Can exercising your body boost your brain's stamina? Are some people just born lazy? And why did Angela stop reading “Us Weekly”?
After you eat the mixed nuts, there's nothing else to do.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner, and you're listening to no stupid questions.
Last episode, Steven and Angela talked about cognitive fatigue and the kinds of work that make your brain tired.
Today.
What can be done about it?
When my attention is the opposite of the flow state, it's divided, it's not unified, and I hate it.
Angela, last time on the show, I asked you a question, the answer to which was so interesting.
You and I went down a series of rabbit holes.
We answered about 10% of the question for all the best possible reasons.
And so here we are, part two.
For the first time in our lives.
The question last time concerned a new paper by four economists.
The paper is called cognitive endurance as human capital.
The four authors are Christina Brown, Spreet Kauer, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Scofield.
And we discussed the paper a little bit, the experiments that went into it, but we didn't even get to the findings.
So let's go back to the paper, and then let's get to the findings.
So this paper has a field experiment with 1600 elementary school students in India, and they are randomly assigned to condition.
There is a control condition, and in the treatment condition, these elementary schools students are given cognitively challenging things to do.
In one case, it was math problems, and another case there were, like, mazes and puzzles that were cognitively challenging, but not traditional academic stuff.