So you're committed to being healthy and in shape, and then someone offers you a cupcake

and you take it and you hold it in your hand and you know that part of you doesn't want to eat

it, but then you take a bite and then another

bite. Now, from the brain's point of view, why did you do that? Because you know you didn't want to do

that, but obviously some part of you did want to do that. So we see this kind of thing all the time.

You don't want to give into some craving that maybe has

been costly to you, whether that's cupcakes or alcohol or social media scrolling or drugs or

gambling or whatever. And then you find yourself in a situation where a temptation is available

and you take it and you later suffer regret and you get mad at yourself

or you cuss at yourself who is talking with whom when you argue with yourself like this

the weird part is that it's all you so we're going to unpack this today because we all have

goals and we all face temptations so what exactly is happening under the hood in the

brain when we act in a manner that is not in accordance with who we want to be? I mean, computers don't have

these problems. They make their calculations and boom, they're done. But being human is tough. So once we

understand what's happening under the hood, we'll see how it becomes just a little easier to steer

the ship. In the last two episodes, we talked about all the systems battling it out under the

surface in your brain. And today we're going to talk about the gap between what you intend to do in some situation

and what you actually do when the temptation is there.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford in California. And on this podcast, we journey deep into the beautiful and complex three-pound universe that underpins your perceptions and your behavior.

We see. and your behavior. We saw in the previous episodes that we typically have little to know awareness about the factors

that influence our choices.

...