When you're trying to choose which ice cream flavor to get, what's actually happening in your brain?

How do you decide?

It seems pretty easy, but that's only if you don't see the storms of activity lighting up the brain.

And how do you make long-term decisions, like that you're not going to eat the ice cream

at all, but instead you're going to eat some broccoli?

And what does any of this have to do with the ancient Greeks or what alien hand syndrome is?

Or what the rules should be around how the president can launch the nuclear bomb.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we dive deeply into our

three-pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Today's episode and next week's is about decision-making.

Although you generally feel like you're just moving through a day,

decision-making lies at the heart of

everything we do. The complexity of the world presents itself to us, and we are constantly

weighing alternatives. If you couldn't do that, you couldn't navigate the now, and you couldn't

plan out your future. So by having a richer understanding of how

choices battle it out in the brain, we can learn how to make better decisions for ourselves.

And as we're going to see next week, because this is a two-parter, we'll even see how we can

use this to build a better criminal justice system. So let's start at the very beginning.

Should you choose the taco or the burrito?

Should you go for that t-shirt or a more formal shirt?

Should you take care of this email first or that bill payment first?

...