Winning the Battle Against Yourself
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the fall of 1999, a new film debuted in just 25 theaters across the United States. Its name was Being John Malkovich. The premise was outlandish. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer named Craig finds a small, hidden door at the office where he works. When he crawls inside, he goes through a strange portal and ends up inside the mind of the actor, John Malkovich. For 15 minutes or so, he gets to inhabit the actor's body before being spit out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Things only get more wacky from there. Craig and a co-worker start charging people to go through the portal. And soon, plenty of people have had the experience of being John Malkovich.
When John Malkovich, the real John Malkovich, inevitably learns about this, he is determined to go through the portal himself. When he does so, he enters a world where everyone has his face and can only say one word. The movie is thought-provoking and has long been one of my favorites. That might be because it is a metaphor for a central idea that we explore on this show. We like to think that we are in charge of our own minds. We decide what we are going to think and what we are going to do. We decide what to cook for dinner, where to go on vacation, and whom to marry. But it turns out that there are a vast number of unconscious mental processes that direct much of how we think and act. Often, we are unaware of these hidden puppeteers.
They make us say and do things that we haven't consciously chosen ourselves. Sadly, there's no way to spit these puppeteers out on the side of the New Jersey turnpike.
It's my head, Schwartz! It's my head!
This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds often conspire against our best interests, and how we can regain some control over the puppet masters pulling at our strings.
Where there's a will, there's a way. Most of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet something odd and discouraging often happens when we set out to lose weight, or exercise more, or save money. Somehow, we end up polishing off that pint of ice cream in the freezer or skipping our session at the gym or once again spending more than our budget allows. It's not what we set out to do, but it seems as if we are not the ones in charge. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how we make choices and how we can initiate change in our lives. Emily Falk, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Emily, I understand that you recently made a promise to yourself about what you would eat at a graduation ceremony that featured many desserts at the buffet. What was the promise you made to yourself?
Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many desserts that looked delicious. And I was very curious, so I wanted to try all of them. But I knew, of course, that if I ate many different desserts, I would not feel amazing afterwards. So I decided that I was going to get one of each of them, try each one, and then eat the full thing from the one I liked the best. I went and I sat down and I did try each of them and it turned out that they were delicious. I was also in a ceremony that was about an hour long and they were just there in front of me. And so in the moment, it went well in the sense that I had many desserts in front of me and a lot of time. So I ate them and that was really fun for a little while until it wasn't.
When Emily got home, she swore to her partner, Brett, that she was only going to eat healthy foods the rest of the day.
Oh, man. Well, I went and I lay down on the couch and I said, I am so sugared up. I am not going to eat any more sugar today.
And what happened?
A little embarrassed to tell you what happened. What happened was that evening we went out to dinner with my grandma Bev and there's a diner in her building called Little Pete's. And we went there and had what my kids considered to be probably the ideal meal, including things like, you know, a griddled grilled cheese and waffles and things that you get at a diner.
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