What causes your brain to procrastinate and how to face it
“You know it’s going to stink in the future just as much as it’s going to stink doing it now, but internally you just can’t help yourself,” said a professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscientist at Arizona State University. “It’s a fascinating phenomenon — that myopia you can’t escape — even though if you just stop and think about it, it’s ludicrous.”
There is individual variation, but “procrastination is a tendency that we all encounter in our life in different domains, or at different time points in our lives,” said Raphaël Le Bouc, a neurologist at the Paris Brain Institute and author of the study. “But the true cognitive mechanisms behind it are not really known. And this might be a reason why it’s difficult to overcome this tendency.”
Procrastinating brains believe that tasks will be easier in the future
Researchers asked 43 adults to rate their preferences for receiving smaller rewards quicker or larger rewards later, as well as for performing easier tasks sooner or more effortful tasks later.
For rewards, earlier research has shown that humans tend to be more impulsive and prefer a smaller reward sooner over a larger reward later, a finding that was replicated in Le Bouc’s study. A bird in hand now is worth two in some future bush.
His study also shows people similarly discount and downplay future effort, preferring an easier task now vs. a more difficult one in the future, such as memorizing 10 digits of pi in one day or 20 digits by next week.
When the researchers had 27 of the 43 subjects perform the same experiment in an fMRI neuroimaging machine, one brain area stood out as central to making this cost-benefit calculation — the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.
Brain activity in this region seemed to combine information about rewards and efforts for a task; more effortful tasks increased its neural activity, while more rewards decreased it.
As expected, the more effort something takes, or the less rewarding
the task, the more likely the participants were to want to procrastinate.
Crucially, the more someone downplayed how difficult future tasks would be, the more likely they would be to delay the task.
Procrastination is also not a one-time decision, but one we get to make repeatedly to put off the task until the proverbial tomorrow.
To assess procrastination behavior in more real-life settings, the researchers turned to bureaucratic busywork.
Participants were informed that to receive their payment, they had to fill out at home and return 10 pieces of arduous administrative paperwork such as documents for passport and driver’s license renewals, within 30 days. “The forms actually were quite boring,” Le Bouc said.
Using their behavioral and brain imaging data, the researchers were able to build a computational model to predict how long each person would delay completing the paperwork.