Dr. David Eagleman

You are conflicted.

This is what makes humans so interesting is that we have all these voices trying to drive us to different conclusions about our behavior.

So the way that your ship of state moves depends on the vote of the neural parliament at any time.

So understanding this, I think, is really critical to navigating our own lives because all of us do things where retrospectively we regret it.

We say, oh, I shouldn't have eaten that whole bag of chips or done the alcohol or the drugs or whatever.

Everybody has regrets all the time with things.

And it's because you have different voices in charge at different times.

Part of what this leads to is what we call the Ulysses Contract.

So a Ulysses contract is where you do something now to prevent yourself from behaving badly in the near future.

Just as an example, you know, when people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they're told is clear all the alcohol out of the house.

Because even if you feel like, look, I'm in a moment of sober reflection, I don't want to ever drink again.

If you have alcohol in the house, you're going to bust into that cabinet at some point on a festive Saturday night or something.

lonely sunday night or whatever so what you do is you constrain your future behavior by setting things up in the right way so your future uh the future you can't behave badly we naively think okay well i know who i am i'm just one person but but you're not and under different circumstances you're tempted by different things and you'll do different kinds of behavior

So having a sense of what's going on under the hood gives us an opportunity to be more closely aligned with the kind of person we would like to be.

Well, but that tussling with himself implies different political parties that are all battling it out.

You know, when you look at a parliament, you've got all these political parties that all love their country.

They just have different ideas of how to steer it.

And this is what's going on in the brain all the time.

So what does one do about that?

How do I make, do I have to make a Lysias contract?