Do you pass the marshmallow test?

HOW long can you go without checking your emails, mobile phone or social media while at work? It could say a lot about your level of brain activity.

A MARSHMALLOW test conducted on children in the ‘60s and ‘70s could be relevant to how often people check their emails, mobile phone and social media at work.

Ed Batista, an executive coach and instructor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says the test carried out on children aged four to six, says a lot about a person’s brain activity.

In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, a child was placed in a room containing only a table and chair, with a single treat — a marshmallow — placed in front of them.

Each child was left alone in the room and told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat.

“Follow-up studies with the children later in adolescence showed a correlation between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of life success, such as higher (college admission) scores,” Mr Batista writes in the Harvard Business Review.

He adds that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans conducted in 2011 on 59 of the original participants, now aged in their 40s, showed higher levels of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex of those who delayed immediate gratification for a greater reward later on.

So why does this matter? Because every one of us is facing the marshmallow test constantly — not in the form of sweet treats, but texts, emails, browser tabs and social feeds.

Ask yourself, how often do you stop what you’re doing and check your social feed, even if you just checked it? How often do you refresh your email?

Phones, computers, tablets, watches, all of these devices “connect us to the global delivery system for those blips of information that do to us what marshmallows do to preschoolers”, Mr Batista writes.

He likens the unprecedented access to information to the easy access to sugary and fatty foods, which our brains are hardwired to crave from evolving in a calorie-poor world.

“A similar process is at work in our response to information,” he writes.

When was the last time you checked your feed?

Just as the development of industrial agriculture and mass commerce has “profoundly altered our caloric environment, global connectivity has profoundly altered our information environment”, he writes.

“We are now ceaselessly bombarded with new information about the people around us — and the definition of ‘people around us’ has fundamentally changed, putting us in touch with more people in an hour than early humans met in their entire lives.

“All of this poses a critical challenge to our brains — the adult version of the marshmallow test.”

Much has been written about the rise of digital distractions and the negative impact on worker productivity.

Cal Newport, author of the book Deep Work, argues most of our time at work is characterised by “shallow activity” — checking emails, attending to smartphone alerts or going to pointless meetings.

“A lot of people have this vague feeling that all the distractions in their lives aren’t great. At the same time, the things causing these distractions have positive benefits too, so it’s all a confusing wash,” Prof Newport told the Financial Times.

He said people can only produce their best work when their minds are allowed to concentrate hard for an uninterrupted period of time.

“Yet almost no one uses deep work any more,” he said. “Even if they wanted to, most workplace cultures make it near impossible. This is somewhat baffling to me.”

He recommends setting aside several hours every week for ‘deep work’, with unbreachable rules such as no internet browsing.

Mr Batista, meanwhile, argues we should learn to exert more control over the tools around us.

Just as we have to learn to avoid instant gratification through sweet treats, “we need to be more thoughtful about our information consumption, resisting the allure of the mental equivalent of ‘junk food’ in order to allocate our time and attention most effectively”.