Delayed Gratification and School Success

           A Stanford University study (1972) was interested in finding out if one group of 6 year olds could wait for a reward (delayed gratification). That is, would they be more successful in life than children who could not wait for an additional reward. The experimenters presented each child with a marshmallow, which they could eat immediately. Or, if they could wait 15 minutes they would get two marshmallows. The psychologists followed both groups over a lengthy number of years and found that the children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures.
           Perhaps those children who expressed a so-called weakness in their inability to delay gratification also had difficulty in other cognitive areas. In other words, certain attributes are essential for future executive functioning such as greater attention span, who or what you have just seen or heard is retrievable from working memory and especially “delayed gratification.” In short these capabilities may predict success in school and even in the working world?
           Fortunately brain scientists believe that executive functioning can be teachable. For example, one educational curriculum called  “Tools of the Mind” has had success in some low-income school districts when compared to children from high-income districts. The program trains kids to revisit temptation and distraction and to practice tasks designed to enhance working memory and flexible thinking. Examples of self-regulation tasks are simply teaching children to tell themselves aloud what to do (Stix,G. 2015). Other successful approaches to produce cognition (delayed gratification) have allied itself with music rather than computer games that claim to boost memory etc.
           Some of the research findings come from a group of Neuroscientists led by Nin Kraus of Northwestern University. Kraus is head of the auditory neuroscience laboratory. She has used EEG recordings to measure how the nervous system encodes pitch, timing and timbre of musical composition and weather neural changes can result from practicing music improves cognitive faculties. Her lab has found that such training enhances working memory and perhaps most important makes student’s better listeners, allowing them to subtract speech from the-all-talking-at-once that sometimes prevails in the classroom. Krus has worked with the Harmony Project and published a study in 2014 that showed that children in one of its programs who practiced a musical instrument could process sounds closely linked to reading and language skills better than children who only did so for a year (Stix,G. 2015).
           Music training’s impact extends even to academic classes. The harmony Project provides music education to lower income youngers in LA schools.  Dozens of students participating in the project have graduated from high school and gone to college usually the first in their family to do so. According to Krus, “If students have to choose how to spend their time between computer games or a musical instrument,  there is is no question, in my mind, which one is more beneficial for the nervous system. If you are trying to copy a guitar lead, you have to keep it in you head and try to reproduce it over and over. David Sortino Ph.D., a Graton resident, is director of The Neurofeedback Institute.