When you make a choice, who exactly is doing the choosing?

Is there someone in your head, but it's not you?

What is a chicken sexer, and what do they have to do with British plane spotters during World War II?

Do we have free will or don't we? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,

David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and one of my big interests has always been

understanding all the stuff we do that we don't have access to why we did it or the stuff we believe is true,

but we don't have access to why we believe it.

So this is going to be a two-parter. In today's episode, I'm going to dive into all the things

that your brain is doing around the

clock that the conscious you has no insight into and really no acquaintance with.

All this activity that lives within what we call the unconscious brain.

You're only conscious of a tiny bit of what's happening under the hood.

So today we're going to see how all this unconscious activity drives so much more of your life

than you would have imagined. And then in the next episode, I'll talk about what all this means

for our legal system. If your behavior and your choices are driven by

parts of your brain that you have little or no control over, what does that mean if you commit a

crime? Can you help that you did it? Did you have a choice? Or does your brain get formed by your genetics and your childhood experience,

neither of which you had any choice over? So what does that all mean for the notion of fault

and blameworthiness in our legal system? What would that mean for our courts? Because you can't

just let everyone off the hook, even if they didn't have a choice and who they are, right? So next week we'll dive into what happens at the intersection

of neuroscience and the legal system and how we can build a system moving forward that gets bad

actors off the street and is compatible with insights of modern neuroscience.

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