Written by: Paul Betito, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If there is one thing cognitive science and the study of phenomena — and with them personal development— do not go without, it is willpower.
The Art Of Willpower
Willpower is rarely remembered yet often relived; it obliges and is obligated; it empowers reasoning, fuels reason and causes raison d’être. It drives libido, our notions, our identities. It splits possibility and action down the middle. It hems and haws, percolates and dissipates but is never, ever without its source, its realization in our most unaffected selves. It is the molten core to our tectonic movement, the marrow in our structure, the filaments in our web. It is the most lasting measure in all of metaphysics and psychology, in fact the whole perspective behind lifespan and lifeform, the missing link between our primeval finitude and—eventually—our sloughing decrepitude, the pan-elemental force behind our most primitive, immiscible, spirited and convergent recollections.
Willpower? Where?
Yet, despite these and other impressive mechanisms of action, the neurological representations for willpower—its neural reasons so to say, its somatic localizations, its corporeal interpretations—are nebulous at best, making it challenging for new connections involving willpower to be forged except autonomously, except invisibly or unbeknownst to judgment. It also makes self-centering and guided action like personal development largely—and rather unfairly—a feat of endurance rather than precocity, of self-collection rather than substance, and showing on the one hand the reason why modern educational policy is much more institutional than subjective—that is, more balanced than interested.
The sheer precocity of willpower, when it is successfully realized or proven, displays significant, protean, dynamical power, like a pan-cultural mortar for building homes or a universal language.
Furthermore, whether willpower may be mentally encoded within the precarious span of self-cognizance, within our narrow range or window of self-awareness, such that personal development can truly and authentically emerge from it, is a serious question of equity and responsibility, involving all our possible questions of ownership and authenticity, capability and entitlement, sensitivity and awareness, and sensation and perception.
The Limits Of Brain Scanning
Nowadays, we depend on brain scans to interpret brain function. Sadly, every possible depiction of the brain within our means, such as from brain imaging or other scanning measurement devices, inadvertently mis-accounts willpower and mis-attributes metabolic factors like magnetic properties, neuro-electrical activity or blood oxygen levels in its place.
That is, any visible conflux of various neural energies, proportions, polarities, high-intensity or heat-producing areas, and so forth, is assumed in science to emanate in its subjectively directed intention not from the research participant, who should not otherwise be able to practice pure self-interest, but from the careful interplay of experimental conditions, which if we are but to impute the most casual self-attention to the research subject leaves in the wake of organized scientific discovery a mess of undetermined, undisclosed, unverified and practicably insubstantial information about willpower.
The Habit Of Science
If there is one thing we do not often hear about brain science, with its so-called limitless horizons and impervious essentialism, whose experiments depend on statistical method to make general deductions possible to aver but also, in this way, make it tough to pause and take a different perspective on things, it might be that analytical approaches to the brain completely miss the mark.
As it turns out, the seat of every disbursement of energy in the brain, in other words every act of conscious intention—including subjective experimental actions—in fact possesses much more than the largely arbitrary, unduly synthetic and limited attention within its activities making experimental control, manipulation and logical inference possible.
That is to say, even tightly controlled experimental actions take place under extremely complex conditions, conditions which are not necessarily lost to the experimental subject just because they are ostensibly controlled for, and many factors related to intention, intangible differences, expectable neural configurations, and other forms of operation are deliberately ignored when they are rounded into statistical methodologies.
In population brain science, for example, regions of the brain are not assumed to be differentially informed by knowable variance. This means that the population science takes functional localization in the brain for granted, assuming all similarities in neural connectivity come down to the same or exact same patterns, behaviours, actions—and so on—in all people.
Indeed, many regions of the brain are well-known. However, another assumption in brain science is that the coordination of activity in the brain is integrated. We are made to think, in other words, that the chicken is both the egg and, at the same time, the chicken. Yet recruitment of activity across brain regions differs depending on what we are doing, and sometimes even minor differences at molecular levels have significant, unintended, unexpected or uncontrollable consequences. Moreover, there are profound ripple effects in the brain for even negligible stimuli, upstream and downstream mechanics able to alter neural configurations beyond, outside of or in spite of, convenient account such as imaging or sensing.
And there is always also the subject—that is, a being—at play, with their vast interconnections, their compensatory mental formations, their structural and infinitesimal mental complexes, their indeterminable point of origination in space and time. Science, for the sake of its frameworks, decides the subject must be taken for granted.
Lastly, circuits in the brain involving the neurochemical associated with pleasure and reward, dopamine, also have a role in willpower. But much as they might be lauded for an almost exclusive role in the makings of willpower, in its ironclad and finely tuned undertow, and compounded and complicated though they are, they fail to do justice to the extensive coordination, the sheer range or amplitude, complicit to every complex action based in willpower. Willpower is more than just a form of imprinting, no matter how immaculate its prevalence might seem.
What Is Willpower?
Willpower, scientifically and colloquially, has been known as self-control, impulse control, inhibition, even self-regulation, but these and other names fail to identify the pure capability, the raw intrinsic dynamism, lying at its heart.
Volition, contrariwise, speaks to an analytic philosophical principle, an equal part conceptual and realistic force, showing it is largely beyond the experience of self-evidence making willpower comparatively unbridled and potentially pervasive, that is, just outside—yet, plain or immanent to—the grasp of pure subjectivity.
Willpower provides a clarion or hortative call to create, to create creative expectation with bodies and minds, and it is the phenomenon making the locus of the Freudian group ego—with its distributive, as opposed to self-made, self-awareness—possible for us to understand.
Willpower In The Lab
Willpower has been observed, evaluated and operationalized in myriad ways in the laboratory. Students and professionals in psychology and the related disciplines tend to be familiar with the classic cupcake test, wherein groups of children were had to sit in a room alone, to wait for the experimenter to return to the room and to choose in that time interval whether to practice self-control or self-restraint or to eat a cupcake located at the centre of a table in front of them.
We saw in the Stanford Prison Experiment how willpower must have influenced willingness not only to seriously adopt derogatory mock social roles like guard or prisoner, but to actualize the behaviours involved. We also saw in the Milgram Shock experiments how willpower must have acted to compel—or how it intervened against—abuse of perceived power to exercise, and even to ramp up, pain inflicted on others.
Finally, we have also seen how mice, rats and primates will repeatedly press a lever or some other experimental device if given the chance—sometimes to the point of death—in order to self-administer psychotropic drugs like heroin and cocaine.
Willpower In Reality
In reality, willpower is a lot more casual, seamless and open-ended than experiments are able to suggest.
What experimental conditions make possible, in their latent potential for unvarying repetition, incorporation and poignant elicitation, is contrast and comparison as an approximate function of willpower, like they were creating a singular repository—that is, the fount of data collection—for willpower to be admitted to, showing that willpower is never necessarily evident or directly connected to what happens to be under scrutiny, but rather is a fortuitous observation—such as seeing a shooting star—under an intense form of magnification.
So, willpower for personal development clearly involves a tough test of perception, one which high performers don’t tend to do any better on than anybody else, seeing that the natures of relativity and consciousness make it such that observation of one’s own willpower does not become supported by default scaffolding, but rather by pure internal cognitive properties we largely take for granted such as processing speed, working memory and the parsimony or logical deftness of our reasoning skills.
What Does Willpower Take?
Firstly, willpower takes strong boundaries and clarity of mind, otherwise the deliberate choice of its exercise risks being lost in the defective fog of uncertainty, something which is strongly associated with anxiety. And, while it is in fact possible to perpetuate willpower through sheer anxiety, this is an arduous and deleterious task subject to default mechanisms which are themselves prone to overcompensation, such as forms of somatic tension, temperature modulation and mechanisms of excitation (eg, using caffeine or other mind-altering drugs).
It is possible to ameliorate boundaries using skills and strategies, as well as through functional methods, tools and objects, inclusions and accommodations, exercises, proclivities, habits and routines, and even dependencies, but it helps to remember that they are cognitive in nature, meaning they are embedded in and interlocked with the various ways in which we deploy our bodies and minds.
Secondly, out from the deadlock of prevarication and prognostication common to default willpower, which is affected—but commonly afflicted—by anxiety, true willpower requires not a tenuous but an unwavering sense of control and sufficiency, that is, fullness or completion within oneself. It is perfectly possible to feel controlled yet underpowered, knowing especially that our self-evaluations even involving willpower tend to be socially programmatic, and that it requires control in the first place in order to be able to recognize lesser conditional capability or deficient performance.
Control refers to a basic sense of stability, equivalency or equilibration, humanity, mutualism, vitalism or some other preponderant form of engrained conduct in the world that is experienced with high self-salience.
Sufficiency, on the other hand, refers for the most part to basic needs, invoking trust and attachment, hunger, thirst and satiety, sleep and rehabilitation, physical safety, and to some extent play and learning.
You would be surprised how easily, principally and coercively nutritional, metabolic, sleep and other possible deficiencies and vulnerable forms of totalization are able to upset willpower. You would also be surprised what levels of control and sufficiency are possible even under duress, disorder, imposition, forcibility, abuse and other risky and harmful conditions, showing not just how temperamental the precursors to willpower can be but how easily it is possible to be led to think our willpower is completely otherwise.
Using these cognitive concepts, it is possible to bring oneself and one’s willpower to the narrow chasm between autonomy and expectation, between calibrated self-functioning and high-meaning, high-workload resource-intensification, whereby willpower becomes not only perfectly conducive to personal development but also actionable, ad libitum—something like the lever and the drug wrapped in one.
Actionable Willpower
Actionable willpower should feel like a mantra, like a personal totem or divine incantation, knowing that actionable means, in cognitive terms, compartmentalized; it should also feel like a mantra knowing that a mantra does not just speak for itself, but for spirit, calling and a higher order. It is also helpful to recollect that the very best boundaries for willpower involve little more than intimations of i) constraint, ii) causality and iii) temporal affordance, that is, a gentle awareness of the epoch separating our past from our present investiture to the future, which is an ego-based phenomenon.
Clearly, it takes coming to grips with oneself at a very essential yet indelible level for willpower to become actionable, and a mantra however copious, rigorous and transformational is just one of many metaphorical vehicles for attaining self-understanding.
In this way, it is possible for willpower to eventually become accessible to every layer, every level and every permutation, recombination and reconfiguration of personal development, for willpower to reach the very best possible place for itself, whereby—and just like in the very best scientific experiments—it might take, in the end, a backseat to method.
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Paul Betito, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Paul Betito is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist with a virtual and in-person private practice in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has expertise in complex systems theory, psychoanalytic theories, cognitive therapies and the study of consciousness.
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