Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

"The participants who memorized the seven-digit number were nearly 50% more likely than the other group to choose cake over fruit.

Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizarre conclusion:

Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."

Bizarre, all right. Unless the subjects were wrestlers or models, why should the choice of fruit v. cake involve self control at all? If you wished to argue that they thought they deserved more of a reward, I might be willing to consider that.

And are we talking about seven numbers vs. two numbers (as in the illustration) or seven-digit number v. two-digit numbers, as in the text?

Unless the subjects were wrestlers or models, why should the choice of fruit v. cake involve self control at all?

For a fair number of people in the US, choosing fruit over cake is largely a matter of willpower. (I hope you're not arguing that a significant fraction of the population needs to exercise willpower in order to choose cake over fruit!)

You could argue that that percentage isn't significant enough for the experiment's sample size, certainly. But otherwise, all things being equal, there should be roughly the same number of people who need to exercise willpower to choose fruit over cake in either group.

The more obvious conclusion, to me, is that people prefer energy-rich foods after expending more mental energy. Our brain is a major energy sink, as it consumes about 20% of our body's energy.

I'm pretty sure that after I've been thinking hard, I prefer to eat energy rich foods. Of course, as with anything related to the brain, since we understand it so poorly it's hard to say if either hypothesis is really true.

You get the same results without having people make food related decisions, and I believe there are experiments that have explicitly looked at the link to energy usage and found it entirely unconvincing at best.

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