How do brains time travel?

We all know what a prediction is, but why is the important thing to the brain, what's called

a prediction error?

And what does any of this have to do with the 2008 crash of the economy, or how we keep

internal price tags on everything, or what we should do with the war on drugs.

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 is part two about decision-making.

So let's quickly summarize last week's episode to get ourselves back up to speed.

In that episode, we saw how the brain is a sophisticated decision-making machine.

It's constantly engaged in choosing among options.

Now, this can be something trivial, like deciding between a taco and a burrito, all the way to life-altering decisions,

like whether to take that job or whether to propose marriage. Now, while early economists assumed

that humans make decisions rationally by weighing pros and cons to arrive at the optimal choice,

modern-day psychology and neuroscience

reveals a pretty different story.

And what we saw last week,

and something I've talked about before here a lot,

is that the brain is composed of multiple networks,

each with its own goals and desires,

and these often compete with one another to influence the decisions that we

make. And this internal conflict is at the heart of how we navigate the world. And by the way,

...