Eric Oliver

And our animal brains love certainty.

Because certainty is how we can make quick and efficient decisions and predictions.

And so we will glom on to anything that gives us a taste of certainty because if we don't have certainty, we oftentimes experience a lot of anxiety.

And anxiety is a very uncomfortable place to live in.

So rather than...

coexist with the anxiety of uncertainty, we will immediately glom onto a scapegoat or some quick or easy explanation for something, oftentimes at the expense of the more complicated reality underneath it.

That's right.

And part of our task, if we want to live better, and I think this is what Mrs. Malone, my English teacher, was actually trying to communicate to us, is becoming aware of these different self-processes.

and not letting one or the other necessarily dominate us so much, but listening to them and recognizing them and seeing what they're up to.

So I was talking earlier about the egoistic self.

It's the part of our psychology that is trying to make its way and help us make our way through our social worlds.

And here's the funny thing about the egoistic self.

It doesn't lend itself to science that well, scientific inquiry that well.

We don't know where in the brain the ego really resides.

We don't know about all its constituent parts.

And funnily enough, the way we know about this egoistic self is through our stories.

So if you think about like when you go to therapy, for example, what do you do?

You tell your therapist your stories, the stories of your day, the stories of your life.

And you interpret those stories.

And that's how you begin to dissect and understand this egoistic self.