What did this have to do with competing systems in the brain? Subprime mortgage offers were perfectly optimized to take advantage of the I-want-it-now system: buy this beautiful house now with very low payments, impress your friends and parents, live more comfortably than you thought you could. At some point the interest rate on your adjustable-rate mortgage will go up, but that’s a long way away, hidden in the mists of the future. By plugging directly into these instant-gratification circuits, the lenders were able to almost tank the American economy. As the economist Robert Shiller noted in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, speculative bubbles are caused by “contagious optimism, seemingly impervious to facts, that often takes hold when prices are rising. Bubbles are primarily social phenomena; until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming.”19
When you begin to look for examples of I-want-it-now deals, you’ll see them everywhere. I recently met a man who accepted $500 while he was a college student in exchange for signing his body away to a university medical school after he dies. The students who accepted the deal all received ankle tattoos that tell the hospital, decades from now, where their bodies should be delivered. It’s an easy sell for the school: $500 now feels good, while death is inconceivably distant. There is nothing wrong with donating one’s body, but this serves to illustrate the archetypical dual-process conflict, the proverbial deal with the Devil: your wishes granted now for your soul in the distant future.
These sorts of neural battles often lie behind marital infidelity. Spouses make promises in a moment of heartfelt love, but later can find themselves in a situation in which present temptations tip their decision making the other way. In November 1995, Bill Clinton’s brain decided that risking the future leadership of the free world was counterbalanced by the pleasure he had the opportunity to experience with the winsome Monica in the present moment.
So when we talk about a virtuous person, we do not necessarily mean someone who is not tempted but, instead, someone who is able to resist that temptation. We mean someone who does not let that battle tip to the side of instant gratification. We value such people because it is easy to yield to impulses, and inordinately difficult to ignore them. Sigmund Freud noted that arguments stemming from the intellect or from morality are weak when pitted against human passions and desires,20 which is why campaigns to “just say no” or practice abstinence will never work. It has also been proposed that this imbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull. Indeed, the Soviet attempts to squelch religion were only partially successful, and no sooner had the government collapsed than the religious ceremonies sprang richly back to life.
The observation that people are made of conflicting short- and long-term desires is not a new one. Ancient Jewish writings proposed that the body is composed of two interacting parts: a body (guf), which always wants things now, and a soul (nefesh), which maintains a longer-term view. Similarly, Germans use a fanciful expression for a person trying to delay gratification: he must overcome his innerer schweinehund—which translates, sometimes to the puzzlement of English speakers, as “inner pigdog.”
Your behavior—what you do in the world—is simply the end result of the battles. But the story gets better, because the different parties in the brain can learn about their interactions with one another. As a result, the situation quickly surpasses simple arm wrestling between short- and long-term desires and enters the realm of a surprisingly sophisticated process of negotiation.
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE ULYSSES
In 1909, Merkel Landis, treasurer of the Carlisle Trust Company in Pennsylvania, went on a long walk and was struck with a new financial idea. He would start something called a Christmas club. Customers would deposit money with the bank throughout the year, and there would be a fee if they withdrew their money early. Then, at the end of the year, people could access their money just in time for holiday shopping. If the idea worked, the bank would have plenty of capital to reinvest and profit from all year. But would it work? Would people willingly give up their capital all year for little or no interest?
Landis tried it, and the concept immediately caught fire. That year, almost four hundred patrons of the bank socked away an average of $28 each—quite a bit of money in the early 1900s. Landis and the other bankers couldn’t believe their luck. Patrons wanted them to hold on to their money.
The popularity of Christmas banking clubs grew quickly, and banks soon found themselves battling each other for the holiday nest egg business. Newspapers exhorted parents to enroll their children in Christmas clubs “to develop self-reliance and the saving habit.”21 By the 1920s, several banks, including the Dime Saving Bank of Toledo, Ohio, and the Atlantic Country Trust Co. in Atlantic City, New Jersey, began manufacturing attractive brass Christmas club tokens to entice new customers.22 (The Atlantic City tokens read, “Join our Christmas Club and Have Money When You Need It Most.”)
But why did Christmas clubs catch on? If the depositors controlled their own money throughout the year, they could earn better interest or invest in emerging opportunities. Any economist would advise them to hold on to their own capital. So why would people willingly ask a bank to take away their money, especially in the face of restrictions and early withdrawal fees? The answer is obvious: people wanted someone to stop them from spending their money. They knew that if they held on to their own money, they were likely to blow it.23
For this same reason, people commonly use the Internal Revenue Service as an ersatz Christmas club: by claiming fewer deductions on their paychecks, they allow the IRS to keep more of their money during the year. Then, come next April, they receive the joy of a check in the mailbox. It feels like free money—but of course it’s only your own. And the government got to earn interest on it instead of you. Nonetheless, people choose this route when they intuit that the extra money will burn a hole in their pocket during the year. They’d rather grant someone else the responsibility to protect them from impulsive decisions.
Why don’t people take control of their own behavior and enjoy the opportunities of commanding their own capital? To understand the popularity of the Christmas club and IRS phenomena, we need to step back three millennia to the king of Ithaca and a hero of the Trojan War, Ulysses.
After the war, Ulysses was on a protracted sea voyage back to his home island of Ithaca when he realized he had a rare opportunity in front of him. His ship would be passing the island of Sirenum scopuli, where the beautiful Sirens sang melodies so alluring they beggared the human mind. The problem was that sailors who heard this music steered toward the tricky maidens, and their ships were dashed into the unforgiving rocks, drowning all aboard.
So Ulysses hatched a plan. He knew that when he heard the music, he would be as unable to resist as any other mortal man, so he came up with an idea to deal with his future self. Not the present, rational Ulysses, but the future, crazed Ulysses. He ordered his men to lash him to the mast of the ship and tie him there securely. This way he would be unable to move when the music wafted over the bow of the ship. Then he had them fill their ears with beeswax so they could not be seduced by the voices of the Sirens—or hear his crazed commands. He made it clear to them that they should not respond to his entreaties and should not release him until the ship was well past the Sirens. He surmised that he would be screaming, yelling, cursing, trying to force the men to steer toward the mellifluous women—he knew that this future Ulysses would be in no position to make good decisions. Therefore, the Ulysses of sound mind structured things in such a way as to prevent himself from doing something foolish when they passed the upcoming island. It was a deal struck between the present Ulysses and the future one.
This myth highlights the way in which minds can develop a meta-knowledge about how the short- and long-term parties interact. The amazing consequence is
that minds can negotiate with different time points of themselves.24
So imagine the hostess pressing the chocolate cake upon you. Some parts of your brain want that glucose, while others parts care about your diet; some parts look at the short-term gain, other parts at long-term strategy. The battle tips toward your emotions and you decide to dig in. But not without a contract: you’ll eat it only if you promise to go to the gym tomorrow. Who’s negotiating with whom? Aren’t both parties in the negotiation you?
Freely made decisions that bind you in the future are what philosophers call a Ulysses contract.25 As a concrete example, one of the first steps in breaking an alcohol addiction is to ensure, during sober reflection, that there is no alcohol in the house. The temptation will simply be too great after a stressful workday or on a festive Saturday or a lonely Sunday.
People make Ulysses contracts all the time, and this explains the immediate and lasting success of Merkel Landis’s Christmas club. When people handed over their capital in April, they were acting with a wary eye toward their October selves, who they knew would be tempted to blow the money on something selfish instead of deferring to their generous, gift-giving December selves.
Many arrangements have evolved to allow people to proactively bind the options of their future selves. Consider the existence of websites that help you lose weight by negotiating a business deal with your future self. Here’s how it works: you pay a deposit of $100 with the promise that you will lose ten pounds. If you succeed by the promised time, you get all the money back. If you don’t lose the weight by that time, the company keeps the money. These arrangements work on the honor system and could easily be cheated, but nonetheless these companies are profiting. Why? Because people understand that as they come closer to the date when they can win back their money, their emotional systems will care more and more about it. They are pitting short- and long-term systems against each other.*
Ulysses contracts often arise in the context of medical decision making. When a person in good health signs an advance medical directive to pull the plug in the event of a coma, he is binding himself in a contract with a possible future self—even though it is arguable that the two selves (in health and in sickness) are quite different.
An interesting twist on the Ulysses contract comes about when someone else steps in to make a decision for you—and binds your present self in deference to your future self. These situations arise commonly in hospitals, when a patient, having just experienced a traumatic life change, such as losing a limb or a spouse, declares that she wants to die. She may demand, for example, that her doctors stop her dialysis or give her an overdose of morphine. Such cases typically go before ethics boards, and the boards usually decide the same thing: don’t let the patient die, because the future patient will eventually find a way to regain her emotional footing and reclaim happiness. The ethics board here acts simply as an advocate for the rational, long-term system, recognizing that the present context allows the intellect little voice against the emotions.26 The board essentially decides that the neural congress is unfairly tilted at the moment, and that an intervention is needed to prevent a one-party takeover. Thank goodness that we can sometimes rely on the dispassion of someone else, just as Ulysses relied on his sailors to ignore his pleas. The rule of thumb is this: when you cannot rely on your own rational systems, borrow someone else’s.27 In this case, patients borrow the rational systems of the board members. The board can more easily take responsibility for protecting the future patient, as its members do not hear the emotional Siren songs in which the patient is ensnared.
OF MANY MINDS
For the purpose of illustrating the team-of-rivals framework, I have made the oversimplification of subdividing the neuroanatomy into the rational and emotional systems. But I do not want to give the impression that these are the only competing factions. Instead, they are only the beginning of the team-of-rivals story. Everywhere we look we find overlapping systems that compete.
One of the most fascinating examples of competing systems can be seen with the two hemispheres of the brain, left and right. The hemispheres look roughly alike and are connected by a dense highway of fibers called the corpus callosum. No one would have guessed that the left and right hemispheres formed two halves of a team of rivals until the 1950s, when an unusual set of surgeries were undertaken. Neurobiologists Roger Sperry and Ronald Meyers, in some experimental surgeries, cut the corpus callosum of cats and monkeys. What happened? Not much. The animals acted normal, as though the massive band of fibers connecting the two halves was not really necessary.
As a result of this success, split-brain surgery was first performed on human epilepsy patients in 1961. For them, an operation that prevented the spread of seizures from one hemisphere to the other was the last hope. And the surgeries worked beautifully. A person who had suffered terribly with debilitating seizures could now live a normal life. Even with the two halves of his brain separated, the patient did not seem to act differently. He could remember events normally and learn new facts without trouble. He could love and laugh and dance and have fun.
But something strange was going on. If clever strategies were used to deliver information only to one hemisphere and not the other, then one hemisphere could learn something while the other would not. It was as though the person had two independent brains.28 And the patients could do different tasks at the same time, something that normal brains cannot do. For example, with a pencil in each hand, split brain patients could simultaneously draw incompatible figures, such as a circle and a triangle.
There was more. The main motor wiring of the brain crosses sides, such that the right hemisphere controls the left hand and the left hemisphere controls the right hand. And that fact allows a remarkable demonstration. Imagine that the word apple is flashed to the left hemisphere, while the word pencil is simultaneously flashed to the right hemisphere. When a split-brain patient is asked to grab the item he just saw, the right hand will pick up the apple while the left hand will simultaneously pick up the pencil. The two halves are now living their own lives, disconnected.
Researchers came to realize, over time, that the two hemispheres have somewhat different personalities and skills—this includes their abilities to think abstractly, create stories, draw inferences, determine the source of a memory, and make good choices in a gambling game. Roger Sperry, one of the neurobiologists who pioneered the split-brain studies (and garnered a Nobel Prize for it), came to understand the brain as “two separate realms of conscious awareness; two sensing, perceiving, thinking and remembering systems.” The two halves constitute a team of rivals: agents with the same goals but slightly different ways of going about it.
In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that until late in the second millennium B.C.E., humans had no introspective consciousness, and that instead their minds were essentially divided into two, with their left hemispheres following the commands from their right hemispheres.29 These commands, in the form of auditory hallucinations, were interpreted as voices from the gods. About three thousand years ago, Jaynes suggests, this division of labor between the left and right hemispheres began to break down. As the hemispheres began to communicate more smoothly, cognitive processes such as introspection were able to develop. The origin of consciousness, he argues, resulted from the ability of the two hemispheres to sit down at the table together and work out their differences. No one yet knows whether Jaynes’s theory has legs, but the proposal is too interesting to ignore.
The two hemispheres look almost identical anatomically. It’s as though you come equipped with the same basic model of brain hemisphere in the two sides of your skull, both absorbing data from the world in slightly different ways. It’s essentially one blueprint stamped out twice. And nothing could be better suited for a team of rivals. The fact that the two halves are doubles of the same basic plan is evidenced by a type of surgery called a hemispherectomy, in which one entire half of the brain is removed (this is done to treat intra
ctable epilepsy caused by Rasmussen’s encephalitis). Amazingly, as long as the surgery is performed on a child before he is about eight years old, the child is fine. Let me repeat that: the child, with only half his brain remaining, is fine. He can eat, read, speak, do math, make friends, play chess, love his parents, and everything else that a child with two hemispheres can do. Note that it is not possible to remove any half of the brain: you cannot remove the front half or the back half and expect survival. But the right and left halves reveal themselves as something like copies of each other. Take one away and you still have another, with roughly redundant function. Just like a pair of political parties. If the Republicans or Democrats disappeared, the other would still be able to run the country. The approach would be slightly different, but things would still work.
CEASELESS REINVENTION
I’ve begun with examples of rational systems versus emotional systems, and the two-factions-in-one-brain phenomenon unmasked by split-brain surgeries. But the rivalries in the brain are far more numerous, and far more subtle, than the broad-stroke ones I have introduced so far. The brain is full of smaller subsystems that have overlapping domains and take care of coinciding tasks.
Consider memory. Nature seems to have invented mechanisms for storing memory more than once. For instance, under normal circumstances, your memories of daily events are consolidated (that is, “cemented in”) by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But during frightening situations—such as a car accident or a robbery—another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track.30 Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can pop back up in “flashbulb” fashion—as commonly described by rape victims and war veterans. In other words, there is more than one way to lay down memory. We’re not talking about a memory of different events, but multiple memories of the same event—as though two journalists with different personalities were jotting down notes about a single unfolding story.