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How much control do we really have over our own minds?

Most of the time, it seems like we're in charge. Like when we decide how to respond to a text or what to eat for dinner tonight.

That's us calling the shots, right?

And yet, two of the most influential psychologists in the last century or so, Sigmund Freud and BF Skinner, both say that we don't have nearly as much control as we think we do.

For Freud, the most important parts of our own psychology are mostly inaccessible to us, locked up in the unconscious.

And Skinner thought that we're just reacting to external stimuli, no different than a rat in a lab.

So even though Freud and Skinner had very different models of the mind, you don't find a ton of freedom in either of them.

And even just thinking about our own experience, we can be influenced by the power of suggestion or led by unconscious biases or just duped by false memories.

So if we're not even fully in control of our minds, then how can we ever hope to understand ourselves?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Grey Area.

My guest today is Paul Blum. He's a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, and he's got a new book out called Psych, The Story of the Human Mind.

The book is really a compressed version of the super popular intro to psychology course that he taught at Yale for years.

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