How is your brain like a team of rivals?

Would you kill one person to save the lives of five others? Why do you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma when someone offers you a chocolate cake? How can you believe different things at once? Find out what’s running under the hood in this first episode of a three-parter about our decision making — and how a little knowledge of neuroscience can allow us to make better decisions.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

Minsky, Marvin (1986). The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Eagleman, David (2011). Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon Books.

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer