DOMINATIONnoted, “Children are constantly cued to eat by food commercials, vend-
ing machines, etc., so it is easy to imagine how a child who is poorly
inhibited could have difficulty resisting these cues to eat.”
The results were as expected. Girls who had problems with impul-
sivity and planning at age 10 gained more weight over the following six
years. The scientists reported that a significant amount of the weight
these girls gained came from bingeing—intense bursts of no self-control.
For a similar reason, overweight children are more likely to be hit
by cars when they’re crossing the street. It’s not because they walk more
slowly; it’s because they’re impulsive. Researchers at the University of
Iowa collected 240 children who were seven or eight years old, and
asked them to cross a busy street to measure how long they waited and
how often a child was hit by a car.^3
Although overweight people sometimes walk more slowly, in this
experiment weight had no effect on how fast the children crossed the
street. But there was a direct relationship between how overweight
the child was and how quickly he or she stepped out into traffic. Less
overweight children waited longer than more overweight children.
Overweight children also left a smaller buffer between themselves and
oncoming traffic—that is, they allowed the cars to get closer. Not sur-
prisingly, they were hit more frequently.
It’s important to remember that biology is not destiny. People whose
control-dopamine systems are at one extreme or the other can change.
People with ADHD can improve dramatically with medication, psycho-
therapy, and sometimes just time. Colonel Aldrin, who faced a different
problem, eventually found ways to harness the intensity of his creative
drive. Since returning from the moon, he has written or cowritten a
dozen books, produced a computer strategy game, and proposed a rev-
olutionary method of space travel that could make a crewed mission to
Mars more practical. He also found time to appear on numerous TV
shows, including Dancing with the Stars, The Price Is Right, Top Chef, and The
Big Bang Theory.
3 Nobody really got hit by a car. The researchers used virtual reality.