The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive. Indeed, even work that has shown some benefits of fasting on certain tasks also admitted that the thought process involved was reliant on “gut feelings”—an appropriate choice of words for decisions governed by the stomach. And while that’s all well and good for someone like Erik, whose “intuition” is actually decades of careful expertise that he doesn’t necessarily have conscious access to, for the rest of us, our guts are just as likely to be wrong than right—and we have no way of telling the difference. We become reliant more on our reflexive thinking than on cool, measured reflection. And we become more emotional: we often interpret the cues of hunger that our bodies send as negative emotional states—hence the term “hangry”—and so, all the negative decision effects that occur when we misattribute mood as information may very well now enter into our thought process.