.

And the circuitry is somewhat different, which I think is very interesting because it means that not all of these four markers are exactly the same disposition, but differently expressed. They actually have different underlying circuitry. I find that amazingly interesting. It teaches us something we couldn't have known by introspection. You could introspect till the cows come home, and you wouldn't find out whether in your brain the circuitry for deferred gratification is the same or different from the circuitry for impulse control. You go, oh, it's not there.

One of the great psychological experiments of all times was the one concerning self-control that was done by Walter Mischel and his colleagues at Stanford in the 1970s. And here is the very simple thing that they did. They brought young children aged three and four into a room. They put them on a chair with a marshmallow in front of them, and they said, you can have one marshmallow now or three when I come back in five minutes.