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All of us do things where retrospectively we regret it. We say, "Oh, I shouldn't have eaten that whole
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bag of chips." or done the, you know, the alcohol or the drugs or whatever.
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Like everybody has regrets all the time with things. And it's because you have
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different voices in charge at different times. We often think of ourselves as individuals, meaning not divisible into
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other things. But really you are a team of rivals. In the brain, you've got 86
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billion cells called neurons, and these are communicating with each other at a blindingly fast rate. Many of these
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cells are hooked up in networks. So, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives making
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different suggestions to you. The thing is, you can actually get competing networks. So, for example, Stephen, if I
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drop some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat it as a good energy source. Part
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of your brain says, "Don't eat it. I'll gain weight." Part of your brain says,
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"Okay, I'll eat one, but I'll go to the gym tonight." The point is you are
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arguing with yourself. You are conflicted. This is what makes humans so interesting is that we have all these
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voices trying to drive us to different conclusions about our behavior. So, the way that your ship of state moves
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depends on the vote of the neural parliament at any time. Understanding this, I think, is really critical to
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navigating our own lives because part of what this leads to is what we call the Ulysses contract.
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So, a Ulysses contract is where you do something now to prevent yourself from behaving badly in the near future. When
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people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they're told is clear all
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the alcohol out of the house. Cuz even if you feel like, look, I'm in a moment
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of sober reflection, I don't want to ever drink again. If you have alcohol in
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the house, you're going to bust into that cabinet at some point on a festive
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Saturday night or lonely Sunday night or whatever. You constrain your future behavior by
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setting things up in the right way. So, your future you can't behave badly. We
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naively think, "Okay, well, I know who I am. I'm just one person." But but you're
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not. And under different circumstances, you're tempted by different things, and
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you'll do different kinds of behavior. Having a sense of what's going on under
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the hood gives us an opportunity to be more closely aligned with the kind of person we would like to be.