How is your brain like Abraham Lincoln's political cabinet?

And why is it easier to do a drone strike on an enemy than to stab them with a bayonet?

And what does any of this have to do with Mel Gibson or the Twilight Zone or Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University.

And in these next three episodes, we're going to sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

So today we're going to discover that you're not one thing with a single drive, but instead

your brain is a team of rivals.

It's a machine that's built of conflicting parts.

This is going to allow us to understand how we make decisions, which is what we'll focus on

in this episode.

And in the next episode, we'll talk about economic decisions in particular,

like how do you choose which ice cream to buy or which car to buy? And finally, we'll talk about

how we can leverage this sort of knowledge to optimally navigate our behavior, to make

our behavior consistent with our long-term thinking rather than

the temptations that sit right in front of us. So for now, let's begin with human behavior

and why we are all so complicated. So I'm going to start today with a story that I told in my

book Incognito. And the story is about

that 2006 arrest of the actor Mel Gibson. So he was pulled over for speeding. He was going

almost twice the posted speed limit on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. And the police officer,

James Me, gave him a breathalyzer test.

...