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showed giant sea turtles losing their sense of direction, wandering into the desert, and pathetically dying as they flapped their flippers aimlessly and feebly, unable to find the sea. It was unquestionably a tearjerker, but not everyone was allowed to cry. Some remained stoic, as instructed; some deliberately let the waterworks flow as much as possible. Afterward they all took the stamina test by squeezing the hand exerciser, and researchers compared the results.
    The movie had no effect on the stamina of the control group: The people squeezed the handles just as long as they had in a test before the film. But the two other groups quit much sooner, and it didn’t matter whether they’d been suppressing their feelings or venting their grief over the poor turtles. Either way, the effort to control their emotional reactions depleted their willpower. Faking it didn’t come free.
    Neither did a classic mental exercise: the white bear challenge. The white bear has been something of a mascot for psychologists ever since Dan Wegner heard the legend about how the young Tolstoy—or, depending on the version, the young Dostoyevsky—bet that his younger brother couldn’t go five minutes without thinking about a white bear. The brother had to pay up, having made a disconcerting discovery about human mental powers. We like to think we control our thoughts, but we don’t. First-time meditators are typically shocked at how their minds wander over and over, despite earnest attempts to focus and concentrate. At best, we have partial control over our streams of thought, as Wegner, who is now at Harvard, demonstrated by asking people to ring a bell whenever a white bear intruded on their thoughts. Some tricks and distraction techniques and incentives could briefly keep the creature at bay, he found, but eventually the bell tolled for everyone.
    This sort of experiment might sound frivolous. Of all the traumas and psychoses afflicting humans, “unwanted white bear thoughts” doesn’t rank very high. Yet that distance from everyday life is precisely what makes it a useful tool to researchers. To understand how well people control their thoughts, it’s best not to pick ordinary thoughts. When a graduate student tried a version of Wegner’s experiment in which people were told not to think about their mothers, the experiment failed in its purpose, and served to demonstrate only that college students are remarkably skilled at not thinking about their mothers.
    What makes Mom different from a white bear? Perhaps the students are trying to separate themselves emotionally from their parents. Perhaps they often want to do things that their mothers would disapprove of, and so they need to put Mom out of their minds. Or perhaps they wish to avoid feeling guilty for not calling their mother as often as she would like. But notice that all these possible explanations for the difference between Mom and the white bear are things about Mom. That’s exactly the problem, at least as a researcher would see it. Mothers are not good topics for pure research, because there is so much baggage—so many mental and emotional associations. The reasons you do or don’t think about your mother are many, variable, and highly specific, so they would not easily generalize. In contrast, if people have trouble suppressing thoughts of white bears—creatures that presumably play essentially no role in the daily life or personal history of the average American college student and research participant—then the explanation is likely to apply to a wide range of topics.
    For all those reasons, the white bear appealed to self-control researchers studying how people manage their thoughts. Sure enough, after people spent a few minutes trying not to think of a white bear, they gave up sooner on puzzles (compared with people who’d been free to ponder anything). They also had a harder time controlling their feelings in another slightly cruel experiment: being forced to