I'll have to check some of the primary sources on that, but it seems true (and obvious) from an intuitive perspective. This would go a long way toward explaining my relatively recent progression toward a zombie-like mental state...
Here's a much better article on the topic by Dan Ariely. This is one of his primary areas of research, and he addresses it in his books (including a description of his experiments).
Some koans have the goal of exhausting this kind of reserve through trying to deeply explore and attempt to solve a paradox. I think the intent is to gain experience of this kind of depletion to better understand its impacts (at least from my experience of it).
Thanks Diego, I checked out the posting you linked and you're right, he definitely raises other highly relevant issues, probably much more eloquently than I did in my own article.
The mental resource that is being impacted by such things as exercising self-control seems to go far beyond anything we typically define as 'ego' as in self-image and I think the implications are therefore even more wide-ranging than ego-depletion, although he does seem to imply that he appreciates this.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadI haven't updated Chrome in the last 3 days - and now I wont :-D (MacBook Air late 2010, Snow Leopard)
http://danariely.com/2012/08/15/understanding-ego-depletion/
I made a separate submission for the above link, it deserves it.
The mental resource that is being impacted by such things as exercising self-control seems to go far beyond anything we typically define as 'ego' as in self-image and I think the implications are therefore even more wide-ranging than ego-depletion, although he does seem to imply that he appreciates this.