“But we cannot fully choose when our minds will be riveted. We think about that impending project not only when we sit down to work on it, but also when we are at home trying to help our child with her homework. The same automatic capture that helps us focus becomes a burden in the rest of life. Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind to give to the rest of life. This is more than a metaphor. We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth. We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource that affects how we process information and make decisions. We can measure executive control, a key resource that affects how impulsively we behave. And we find the scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth—it makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not the that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces one’s bandwidth.”
Excerpted from: Mullainathan, Sendhil and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. New York: Picador, 2013.
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