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remain stoic while watching classic skits from Saturday Night Live and a Robin Williams stand-up routine. The audience’s facial reactions were recorded and later systematically coded by researchers. Once again, the effects were obvious on the people who’d earlier done the white bear exercise: They couldn’t resist giggling, or at least smiling, when Williams went into one of his riffs.
    You might keep that result in mind if you have a boss prone to making idiotic suggestions. To avoid smirking at the next meeting, refrain from any strenuous mental exercises beforehand. And feel free to think about all the white bears you want.

Name That Feeling
    Once the experiments showed that willpower existed, psychologists and neuroscientists had a new set of questions. Exactly what was willpower? Which part of the brain was involved? What was happening in the neural circuits? What other physical changes were taking place? What did it feel like when willpower ebbed?
    The most immediate question was what to call this process—something more precise than “changeful potency” or “weak will” or the “The devil made me do it.” The recent scientific literature didn’t offer much help. Baumeister had to go all the way back to Freud to find a model of the self that incorporated concepts of energy. Freud’s ideas, as usual, turned out to be both remarkably prescient and utterly wrong. He theorized that humans use a process called sublimation to convert energy from its basic instinctual sources into more socially approved ones. Thus, Freud posited, great artists channel their sexual energy into their work. It was clever speculation, but the energy model of the self didn’t catch on with psychologists in the twentieth century, and neither did the specific theory about the sublimation mechanism. When Baumeister and colleagues tested a list of Freud’s theoretical mechanisms against the modern research literature, they found that sublimation fared the worst of all. There was essentially no evidence for it, and lots of reasons to think the opposite was true. For example, if the theory of sublimation was correct, then artists’ colonies should be full of people sublimating their erotic urges, and therefore there should be relatively little sexual activity. Have you ever heard of an artists’ colony known for its lack of sex?
    Still, Freud was onto something with his energy model of the self. Energy is an essential element in explaining the liaisons at artists’ colonies. Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido. Freud had been a bit vague about where this energy came from and how it operated, but at least he had assigned it an important place in his theory of self. As a kind of homage to Freud’s insights in this direction, Baumeister elected to use Freud’s term for the self: ego . Thus was born “ego depletion,” Baumeister’s term for describing people’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. People can sometimes overcome mental fatigue, but Baumeister found that if they had used up energy by exerting willpower (or by making decisions, another form of ego depletion that we’ll discuss later), they would eventually succumb. This term would later appear in thousands of scientific papers, as psychologists came to understand the usefulness of ego depletion for explaining a wide assortment of behaviors.
    How ego depletion occurs inside the brain, initially a mystery, became clearer when two researchers at the University of Toronto, Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer Gutsell, observed people who were wearing a cap that covered the skull with a dense network of electrodes and wires. This method, called electroencephalographic recording (EEG), enables scientists to detect electrical activity inside the brain. It can’t exactly read someone’s mind, but it can help map out how the brain deals