It is driven by the sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch of the object of desire. It wants what it wants immediately and steeply reduces or 'discounts' the value of any rewards that are delayed. Immediate rewards activate the hot, automatic, reflexive, unconscious limbic system, which pays little attention to delayed consequences.Given this history, it makes little sense to wait rather than grab whatever is at hand. Beginning in early childhood, far too many people live in untrustworthy, unreliable worlds in which promises for delayed larger rewards are made but never kept.With practice, the desired action of an implementation plan becomes initiated automatically when the relevant situational cues occur.

It is critical to keep infants' stress levels from becoming chronically activated and to promote the formation of close, warm attachments so the babies feel secure and safe. How lovingly and caringly infants are nurtured, or how cruelly and coldly they are neglected or abused, is inscribed in their brains and changes who they become.It's easier to use the cool system when hot choices for others rather than for oneself. When dealing with temptations, one way to momentarily escape the hot system is to imagine how someone else would behave.It motivates preschoolers to want two marshmallows, but it also makes it hard for them to endure the wait. The hot system gives life its emotional zest.The marshmallow experiments convinced me that if people can change how they mentally represent a stimulus, they can exert self-control and escape from being victims of the hot stimuli that have come to control their behavior.We are less likely to delay gratification when we feel sad or bad.Children who just couldn't wait when cued to think 'hot' about what they wanted right now could easily wait when cued to think 'cool' about it.The ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.The following are my favorite quotes from Walter Mischel's The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control.

The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel