How is your brain like Abraham Lincoln's political cabinet? And why is it easier to do a drone strike on an enemy than to stab them with a bayonet? And what does any of this have to do with Mel Gibson or the Twilight Zone or mister Spock from Star Trek. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and in these next three episodes, we're going to sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. So today we're going to discover that you're not one thing with a single drive, but instead your brain is a team of rivals. It's a machine that's built of conflicting parts. This is going to allow us to understand how we make decisions, which is what we'll focus on in this episode, and in the next episode we'll talk about economic decisions in particular, like how do you choose which ice cream to buy or which car to buy? And finally, we'll talk about how we can leverage this sort of knowledge to optimally navigate our behavior, to make our behavior consistent with our long term thinking rather than the temptations that sit right in front of us. So for now, let's begin with human behavior and why we are all so complicated. So I'm going to start today with a story that I told in my book Incognito, and the story is about that two thousand and six arrest of the actor Mel Gibson. So he was pulled over for speeding. He was going almost twice the posted speed limit on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and the police officer, James Me, gave him a breath liizer test, and what that showed is that Gibson's blood alcohol level was at zero point one two percent, which is very high, well over the legal limit of point eight. And there was also an open bottle of tequila on the seat next to Gibson. So the officer places Gibson under arrest and asks him to get into the squad car, and Gibson goes nuts, and he says Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, and he asks the officer are you a Jew And the officer, James Me, was indeed Jewish. So Gibson refuses to get in the squad car and he has to be handcuffed. So within a day the website TMZ leaks a video of this interaction, and there's this vigorous response from the media and everything gets very heated. So eventually Gibson writes a note of apology, and it reads quote, after drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. So he goes on to say he's ashamed and he disgraced himself, and that he's been battling alcoholism, and he apologizes for his quote unbecoming behavior. But this didn't really land that well because there was no reference at all to the anti Semitic slurs. So Gibson then writes a longer note of apology directed toward the Jewish community, and he says, quote, there is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of antisemitic remark. I want to apologize, specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a dui charge. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God, I have to honor his children. But please, I know from my heart that I am not an anti Semite. I'm not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. So Gibson offered to meet one on one with leaders of the Jewish community to quote discern the appropriate path for healing. So he seemed genuinely apologetic, and Jewish leaders accepted his apology. But here's the question. Are Mel Gibson's true colors that of an anti Semite or are his true colors those he showed afterwards in his eloquent and apparently heartfelt apologies. Well this was a question that got a lot of people arguing. So one journalist wrote in the Washington Post an article that he titled Mel Gibson it wasn't just the tequila talking, and he wrote, quote, well, I'm sorry about his relapse, but I just don't buy the idea that a little tequila, or even a lot of tequila, can somehow turn an unbiased person into a raging anti semite, or a racist, or a homophobe, or a bigot of any kind for that matter. Alcohol removes inhibitions, allowing all kinds of opinions to escape uncensored. But you can't blame alcohol for forming and nurturing those opinions in the first place. Then, the producer of the TV show Scarborough County drank alcohol on the show until he raised his blood alcohol level two point one two percent, which was Gibson's level on that night, and he reported quote, not feeling antisemitic after drinking. So, like a lot of people, the reporter and the producer suspected that the alcohol had loosened Gibson's inhibitions and revealed his true self, and the nature of their suspicion has a long history. An ancient Greek poet had coined a popular phrase which translates to in wine, there is the truth, and this was repeated by the Roman as in Vino veritas. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud makes the same point quote in came wine out went a secret. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic people always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying. Okay, But going back to Mel Gibson, not everyone agreed with the hypothesis that alcohol revealed who he really was. A writer in The National Review argued, quote, the guy was drunk. For Heaven's sake. We all say and do dumb things when we're drunk. If I were to be judged on my drunken escapades and follies, I should be utterly excluded from polite society. And so would you, unless you're some kind of saint. The Jewish conservative activist David Horowitz commented on Fox News, quote, people deserve compassion when they're in this kind of trouble. I think it would be very ungracious for people to deny it to him. There is an addiction psychologist named Alan Marlott who wrote in USA Today alcohol is not a truth serum. It may or may not indicate his true feelings, and Gibson's social circle publicly vouched for him. Earlier in the day before the arrest, Gibson had spent time at the house of his friend Dean Devlin, who was quoted saying, if Mel is an anti Semite, he spends a lot of time with us, which makes no sense. Devlin and his wife are both Jewish. For Devlin, that was proof enough against the arguments of anti Semitism. So which are Gibson's true colors? Those in which he shouts anti Semitic comments or those in which he feels remorse and shame and publicly says I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. Now, many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side. Words, we think that people have a genuine aim and the rest is decoration or evasion or cover up. Now that's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature. And as we're going to see in this episode, we are made of many drives under the hood, many different networks of neurons that sometimes have their own opinions. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, I am large, I contain multitudes. So Gibson's detractors are going to continue to insist that he is truly an anti Semite, and his defenders will continue to insist that he is not. But both may be defending an incomplete story. So let's begin in the nineteen sixties, when the pioneers of artificial intelligence, we're struggling to build simple robotic programs that could manipulate small blocks of wood. So the idea was to identify the blocks and then to grip them, and then to stack them up in simple patterns. And this was one of those apparently simple problems that turns out to be incredibly hard, because for a robot, finding a block of wood requires figuring out which camera pixels correspond to the block and which ones don't, and then you have to recognize the block shape regardless of the angle and the distance of the block. And then you have to grab it, which requires visual guidance of graspers that have to squeeze in at the right moment from the right direction with the right force, and stacking requires an analysis of the rest of the blocks and adjusting to those details. And all these programs need to be coordinated so they happen at the right times in the right sequence. And so what these AI pioneers discovered is that tasks that seem simple are often masking enormous computational complexity. So some decades ago, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky and his colleagues started thinking about this problem and they came up with a really progressive idea. Maybe the robot could solve the problem by distributing the labor among specialized subagents. So imagine small computer programs that could each bite off a small piece of the problem. So one computer program is in charge of the job find, another could solve the Fetch problem. Another takes care of the stack block. And these subagents can be connected in a hierarchy just like a company, and they can report to one another and to their bosses. And because of this hierarchy, stack block would not try to start its job until Find and Fetch had finished their jobs. So they is that these subagents are totally mindless. But when these sub agents come together, the whole system starts to look pretty smart. So this idea of subagents didn't solve the problem entirely, but it helped a lot, and most importantly, it brought into focus a new idea about the working of biological brains. Marvin Minsky suggested that human minds perhaps were collections of enormous numbers of machine like mindless subagents that collaborate. So the key idea is that a bunch of small specialized workers can give rise to something like a society with all kinds of rich properties that no subagent has by itself. Each little guy is just doing some simple thing, but together, when they're connected in the right way, you get something that looks like intelligence. So the suggestion was that and thousands of little minds are better than one large one. And if this sounds weird, just think about how factories work. Each person on the assembly line is specialized. They do one simple job. No one there knows how to do everything, and yet complex products get built out of this. And this is also how government ministries operate. Each bureaucrat has one task or a few very specific tasks, and the government succeeds on its ability to distribute the work appropriately and on larger scales. This is how civilizations operate. They reach the next level of sophistication when they learn to divide labor. They commit some people to specialize in agriculture, and some to art, and some to warfare and so on. This division of labor allows specialization and a deeper level of expertise, so even though no one knows how other jobs work, as an emergent result, you get civilization. So this idea of dividing up problems into smaller subroutines that ignited the young field of artificial intelligence back in the nineteen seventies. Instead of trying to develop a single all purpose program, the scientists changed their goal. Now it was to build a system out of smaller, local expert networks which know how to do one single thing. And in this framework, the larger system only has to switch which of the experts has control at any given moment. The learning challenge now involves not so much how to do each little task, but instead how to distribute who's doing what when. So, as Minsky suggested in his book The Society of Mind, perhaps that's all the human brain has to do as well, and he noted that if brains really do work this way as collections of subagents, we wouldn't have any reason to be aware of the specialized processes. He said, quote thousands and perhaps millions of little processes must be involved in how we anticipate, imagine, plan, predicts, and prevent, and yet all this proceeds so automatically that we regard it as ordinary common sense. At first, it may seem incredible that our minds could use such intricate machinery and yet be unaware of it. When scientists began to look into the brains of animals, Minsky's society of mind idea open up a new way of looking at things. In the early nineteen seventies, researchers realized that a frog has at least two separate ways of seeing motion. One system is looking for small darting objects like a fly, and it directs the tongue, and the other system is looking for large looming objects like a person, and it tells the lef legs to jump. And presumably neither of these systems is conscious. Instead, they're just simple automated programs that are burned down in the circuitry. So the society of mind framework was an important step forward. But despite the initial excitement about it, a collection of experts with divided labor has never proven sufficient to yield the properties of the human brain. It's still the case that our smartest robots are less intelligent than a three year old child. So what went wrong? I suggested in my book Incognito that a critical factor was missing from the division of labor models, and we turn to that now. The missing factor in Minski's theory was competition among the experts who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem. Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict. In an assembly line a government ministry, each worker is an expert in a small task. But in contrast, parties in a democracy hold different opinions about the same issues, and the important part of the process is the battle for steering the ship of state. Brains are like democracies. They're built of multiple overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As the poet while Whitman correctly surmised, we are large, and we harbor multitudes within us, and those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There's an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain. They compete to control the single output channel of your behavior. So as a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, or cussing yourself, or cajoling yourself. These are things that computers simply don't do. So when the hostess at a party offers you chocolate cake, you can find yourself on the horns of a dilemma. Some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar. Other parts of your brain care about the negative consequences, like the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles. Part of you wants the cake, and part of you tries to gather the strength to pass on it. And the final vote of the parliament determines which party controls what you ultimately do. In other words, whether you put your hand up or you put your hand out. In the end, you either eat the chocolate cake or you don't, but you can't do both. Because of these internal multitudes, biological creatures can be conflicted. Now, the term conflicted can't be sensibly applied to an entity that has a single program. Your car can't conflicted about which way to turn. It has one steering wheel commanded by one driver, and it follows directions without complaint. But brains can be of two minds, and often many more than that. We don't know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior. Consider this simple experiment that's been done with laboratory rats. If you put some cheese at the end of a little corridor, the rat will go towards the cheese, and you can hook up a little harness to feel how strongly he's pulling towards that. Now, let's say instead of the cheese, you put an electrical shock. Now the rat moves away from the electrical shock, and with the harness you can measure the force. Okay, Now you put both cheese and the electrical shock at the end of the hallway. And what the rat does is he begins to approach, but with draws, and he finds the courage to approach again. And what happens is he oscillates conflicted, and it's exactly at the distance where the two forces cancel out. In other words, he's going towards a thing, and he's pulling away from the thing, and both programs are running at once. The pull matches the push. The poor rat has two pairs of paws on its steering wheel, each pulling in opposite directions, and as a result, he can't get anywhere. So brains, whether rat or human, are machines made of conflicting parts. If building a contraption with internal division seems strange, just consider that we already build social machines like this. Think of a jury of peers in a courtroom trial. You have twelve strangers with different opinions, and they're tasked with this single mission of coming to a consensus. So the jurors argue and cox and the influence, and eventually the group coheres to a single decision, having differing opinions. It's not a drawback to the jury system. It is the central feature. When the President Abraham Lincoln was putting together his presidential cabinet, he chose to put in adversaries. The historian Doris Kern's Goodwin described his cabinet as a team of rivals, and we see this kind of team of rivals all the time. In Zimbabwe some years ago, the president Robert Mugabe agreed to share power with a rival that he had earlier tried to assassinate. And in China in two thousand and nine, the President Hu Jintao named two opposing faction leaders to help him craft China's future. I proposed in incognito that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals, and the rest of this episode and the next two are going to explore that framework. Who the parties are, how they compete, how the union is held together, what happens when things fall apart. How this framework allows us to understand what products we buy and how we can use this understanding of the team of rivals to better navigate our own behavior into the future. As we move along, remember that different political parties typically have the same goal, which is success for their country, but they just have different ways of going about it. So, as Lincoln put it, rivals should be turned into allies quote for the sake of the greater good and for networks. In your brain neural subpopulations, the common interest is the thriving and survival of you the organism. In the same way that liberals and conservatives both love their country but can have different strategies for steering it. It's the same way in the brain you have competing factions that all believe they know the right way to solve problems. When trying to understand the strange details of human behavior, psychologists or economists sometimes refer to a dual process account, and you'll know this, for example, if you've read Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. In that framework, the brain has two separate systems. One is fast and automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness, and the other system is slow and cognitive and conscious, and these two systems are always battling it out. Now, this is a very good start to thinking about it, but there's no real reason to assume that there are only two systems. In fact, as we're going to see, there are many systems, and there are also different ways to think about how to divide things up. So in nineteen twenty, Sigmund Freud suggested three competing parts in his model of the psyche. There was the id, the ego, and the superego. The id was all about instinct, the ego was realistic and organized, and the super ego was critical and moralizing. In the nineteen fifties, the neuroscientist Paul MacLean suggested that the brain is made of three layers that represent successive stages of evolutionary development. There's the reptilian brain, which is involved in survival behaviors, and the limbic system, which underlies the emotions. And in higher animals, there's the neo core text, which is used in higher order thinking. Now, the details of both Freud's model and Maclean's model have largely fallen out of favor, but the heart of the idea survives, which is that brains are made of competing subsystems. I'll start with a simple model of competition as a starting point because it captures one way to see this picture, but by the next episode we'll see that it's even more sophisticated than that. So we'll start with a general statement about the brain's anatomy, which is that some areas of your brain are involved in higher order operations regarding events in the outside world. For the cognitionandy, this area is like the dorsilateral prefrontal core text, which is on the surface of your brain, just inside your temples, so those are monitoring and assessing the outside world, while other areas are involved with monitoring your internal state, like your level of hunger, or your sense of motivation, or whether something is rewarding to you. And this includes areas like the region just behind your forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex, in several areas deep below the surface, so these monitor what's going on on the inside. Now, again, the real situation is even more complex than this rough division would imply, because brains do a lot more than just monitor the outside and the inside. Your brain also simulates future states and reminisces about the past and figures out where to find things not immediately present, and so on. We'll get into that, but for the moment, this division into systems that monitor the outside and the inside will serve as a rough guide, and we can refine this picture later. Now to pick two labels that'll be familiar to everyone. We can call these the rational and the emotional systems. Are a little underspecified and imperfect, but they carry this starting point about rivalries in the brain. The rational system is the one that cares about analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state and worries whether things will be good or bad. In other words, as a rough guide, rational cognition involves external events, while emotion involves your internal state. So you can do a math problem without consulting your internal state, but you have to consult your internal state to order a dessert off the menu, or to prioritize what you feel like doing next. The emotional networks are absolutely required to rank your possible next actions in the world. If you were an emotionless robot who rolled into a room, you might be able to analyze this stuff around you, but you would be frozen with indecision about what to do next. Choices about the priority of actions are determined by our internal states. When you get home, will you head straight to your refrigerator or the bathroom or the bedroom. That doesn't depend on the external stimuli in your home because those haven't changed, but instead on your body's internal states. So the battle between the rational and the emotional systems can be brought to light by what philosophers call the trolley dilemma. Here's the scenario. A trolley is barreling down the train tracks. It's going out of control, and five workers are making repairs way down the track, and you, a bystander, realize that they're all going to get killed by this trolley. But you also notice that there's a lever nearby that you can throw, and that will divert the trolley down a different track where there's a single worker who will be killed. So what do you do? Do you throw the lever or not? If you're like most people, you have no hesitation about throwing the lever because it's far better than only one person gets killed than five people. Right, Okay, so that's a good choice. But there's a second version. Of the trolley problem that presents an interesting twist. Imagine that the same trolley is barreling down the tracks. The same five workers are gonna get killed, but this time you're a bystander on a footbridge that goes over the tracks, and you notice that there's an obese man standing on the footbridge, and you realize that if you push him off the bridge, his bulk will be sufficient to stop the train and save the five workers. Do you push the man off? If you're like most people, you bristle at this suggestion of murdering an innocent person. But here's the thing. What differentiates this from your previous choice. Aren't you trading one life for five lives? In both versions of the dilemma? Doesn't the math work out the same way? So what is the difference in these two cases. Philosophers propose that the difference lies in how people are being used. In the first scenario, you're simply reducing a bad situation, the death of five people, to a less bad situation, the death of one person. In the case of the man on the bridge, he is being exploited as a means to an end. So that's a popular explanation in the philosophy literature, but there's also a more brain based approach to understanding this reversal in your choice. Neuroscientists Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen did brain imaging while people consider these two scenarios, and what they found was that the difference pivots on the emotional component of actually touching someone that is interacting with them at a close distance. So if the problem is constructed so that the man on the footbridge can be dropped with the flip of a switch through a trapdoor, many people will vote to let him drop. But there's something about interacting with the person up close that stops most people from pushing the man to his death. Why it's because that sort of personal interaction activates these emotional networks. It changes the problem from an abstract, impersonal math problem into a personal emotional decision. So when people consider the trolley problem, here's what the brain imaging reveals. In the footbridge scenario, where you actually have to push the guy, the brain areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. But in pulling the lever scenario, the only brain errors involved are those involved in rational thinking. People register emotionally when they have to push someone. But if you only have to tip a lever, your brain behaves like mister Spock, who's the vulcan on Star Trek, who's all rationality and no emotion, who says emotions are alien to me. The battle between emotional and rational networks in the brain is nicely illustrated by an old episode of The Twilight Zone, which I saw years ago. Here's how it goes. A stranger in an overcoat shows up at a man's door and proposes a deal. He says, here is a box with a single button on it. All you have to do is press the button, and I will pay you one thousand dollars. The man says, what happens when I press the button? And the stranger says, when you press the button, someone far away, someone you don't even know, will die. So the man suffers over this moral dilemma through the night, and the button box rests on his kitchen table and he stares at it, and he paces around it, and sweat is on his brow, and he's thinking about his desperate financial situation, and finally he lunges to the box and he punches the button and nothing happens. It's quiet, anticlimactic. And suddenly there's a knock at the door, and the stranger in the overcoat is there, and he hands the man the money and he takes the box, and the man says, wait, what happens now, And the stranger says, now, I take the box and I give it to the next person, someone far away, someone you don't even know now. I loved this story because it highlights the ease of impersonally pressing a button. If the man had been asked to attack someone with his hands, he presumably would have declined the offer. In earlier times in our evolution, there wasn't really any way to interact with other people at any distance other than hands and feet are possibly a stick, and that distance of interaction was salient and consequential. And this is what our emotional reaction reflects. But interestingly, as we evolved, the situation began to change. Generals and even soldiers could very commonly find themselves very far removed from the people that they were killing. There's a great line in Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth where a man challenges a nobleman and mocks the fact that the nobleman has never known the danger of the battlefield. The man says, when struckest thou one blow in the field, and the nobleman responds, great men have reaching hands oft? Have I struck those that I never saw? And struck them dead? And this is what happens all the time. In modern warfare, we can launch Tomahawk surface to surface missiles from the deck of Navy ships with the touch of a button. The result of pushing that button is then watched by the missile operator live on CNN. Minutes later when buildings in the enemy's city disappear in plumes, so the proximity is lost, and so is the emotional influence. This impersonal nature of waging war makes it disconcertingly easy. I recently heard an argument between an old time fighter pilot who was lamenting how easy it is for drone pilots to do something, and he's right, But it should also be noted that it's easy when you're thousands of feet in the air. If you watch the footage of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was dropping these ten thousand pound nuclear bombs onto civilian targets, you'll hear the total casualness of the pilot even though each bomb wiped out almost one hundred thousand people, and in fact, the pilot later said quote, I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. Now, I'm not making a judgment about a military pilot's obligation in the middle of a world war. It was a complex issue that is difficult to be understood by a modern audience who hasn't just lived through years of war and is looking for a way to end it. That I am saying saying it's surprising to see how easy it appeared to press the button to open the bomb doors from thirty three thousand feet in the air, as opposed to if the pilot had been sent in to murder one hundred thousand civilians, including women and children, with a knife or with his hands. I assume it would have been a very different experience for him. So, in thinking about these issues about how easy it is to wage war when it's impersonal, one political thinker in the nineteen sixties suggested that the button to launch a nuclear war should be implanted in the chest of the president's closest friend. That way, if the president wants to make the decision to annihilate millions of people on the other side of the globe, he'd first have to physically harm his friend. He'd have to rip open his chest to get at the button that would at least engage his emotional system in the decision making so as to guard against letting the choice be impersonal. Because both of these neural systems battle to control the single output channel of your behavior, emotions can tip the balance of decision making, and this ancient battle has turned into a directive of sorts from many people. If it feels bad, it is probably wrong. Now, there are lots of counter examples to this. For example, you can find yourself put off by a particular choice, but still conclude that it's not morally wrong, like putting your pet down when it gets too old and sick, even though it breaks your heart. Nonetheless, emotion serves as a generally useful steering mechanism for decision making. The emotional systems are evolutionarily quite old, and they're shared with many other species, while the development of the rational system is more recent. But the novelty of the rational system doesn't necessarily indicate that it's by itself superior. Societies would not be better off if everyone were like the vulcan mister Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance, a teaming up of the internal rivals is probably optimal for brains. And that's because the disgust that we feel at pushing the man off the footbridge is critical to social interaction. The impassivity that one feels at pressing a button to launch a Tomahawk missile is probably detrimental to civilization. Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. Or, to put it in another way, a democracy that is split across the aisle maybe just what you want, because a takeover in either direction would almost certainly prove less optimal. The ancient Greeks had an interesting analogy for life that captured this wisdom. The idea was that life is as though you are a charioteer and your chariot is being pulled by two horses. One is the horse of reason and the other is the horse of passion. One horse is always trying to tug you off one side of the road, and the other is trying to pull you off the other side, and your job is to hold on to them tightly and keep them in check so that you can continue down the middle of the road. And that's what we try to do with the brain networks involved in rationality and emotion. So what we've introduced in today's episode is the way in which the brain is a machine built out of conflicting parts. In the next episode, we're going to explore how this team of rivals expresses itself in very particular ways, like how we choose what to buy or how much something should cost. This is the basis of a new type of economics called neuroeconomics, so tune into that to uncover the next juicy bits. That's all for this week. To find out more and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel so you can follow along each week for new updates until next time. This is Inner Cosmos and I'm David Eagleman.

How is your brain like Abraham Lincoln's political cabinet? And why is it easier to do a drone strike on an enemy than to stab them with a bayonet? And what does any of this have to do with Mel Gibson or the Twilight Zone or mister Spock from Star Trek. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and in these next three episodes, we're going to sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. So today we're going to discover that you're not one thing with a single drive, but instead your brain is a team of rivals. It's a machine that's built of conflicting parts. This is going to allow us to understand how we make decisions, which is what we'll focus on in this episode, and in the next episode we'll talk about economic decisions in particular, like how do you choose which ice cream to buy or which car to buy? And finally, we'll talk about how we can leverage this sort of knowledge to optimally navigate our behavior, to make our behavior consistent with our long term thinking rather than the temptations that sit right in front of us. So for now, let's begin with human behavior and why we are all so complicated. So I'm going to start today with a story that I told in my book Incognito, and the story is about that two thousand and six arrest of the actor Mel Gibson. So he was pulled over for speeding. He was going almost twice the posted speed limit on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and the police officer, James Me, gave him a breath liizer test, and what that showed is that Gibson's blood alcohol level was at zero point one two percent, which is very high, well over the legal limit of point eight. And there was also an open bottle of tequila on the seat next to Gibson. So the officer places Gibson under arrest and asks him to get into the squad car, and Gibson goes nuts, and he says Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, and he asks the officer are you a Jew And the officer, James Me, was indeed Jewish. So Gibson refuses to get in the squad car and he has to be handcuffed. So within a day the website TMZ leaks a video of this interaction, and there's this vigorous response from the media and everything gets very heated. So eventually Gibson writes a note of apology, and it reads quote, after drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. So he goes on to say he's ashamed and he disgraced himself, and that he's been battling alcoholism, and he apologizes for his quote unbecoming behavior. But this didn't really land that well because there was no reference at all to the anti Semitic slurs. So Gibson then writes a longer note of apology directed toward the Jewish community, and he says, quote, there is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of antisemitic remark. I want to apologize, specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a dui charge. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God, I have to honor his children. But please, I know from my heart that I am not an anti Semite. I'm not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. So Gibson offered to meet one on one with leaders of the Jewish community to quote discern the appropriate path for healing. So he seemed genuinely apologetic, and Jewish leaders accepted his apology. But here's the question. Are Mel Gibson's true colors that of an anti Semite or are his true colors those he showed afterwards in his eloquent and apparently heartfelt apologies. Well this was a question that got a lot of people arguing. So one journalist wrote in the Washington Post an article that he titled Mel Gibson it wasn't just the tequila talking, and he wrote, quote, well, I'm sorry about his relapse, but I just don't buy the idea that a little tequila, or even a lot of tequila, can somehow turn an unbiased person into a raging anti semite, or a racist, or a homophobe, or a bigot of any kind for that matter. Alcohol removes inhibitions, allowing all kinds of opinions to escape uncensored. But you can't blame alcohol for forming and nurturing those opinions in the first place. Then, the producer of the TV show Scarborough County drank alcohol on the show until he raised his blood alcohol level two point one two percent, which was Gibson's level on that night, and he reported quote, not feeling antisemitic after drinking. So, like a lot of people, the reporter and the producer suspected that the alcohol had loosened Gibson's inhibitions and revealed his true self, and the nature of their suspicion has a long history. An ancient Greek poet had coined a popular phrase which translates to in wine, there is the truth, and this was repeated by the Roman as in Vino veritas. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud makes the same point quote in came wine out went a secret. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic people always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying. Okay, But going back to Mel Gibson, not everyone agreed with the hypothesis that alcohol revealed who he really was. A writer in The National Review argued, quote, the guy was drunk. For Heaven's sake. We all say and do dumb things when we're drunk. If I were to be judged on my drunken escapades and follies, I should be utterly excluded from polite society. And so would you, unless you're some kind of saint. The Jewish conservative activist David Horowitz commented on Fox News, quote, people deserve compassion when they're in this kind of trouble. I think it would be very ungracious for people to deny it to him. There is an addiction psychologist named Alan Marlott who wrote in USA Today alcohol is not a truth serum. It may or may not indicate his true feelings, and Gibson's social circle publicly vouched for him. Earlier in the day before the arrest, Gibson had spent time at the house of his friend Dean Devlin, who was quoted saying, if Mel is an anti Semite, he spends a lot of time with us, which makes no sense. Devlin and his wife are both Jewish. For Devlin, that was proof enough against the arguments of anti Semitism. So which are Gibson's true colors? Those in which he shouts anti Semitic comments or those in which he feels remorse and shame and publicly says I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. Now, many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side. Words, we think that people have a genuine aim and the rest is decoration or evasion or cover up. Now that's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature. And as we're going to see in this episode, we are made of many drives under the hood, many different networks of neurons that sometimes have their own opinions. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, I am large, I contain multitudes. So Gibson's detractors are going to continue to insist that he is truly an anti Semite, and his defenders will continue to insist that he is not. But both may be defending an incomplete story. So let's begin in the nineteen sixties, when the pioneers of artificial intelligence, we're struggling to build simple robotic programs that could manipulate small blocks of wood. So the idea was to identify the blocks and then to grip them, and then to stack them up in simple patterns. And this was one of those apparently simple problems that turns out to be incredibly hard, because for a robot, finding a block of wood requires figuring out which camera pixels correspond to the block and which ones don't, and then you have to recognize the block shape regardless of the angle and the distance of the block. And then you have to grab it, which requires visual guidance of graspers that have to squeeze in at the right moment from the right direction with the right force, and stacking requires an analysis of the rest of the blocks and adjusting to those details. And all these programs need to be coordinated so they happen at the right times in the right sequence. And so what these AI pioneers discovered is that tasks that seem simple are often masking enormous computational complexity. So some decades ago, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky and his colleagues started thinking about this problem and they came up with a really progressive idea. Maybe the robot could solve the problem by distributing the labor among specialized subagents. So imagine small computer programs that could each bite off a small piece of the problem. So one computer program is in charge of the job find, another could solve the Fetch problem. Another takes care of the stack block. And these subagents can be connected in a hierarchy just like a company, and they can report to one another and to their bosses. And because of this hierarchy, stack block would not try to start its job until Find and Fetch had finished their jobs. So they is that these subagents are totally mindless. But when these sub agents come together, the whole system starts to look pretty smart. So this idea of subagents didn't solve the problem entirely, but it helped a lot, and most importantly, it brought into focus a new idea about the working of biological brains. Marvin Minsky suggested that human minds perhaps were collections of enormous numbers of machine like mindless subagents that collaborate. So the key idea is that a bunch of small specialized workers can give rise to something like a society with all kinds of rich properties that no subagent has by itself. Each little guy is just doing some simple thing, but together, when they're connected in the right way, you get something that looks like intelligence. So the suggestion was that and thousands of little minds are better than one large one. And if this sounds weird, just think about how factories work. Each person on the assembly line is specialized. They do one simple job. No one there knows how to do everything, and yet complex products get built out of this. And this is also how government ministries operate. Each bureaucrat has one task or a few very specific tasks, and the government succeeds on its ability to distribute the work appropriately and on larger scales. This is how civilizations operate. They reach the next level of sophistication when they learn to divide labor. They commit some people to specialize in agriculture, and some to art, and some to warfare and so on. This division of labor allows specialization and a deeper level of expertise, so even though no one knows how other jobs work, as an emergent result, you get civilization. So this idea of dividing up problems into smaller subroutines that ignited the young field of artificial intelligence back in the nineteen seventies. Instead of trying to develop a single all purpose program, the scientists changed their goal. Now it was to build a system out of smaller, local expert networks which know how to do one single thing. And in this framework, the larger system only has to switch which of the experts has control at any given moment. The learning challenge now involves not so much how to do each little task, but instead how to distribute who's doing what when. So, as Minsky suggested in his book The Society of Mind, perhaps that's all the human brain has to do as well, and he noted that if brains really do work this way as collections of subagents, we wouldn't have any reason to be aware of the specialized processes. He said, quote thousands and perhaps millions of little processes must be involved in how we anticipate, imagine, plan, predicts, and prevent, and yet all this proceeds so automatically that we regard it as ordinary common sense. At first, it may seem incredible that our minds could use such intricate machinery and yet be unaware of it. When scientists began to look into the brains of animals, Minsky's society of mind idea open up a new way of looking at things. In the early nineteen seventies, researchers realized that a frog has at least two separate ways of seeing motion. One system is looking for small darting objects like a fly, and it directs the tongue, and the other system is looking for large looming objects like a person, and it tells the lef legs to jump. And presumably neither of these systems is conscious. Instead, they're just simple automated programs that are burned down in the circuitry. So the society of mind framework was an important step forward. But despite the initial excitement about it, a collection of experts with divided labor has never proven sufficient to yield the properties of the human brain. It's still the case that our smartest robots are less intelligent than a three year old child. So what went wrong? I suggested in my book Incognito that a critical factor was missing from the division of labor models, and we turn to that now. The missing factor in Minski's theory was competition among the experts who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem. Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict. In an assembly line a government ministry, each worker is an expert in a small task. But in contrast, parties in a democracy hold different opinions about the same issues, and the important part of the process is the battle for steering the ship of state. Brains are like democracies. They're built of multiple overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As the poet while Whitman correctly surmised, we are large, and we harbor multitudes within us, and those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There's an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain. They compete to control the single output channel of your behavior. So as a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, or cussing yourself, or cajoling yourself. These are things that computers simply don't do. So when the hostess at a party offers you chocolate cake, you can find yourself on the horns of a dilemma. Some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar. Other parts of your brain care about the negative consequences, like the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles. Part of you wants the cake, and part of you tries to gather the strength to pass on it. And the final vote of the parliament determines which party controls what you ultimately do. In other words, whether you put your hand up or you put your hand out. In the end, you either eat the chocolate cake or you don't, but you can't do both. Because of these internal multitudes, biological creatures can be conflicted. Now, the term conflicted can't be sensibly applied to an entity that has a single program. Your car can't conflicted about which way to turn. It has one steering wheel commanded by one driver, and it follows directions without complaint. But brains can be of two minds, and often many more than that. We don't know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior. Consider this simple experiment that's been done with laboratory rats. If you put some cheese at the end of a little corridor, the rat will go towards the cheese, and you can hook up a little harness to feel how strongly he's pulling towards that. Now, let's say instead of the cheese, you put an electrical shock. Now the rat moves away from the electrical shock, and with the harness you can measure the force. Okay, Now you put both cheese and the electrical shock at the end of the hallway. And what the rat does is he begins to approach, but with draws, and he finds the courage to approach again. And what happens is he oscillates conflicted, and it's exactly at the distance where the two forces cancel out. In other words, he's going towards a thing, and he's pulling away from the thing, and both programs are running at once. The pull matches the push. The poor rat has two pairs of paws on its steering wheel, each pulling in opposite directions, and as a result, he can't get anywhere. So brains, whether rat or human, are machines made of conflicting parts. If building a contraption with internal division seems strange, just consider that we already build social machines like this. Think of a jury of peers in a courtroom trial. You have twelve strangers with different opinions, and they're tasked with this single mission of coming to a consensus. So the jurors argue and cox and the influence, and eventually the group coheres to a single decision, having differing opinions. It's not a drawback to the jury system. It is the central feature. When the President Abraham Lincoln was putting together his presidential cabinet, he chose to put in adversaries. The historian Doris Kern's Goodwin described his cabinet as a team of rivals, and we see this kind of team of rivals all the time. In Zimbabwe some years ago, the president Robert Mugabe agreed to share power with a rival that he had earlier tried to assassinate. And in China in two thousand and nine, the President Hu Jintao named two opposing faction leaders to help him craft China's future. I proposed in incognito that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals, and the rest of this episode and the next two are going to explore that framework. Who the parties are, how they compete, how the union is held together, what happens when things fall apart. How this framework allows us to understand what products we buy and how we can use this understanding of the team of rivals to better navigate our own behavior into the future. As we move along, remember that different political parties typically have the same goal, which is success for their country, but they just have different ways of going about it. So, as Lincoln put it, rivals should be turned into allies quote for the sake of the greater good and for networks. In your brain neural subpopulations, the common interest is the thriving and survival of you the organism. In the same way that liberals and conservatives both love their country but can have different strategies for steering it. It's the same way in the brain you have competing factions that all believe they know the right way to solve problems. When trying to understand the strange details of human behavior, psychologists or economists sometimes refer to a dual process account, and you'll know this, for example, if you've read Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. In that framework, the brain has two separate systems. One is fast and automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness, and the other system is slow and cognitive and conscious, and these two systems are always battling it out. Now, this is a very good start to thinking about it, but there's no real reason to assume that there are only two systems. In fact, as we're going to see, there are many systems, and there are also different ways to think about how to divide things up. So in nineteen twenty, Sigmund Freud suggested three competing parts in his model of the psyche. There was the id, the ego, and the superego. The id was all about instinct, the ego was realistic and organized, and the super ego was critical and moralizing. In the nineteen fifties, the neuroscientist Paul MacLean suggested that the brain is made of three layers that represent successive stages of evolutionary development. There's the reptilian brain, which is involved in survival behaviors, and the limbic system, which underlies the emotions. And in higher animals, there's the neo core text, which is used in higher order thinking. Now, the details of both Freud's model and Maclean's model have largely fallen out of favor, but the heart of the idea survives, which is that brains are made of competing subsystems. I'll start with a simple model of competition as a starting point because it captures one way to see this picture, but by the next episode we'll see that it's even more sophisticated than that. So we'll start with a general statement about the brain's anatomy, which is that some areas of your brain are involved in higher order operations regarding events in the outside world. For the cognitionandy, this area is like the dorsilateral prefrontal core text, which is on the surface of your brain, just inside your temples, so those are monitoring and assessing the outside world, while other areas are involved with monitoring your internal state, like your level of hunger, or your sense of motivation, or whether something is rewarding to you. And this includes areas like the region just behind your forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex, in several areas deep below the surface, so these monitor what's going on on the inside. Now, again, the real situation is even more complex than this rough division would imply, because brains do a lot more than just monitor the outside and the inside. Your brain also simulates future states and reminisces about the past and figures out where to find things not immediately present, and so on. We'll get into that, but for the moment, this division into systems that monitor the outside and the inside will serve as a rough guide, and we can refine this picture later. Now to pick two labels that'll be familiar to everyone. We can call these the rational and the emotional systems. Are a little underspecified and imperfect, but they carry this starting point about rivalries in the brain. The rational system is the one that cares about analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state and worries whether things will be good or bad. In other words, as a rough guide, rational cognition involves external events, while emotion involves your internal state. So you can do a math problem without consulting your internal state, but you have to consult your internal state to order a dessert off the menu, or to prioritize what you feel like doing next. The emotional networks are absolutely required to rank your possible next actions in the world. If you were an emotionless robot who rolled into a room, you might be able to analyze this stuff around you, but you would be frozen with indecision about what to do next. Choices about the priority of actions are determined by our internal states. When you get home, will you head straight to your refrigerator or the bathroom or the bedroom. That doesn't depend on the external stimuli in your home because those haven't changed, but instead on your body's internal states. So the battle between the rational and the emotional systems can be brought to light by what philosophers call the trolley dilemma. Here's the scenario. A trolley is barreling down the train tracks. It's going out of control, and five workers are making repairs way down the track, and you, a bystander, realize that they're all going to get killed by this trolley. But you also notice that there's a lever nearby that you can throw, and that will divert the trolley down a different track where there's a single worker who will be killed. So what do you do? Do you throw the lever or not? If you're like most people, you have no hesitation about throwing the lever because it's far better than only one person gets killed than five people. Right, Okay, so that's a good choice. But there's a second version. Of the trolley problem that presents an interesting twist. Imagine that the same trolley is barreling down the tracks. The same five workers are gonna get killed, but this time you're a bystander on a footbridge that goes over the tracks, and you notice that there's an obese man standing on the footbridge, and you realize that if you push him off the bridge, his bulk will be sufficient to stop the train and save the five workers. Do you push the man off? If you're like most people, you bristle at this suggestion of murdering an innocent person. But here's the thing. What differentiates this from your previous choice. Aren't you trading one life for five lives? In both versions of the dilemma? Doesn't the math work out the same way? So what is the difference in these two cases. Philosophers propose that the difference lies in how people are being used. In the first scenario, you're simply reducing a bad situation, the death of five people, to a less bad situation, the death of one person. In the case of the man on the bridge, he is being exploited as a means to an end. So that's a popular explanation in the philosophy literature, but there's also a more brain based approach to understanding this reversal in your choice. Neuroscientists Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen did brain imaging while people consider these two scenarios, and what they found was that the difference pivots on the emotional component of actually touching someone that is interacting with them at a close distance. So if the problem is constructed so that the man on the footbridge can be dropped with the flip of a switch through a trapdoor, many people will vote to let him drop. But there's something about interacting with the person up close that stops most people from pushing the man to his death. Why it's because that sort of personal interaction activates these emotional networks. It changes the problem from an abstract, impersonal math problem into a personal emotional decision. So when people consider the trolley problem, here's what the brain imaging reveals. In the footbridge scenario, where you actually have to push the guy, the brain areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. But in pulling the lever scenario, the only brain errors involved are those involved in rational thinking. People register emotionally when they have to push someone. But if you only have to tip a lever, your brain behaves like mister Spock, who's the vulcan on Star Trek, who's all rationality and no emotion, who says emotions are alien to me. The battle between emotional and rational networks in the brain is nicely illustrated by an old episode of The Twilight Zone, which I saw years ago. Here's how it goes. A stranger in an overcoat shows up at a man's door and proposes a deal. He says, here is a box with a single button on it. All you have to do is press the button, and I will pay you one thousand dollars. The man says, what happens when I press the button? And the stranger says, when you press the button, someone far away, someone you don't even know, will die. So the man suffers over this moral dilemma through the night, and the button box rests on his kitchen table and he stares at it, and he paces around it, and sweat is on his brow, and he's thinking about his desperate financial situation, and finally he lunges to the box and he punches the button and nothing happens. It's quiet, anticlimactic. And suddenly there's a knock at the door, and the stranger in the overcoat is there, and he hands the man the money and he takes the box, and the man says, wait, what happens now, And the stranger says, now, I take the box and I give it to the next person, someone far away, someone you don't even know now. I loved this story because it highlights the ease of impersonally pressing a button. If the man had been asked to attack someone with his hands, he presumably would have declined the offer. In earlier times in our evolution, there wasn't really any way to interact with other people at any distance other than hands and feet are possibly a stick, and that distance of interaction was salient and consequential. And this is what our emotional reaction reflects. But interestingly, as we evolved, the situation began to change. Generals and even soldiers could very commonly find themselves very far removed from the people that they were killing. There's a great line in Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth where a man challenges a nobleman and mocks the fact that the nobleman has never known the danger of the battlefield. The man says, when struckest thou one blow in the field, and the nobleman responds, great men have reaching hands oft? Have I struck those that I never saw? And struck them dead? And this is what happens all the time. In modern warfare, we can launch Tomahawk surface to surface missiles from the deck of Navy ships with the touch of a button. The result of pushing that button is then watched by the missile operator live on CNN. Minutes later when buildings in the enemy's city disappear in plumes, so the proximity is lost, and so is the emotional influence. This impersonal nature of waging war makes it disconcertingly easy. I recently heard an argument between an old time fighter pilot who was lamenting how easy it is for drone pilots to do something, and he's right, But it should also be noted that it's easy when you're thousands of feet in the air. If you watch the footage of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was dropping these ten thousand pound nuclear bombs onto civilian targets, you'll hear the total casualness of the pilot even though each bomb wiped out almost one hundred thousand people, and in fact, the pilot later said quote, I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. Now, I'm not making a judgment about a military pilot's obligation in the middle of a world war. It was a complex issue that is difficult to be understood by a modern audience who hasn't just lived through years of war and is looking for a way to end it. That I am saying saying it's surprising to see how easy it appeared to press the button to open the bomb doors from thirty three thousand feet in the air, as opposed to if the pilot had been sent in to murder one hundred thousand civilians, including women and children, with a knife or with his hands. I assume it would have been a very different experience for him. So, in thinking about these issues about how easy it is to wage war when it's impersonal, one political thinker in the nineteen sixties suggested that the button to launch a nuclear war should be implanted in the chest of the president's closest friend. That way, if the president wants to make the decision to annihilate millions of people on the other side of the globe, he'd first have to physically harm his friend. He'd have to rip open his chest to get at the button that would at least engage his emotional system in the decision making so as to guard against letting the choice be impersonal. Because both of these neural systems battle to control the single output channel of your behavior, emotions can tip the balance of decision making, and this ancient battle has turned into a directive of sorts from many people. If it feels bad, it is probably wrong. Now, there are lots of counter examples to this. For example, you can find yourself put off by a particular choice, but still conclude that it's not morally wrong, like putting your pet down when it gets too old and sick, even though it breaks your heart. Nonetheless, emotion serves as a generally useful steering mechanism for decision making. The emotional systems are evolutionarily quite old, and they're shared with many other species, while the development of the rational system is more recent. But the novelty of the rational system doesn't necessarily indicate that it's by itself superior. Societies would not be better off if everyone were like the vulcan mister Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance, a teaming up of the internal rivals is probably optimal for brains. And that's because the disgust that we feel at pushing the man off the footbridge is critical to social interaction. The impassivity that one feels at pressing a button to launch a Tomahawk missile is probably detrimental to civilization. Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. Or, to put it in another way, a democracy that is split across the aisle maybe just what you want, because a takeover in either direction would almost certainly prove less optimal. The ancient Greeks had an interesting analogy for life that captured this wisdom. The idea was that life is as though you are a charioteer and your chariot is being pulled by two horses. One is the horse of reason and the other is the horse of passion. One horse is always trying to tug you off one side of the road, and the other is trying to pull you off the other side, and your job is to hold on to them tightly and keep them in check so that you can continue down the middle of the road. And that's what we try to do with the brain networks involved in rationality and emotion. So what we've introduced in today's episode is the way in which the brain is a machine built out of conflicting parts. In the next episode, we're going to explore how this team of rivals expresses itself in very particular ways, like how we choose what to buy or how much something should cost. This is the basis of a new type of economics called neuroeconomics, so tune into that to uncover the next juicy bits. That's all for this week. To find out more and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel so you can follow along each week for new updates until next time. This is Inner Cosmos and I'm David Eagleman.