Dr. David Eagleman

Part of your brain says, don't eat it.

You know, I want to stay fit.

And so part of your brain says, okay, maybe I'll eat part of it, but I'll go to the gym later.

Or, you know, I promised my girlfriend that I'll go do this thing.

Like,

We've got all these voices.

You can cuss at yourself.

You can cajole yourself.

You can contract with yourself.

And the question is, who's talking to whom?

It's all you, but it's parts of you that have these different tribes.

Now, the part that's really amazing about us is we've got lots of short-term tribes, but we also have this capacity to look into the future and think about who we want to be.

And that is essentially subserved by our prefrontal cortex, which, as we mentioned earlier, is something that is, you know,

The size of it is unique to humans.

All of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom don't have a prefrontal cortex that's a fraction of what we have.

That's what allows us to unhook from the here and now.

Okay.

Now, here's the thing.

I have been fascinated by this for a long time about how we –

sometimes know, okay, my future self is going to act badly in this situation.