This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Our brains don't just help us survive.

They help us advance economically and socially and yet we don't understand our

own motives as well as we would like to believe. In Robin Hansen's book The

Elephant in the Brain, he discusses the ways in which our primate brains don't just get the better of us but also change

key institutions that mediate our lives.

In most areas of human behavior, including school and medicine and conversation and research and politics.

We have a story we tell you about and tell anybody about what we're doing in that area,

why we're there.

We go to school to learn the material, we go to the doctor to get healthy we get

involved in politics to make the world better these are our standard

stories and we believe them and most policy analysis takes them at their word, assumes that these stories are right.

And the theme of our book, with myself and Kevin Simler, the elephant in the brain, is that most of these stories

are wrong, at least to a large degree.

You, the excuse that your dog ate your homework only works because sometimes your dog really does eat your homework,

but it's an excuse because mostly it's not true.

Similarly, even though sometimes we go to the doctor to get well or go to school to learn the

material, it's true a lot less than we admit.

And so our book is about, what are our motives that is the motives we'd less like to admit that explain a larger fraction of our behavior than we'd like to admit.

So when you talk about motives, do you mean motives that we are aware of ourselves?

We're talking about the explanation for our behavior, the thing that makes sense of a lot of the details.

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