The science writer Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article on self-control in next week’s issue of the New Yorker (“The Secret of Self-control”  New Yorker  May 18 2009) Lehrer rehearses the same scientific study I mentioned in Cyburbia  the famous experiment in the late 1960’s in which Stanford’s Professor of Psychology Walter Mischel gave marshmallows to little children and promised them more if they waited to eat them while he went away on an errand