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"One might therefore expect the patient to say he didn’t know why he was laughing, but this isn’t what happened. Instead, the patient’s left hemisphere made up a reason for laughing— like that the patient found the experiment amusing.9 Likewise, when the right hemisphere was presented with the word wave, the patient would wave; when asked why he was waving, he would rationalize his behavior and claim to have seen someone he knew.10 LeDoux and Gazzaniga concluded that people routinely don’t know why they do what they do, inasmuch as the behavior in question is caused by brain systems that operate without their conscious knowledge. One of the main jobs of consciousness, they argue, is to confabulate—to generate a coherent story that ties together the operations of the various brain systems, and one way to generate this story is to hazard a guess about why a particular brain system is doing something.11 In short, we figure out our own desires the way we figure out the desires of other people—by observing our behavior and drawing inferences from it. And in the same way as we can be utterly mistaken about the motivations of other people, we can be mistaken about our own motivations: the inference we draw about our behavior can have little bearing on reality."

"Unless we are exceptional individuals, we are daily presented with evidence of a divided will. We experience what philosophers call weakness of the will: our emotions seduce our intellect. "

" They suggest that different desire-generating systems (or “functional modules”) operate within the brain. Some of these systems work in conjunction with and are under the control of the brain’s dominant verbal system and thereby give rise to conscious, “rational” desires. Other desire-generating systems operate without the knowledge of the brain’s verbal system and are therefore outside its control. We become aware of the existence of these systems only when they give rise to desires that we—that is, the “we” represented by our dominant verbal system—find to be objectionable.12 "

"Sometimes the dominant verbal system doesn’t fight desires it had no part in generating but instead tries to justify them. It notices that we are engaged in a certain sort of behavior and then concocts a plausible-sounding reason why we should behave in that fashion. "

 In the case of the brain, though, the “supreme commander”—which LeDoux and Gazzaniga think is on the left side of our brain and is connected with the brain’s speech-processing region—doesn’t so much give orders as come up with plausible-sounding reasons why his generals are doing what they are doing."

"—why he is distressed by his discordant desires—we can invoke evolutionary psychology. When our desires conflict, we are in effect at war with ourselves, and this makes it harder for us to cope with the world around us. One side of us will try to undo what the other side accomplishes. "

" evolution has given us an incentive to avoid internal discord: we experience the feeling of distress psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The only way to eliminate this feeling is to declare a winner of the internal debate and proceed with life."

"Although our adaptive unconscious is part of our mind, it is inaccessible to us. We can know of it only by inference—by watching ourselves behave and then forming conjectures about what must be going on in our adaptive unconscious to account for that behavior. As a result, writes Wilson, “There is a great deal about ourselves that we cannot know directly, even with
the most painstaking introspection.”17 The maxim “Know thyself” might therefore be harder to act on than one might wish."

"When we make decisions, we are typically susceptible to influences of which “we”—our conscious selves—are utterly unaware, but to which our unconscious selves respond. "

"  And when Nisbett and Wilson asked students why they had named Tide, they almost never said it was because they had been exposed to the ocean-moon word pair. Instead they might have said that Tide was the best-known detergent, that Tide was the detergent their mother used, or that they liked the Tide box. They had demonstrably been influenced by exposure to the ocean-moon word pair but were oblivious to how the exposure had influenced them.18"

"One might think that we would have considerable—indeed, complete—knowledge of how we come to make certain decisions. After all, we have direct access to our minds, and our minds are what make the decisions. Experiments such as those described above, however, indicate that in an important sense, we don’t know our own minds: it is entirely possible for us to make a decision without fully understanding why we made the decision we did. Indeed, according to Nisbett and Wilson, our understanding of why we make certain decisions may be no better than our understanding of why other people, to whose minds we lack direct access, make decisions. In short, your understanding of why I made a decision might be as good as, or possibly even better than my understanding of why I made a decision. "

"When, in our role as consumers, we decide to buy a particular product, the decision is typically quasi-rational. A desire to buy something emerges from deep within us, and once we are aware of the existence of this desire, we set about concocting reasons why it is a sensible desire and one we should act upon. Advertisers, of course, realize this. They design ads that will trigger the unconscious desire formation process within us and then help us rationalize the desire the ad has created."

Besides misjudging how getting or not getting what we want will affect us, we also, say Gilbert and Wilson, tend to misjudge how long it will affect us: “People tend to overestimate the duration of their emotional reactions to future events— especially negative events—and . . . this can lead them to miswant in the long term.” 

" In some cases, we get what we want only to discover that, thanks to miswanting, we don’t really want it. As a result, we experience at best momentary satisfaction. In other cases, when we get the thing we wanted, we do find it desirable, but its desirability diminishes with the passage of time, as we adapt to its presence in our life. Soon our old feeling of dissatisfaction returns. Thanks to miswanting and adaptation, most people spend their lives on what economic psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls a satisfaction treadmill.26 "

" We can, to begin with, take steps to avoid miswanting: we can study the way we form desires and learn to distinguish those things that are really desirable, given our life plan, from those things that, because of our present circumstances or our present state of mind, merely seem desirable. We can also take steps to impede the adaptation process. In particular, we can consciously strive to keep wanting the things we already have. "

"the psychological research on decision making: “During the 1970s . . . it became increasingly apparent that people do not typically solve problems, make decisions, or reach conclusions using the kinds of standard, conscious, and rational processes that they were more-or-less assumed to be using.” To the contrary, people could best be described, in much of their decision making, as being “arational”:“When people were observed making choices and solving problems of interesting complexity, the rational and logical elements were often missing."

"According to Wegner, people have “an ideal of conscious agency.”31 We are convinced that we consciously control our actions, that we are in charge of ourselves. When it looks as though we are falling short of this ideal—when we find ourselves doing something we did not choose to do—we hide the fact from ourselves by creatively revising our beliefs about what it is we want.32 This strategy, says Wegner, eventually “leads us to the odd pass of assuming that we must have been consciously aware of what we wanted to do in performing actions we don’t understand or perhaps even remember—just to keep up the appearance that we ourselves are agents with conscious will.”

But as we have seen, the desire that gives rise to instrumental desires might not itself be rational. In particular, my wanting X might not be rational: I might not have decided to want X; to the contrary, this desire might simply have popped into my head. "

"despite appearances to the contrary, it is a nonrational desire. "

"Along these lines, Zajonc argues that many of our decisions are simply reflections of our likes and dislikes: “Quite often ‘I decided in favor of X’ is no more than ‘I liked X.’ Most of the time, information collected about alternatives serves us less for making a decision than for justifying it afterward. . . . We buy the cars we ‘like,’ choose the jobs and houses that we find ‘attractive,’ and then justify those choices by various reasons that might appear convincing to others.”34 But experiments performed by Zajonc and others suggest that our likes and dislikes are often formed subconsciously: “Preferences can be built up without participants’ awareness of the sources of these preferences.”35 He concludes that our likes and dislikes not only can be formed in a nonrational manner but often are; as he succinctly puts it, “preferences need no inferences.”36 But if our likes are nonrational, so are the desires we form based on these likes."

 “our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important changes, without our being in the least degree aware, until we have our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which has
taken place in them.” Indeed, he points out that when we are falling in love with someone, we are often the last to know: “The existence of a mutual attachment . . . is often recognised by a by-stander (especially if the perception be sharpened by jealousy, which leads to an intuitive interpretation of many minute occurrences that would be without significance to an ordinary observer), before either of the parties has made the discovery.” Carpenter also observes, with considerable insight, that our unconscious likes and dislikes can be stronger and more dangerous than our conscious likes and dislikes—more dangerous“because we cannot knowingly guard against them.”

"But even if no one else were around to impress, we would embrace the ideal of conscious agency for the simple reason that we want to be free. We don’t want our choice making to be an illusion, merely the reflection of deep brain processes of which we are not conscious and over which we have no control. Such choices, we fear, would not be meaningful. We are willing to go to great lengths to preserve, if not actual freedom, at least the feeling that we are free. One way to accomplish this is constantly to invent reasons why we are doing what we find ourselves doing: we are doing it because we want to, not because some deep brain process made us do it."

"What really happens when we make a decision is something like this. We mull over the decision to be made. Then the magic moment comes: we make up our minds, we commit to a course of action. What transpires in that moment is a mystery. Before that moment we didn’t want to do something; after that moment we do. The decision wasn’t made at the conscious level. To the contrary, it sprang from our unconscious like a jack-inthe-box. And as soon as we become aware of what “we” have decided, our intellect takes credit for it: “Good idea. That must be what I want to do,” it mutters. In making decisions, we try to proceed in a rational manner, but the analytic process is often a sham. We might, for example, draw up a list of pros and cons. The problem with such lists is that we routinely cheat in constructing them. When the list isn’t coming out “right,” we rack our brains to come up with items to add to one side; when that doesn’t work, we decide that the items on the “right” side, though fewer in number, should be given a greater weight. And if even that doesn’t work, we simply throw the list away or conveniently misplace it. The list isn’t so much an analytic technique for making a decision as it is a device for rationalizing a decision that deep down has already been made. "

"Decision theory tends to work best for trivial decisions, such as when you are in a casino, trying to decide whether to play craps or roulette. For life’s biggest decisions, such as whether to get married or have children, it is pretty much useless"

"neurologist Antonio Damasio, who specializes in helping patients suffering from brain damage that incapacitates their emotions without simultaneously compromising their reasoning ability. His patients, in other words, are the earthly equivalent of the rational but emotionless Vulcans of Star Trek fame. The curious thing about Damasio’s patients is that their lack of emotions, rather than improving their ability to make decisions, incapacitates it. "

" “This behavior is a good example of the limits of pure reason. It is also a good example of the calamitous consequence of not having automated mechanisms of decision making.”"

Although Elliot had a superior IQ, his emotional capacity had been seriously compromised. In Damasio’s words, Elliot’s predicament was “ to know but not to feel .”44 We might think diminished emotional capacity would improve a person’s ability to make choices: there would be fewer emotions to interfere with rational decision making. What Damasio found is that, to the contrary, emotional capacity is a key ingredient in decision making: “Real life has a way of forcing you into choices. If you do not succumb to the forcing, you can be just as undecided as Elliot.” Indeed, writes Damasio, “As we are confronted by a task, a number of options open themselves in front of us and we must select our path correctly, time after time, if we are to keep on target. Elliot could no longer select the path.”45 Damasio concludes that “certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may
put the instruments of logic to good use.”46 Our emotional states“do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration.”47

"According to Hume,
reason is capable of telling us that if we do X, Y will result. It is incapable of telling us, however, whether Y is worth obtaining, and therefore whether we ought to do X. It is only when reason is coupled with a value system—with a feeling that something is worth having—that reason can motivate behavior. "

" Arthur Schopenhauer argued that the intellect doesn’t rule the will. According to him, “the intellect gets to know the conclusions of the will only a posteriori and empirically.”53 Indeed, the operation of the will is a “secret workshop” into which the intellect cannot penetrate.54 The intellect, he concludes, is a “mere tool in the service of the will.”55 "

 Sigmund Freud argued that we are to a considerable extent ruled by unconscious desires. He also commented on “defensive rationalization,” the mind’s ability to justify its owner’s behavior. A person, on being asked why he is behaving in a certain way, “instead of saying that he has no idea . . . feels compelled to invent some obviously unsatisfactory reason.”58

" Russell argues that “a man’s actions and beliefs may be wholly dominated by a desire of which he is quite unconscious, and which he indignantly repudiates when it is suggested to him.” According to Russell, “the discovery of our own motives can only be made by the same process by which we discover other people’s, namely, the process of observing our actions and inferring the desire which could prompt them.”59 He adds that we are quite proficient at deceiving ourselves about our desires—that we even go so far as to develop entire systems of false beliefs to keep ourselves ignorant of what it is, at base, that we desire.60 The reasoning of Russell and the others may have been prescientific, but subsequent research suggests that their intuitions about how desires arise within us were correct."

"If I am ordering a meal in a restaurant I may be free to choose whatever I like from among the alternatives on the menu. But I am not free to choose what I like shall be. I cannot say to myself: “Up to this point in my life I have always detested spinach, but just for today I am going to like it.” . . . What I am in the mood for, and what I like or detest, are not at my command. "

"It should be clear from these examples that our BIS is flawed. If we worked for a company with a flawed incentive system, we could quit and find employment elsewhere. We cannot similarly escape our BIS. Like it or not, we are stuck with it and its flaws for life. I will have more to say about our predicament— being forced to live under a flawed incentive system—in the next chapter."

"The schedule of incentives of our BIS is determined by our wiring—by how our neurons are configured and by what hormones and neurotransmitters are present within us. Change our neuronal wiring or body chemistry, and you change what feels bad or good to us. For example, deprive us of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and our ability to feel good will be impaired; indeed, we will slip into depression. Deprive a male of testosterone, and gazing at a beautiful woman won’t be as pleasurable as it once was. Although our genes are the dominant factor in determining our BIS, other factors are also at work. Indeed, even though we have the same genetic makeup throughout our lives, our BIS changes with the passage of time. Some of these changes"

"are “preprogrammed.” For example, our genetic makeup dictates that we go through puberty at a certain age. During puberty, our hormones change, which in turn changes our BIS; as a result, what feels, tastes, looks, and smells good to us changes as well. Other changes to our BIS are not preprogrammed in this manner but depend on our life experience. Suppose, for example, we are thrown from a horse. Unless (folk wisdom would have us believe) we remount immediately, our BIS will be permanently altered: we will develop a fear of horses, and as a result, something that used to feel good to us—riding horses—will henceforth feel bad. Sometimes what feels bad to us changes not because of a change in our BIS but because of a change in our body. Suppose, for example, we sprain our ankle. Although our BIS formerly rewarded us with an endorphin high for jogging, it now punishes us for even trying to walk. In this case, unlike when we fell from the horse, it isn’t our BIS that changed, it is our body. Notice, after all, that even before the sprain, our BIS would have punished us for wrenching the ligaments in our ankle. By way of contrast, before we fell from a horse, our BIS would not have punished us for getting on one; after our fall, it will. The fall reprogrammed our BIS.
To better understand how our BIS is affected by our life experiences, consider food preferences. Foods taste and smell the way they do because of our biological wiring, and the tastes and smells in question are good or bad because of our BIS."

story of a psychologist who has filet mignon with béarnaise sauce—one of his favorite dishes—for dinner, goes to the opera with his wife, and then becomes violently ill. As a result of this series of events, he develops an aversion not to opera, not to his wife, and not even to the person who gave him the flu that he knows to be the cause of his illness, but to filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. Says Ornstein, “The tendency to make a connection between nausea and prior food taste is so strongly prepared in us that it defies reason.”

"The above examples demonstrate that our BIS, besides allowing us to respond flexibly to stimuli, is itself flexible in the sense that its schedule of incentives—the rewards promised and punishments threatened by it—can change. Think again about our food preferences. Although our BIS determines these preferences, it is flexible in the manner in which it does so. "

excellent talk:

"We saw earlier that our BIS can change with the passage of time. Some changes are preprogrammed and others are the result of life experiences. When our BIS changes, our personality can change as well. The onset of puberty, for example, alters our BIS by changing the hormones present within us, and by altering our BIS, it changes our personality"

"It is likewise possible for illness to rewire our BIS and thereby alter our personality. "

" Sacks also describes a woman who in a short period of time transformed from a reserved research chemist into an impulsive and facetious punster, full of quips and wisecracks. The cause of this personality change was a huge carcinoma in her brain."

" The second Noble Truth is that this suffering is caused by desire and ignorance. Because we desire, we feel dissatisfied and are thereby led to feel envy, hatred, and anger; because of our ignorance, we fail to see that our desire is the cause of our grief. "

" The third Noble Truth is that by overcoming desire and gaining wisdom we can overcome suffering. "

" According to Buddha, though, the world is mistaken on this point: “The pull of desire is to be resisted and eventually abandoned,” and the reason we should overcome our desires is not because they are morally evil but because we will suffer until we overcome them.7 How can we overcome desire? Not, says Bodhi, by repressing our desires but by “changing our perspective on them so that they no longer bind us. When we understand the nature of desire, when we investigate it closely with keen attention, desire falls away by itself, without need for struggle.”8 Once we understand desire, he says, “attachments are shed like the leaves of a tree, naturally and spontaneously.”9 

Zen practice is supposed to allow us to overcome desire without desiring that we overcome it. Zen encourages us to do something not obviously connected with overcoming desire in the belief that while we are engaged in this other practice— while we are both distracted and gaining insight, as it were—we will have the moment of enlightenment that allows us to master desire without consciously wishing to master it. According to one Zen master, “Gaining enlightenment is an accident. Spiritual practice simply makes us accident-prone.”

What Zen Buddhists “seek” (apparently) is a moment of enlightenment, a moment at which the futility of desire becomes deeply, instinctively clear. This moment is called tun wu in Chinese and satori in Japanese. Alan Watts describes it as a moment “when it is clearly understood that all one’s intentional acts—desires, ideals, stratagems—are in vain.” It is a moment in which a person “sees that his grasp upon the world is his strangle-hold about his own neck, the hold which is depriving him of the very life he so longs to attain. And there is no way out, no way of letting go, which he can take by effort, by a decision of the will.” It is a moment at which our “consciousness of the inescapable trap in which we are at once the trapper and the trapped reaches a breaking point. One might almost say that it ‘matures’ or ‘ripens.’ . . . In this moment all sense of constraint drops away, and the cocoon which the silkworm spun around himself opens to let him go forth winged as a moth. . . . Contrivances, ideals, ambitions, and self-propitiations are no longer necessary, since it is now possible to live spontaneously without trying to be spontaneous.”

"The enlightened individual will become a master of inconspicuous consumption, as compared to the conspicuous consumption in which most of us revel. While the drivers around him are experiencing boredom and anxiety, the enlightened driver might experience bliss. Some, on hearing this description of enlightenment, will ridicule the person who can find pleasure gazing at the smoke drifting up from the tailpipes of the cars blocking his way. Such a person is at best childlike and at worst a fool. They will pity him. But who is more to be pitied, the person who is almost incapable of satisfaction and must therefore spend unsatisfying days in pursuit of a moment or two of satisfaction, or the person who can find satisfaction in the most ordinary moments and whose days are therefore filled with satisfying moments? "

" most of us aren’t interested in satisfaction. We are instead interested in “success,” which not only is different from satisfaction but is to a considerable extent incompatible with it."

"What is it like to gain enlightenment? Different Zen schools offer different answers to this question. Some schools hold that a person can be enlightened only once; others hold that a person can be enlightened repeatedly. Some schools hold that only one degree of enlightenment is possible—namely, perfect enlightenment; others hold that some enlightenments are more significant than others. Some schools even reject the idea of a moment of enlightenment and instead claim that enlightenment can come gradually. "

" Enlightenment does not appear to have diminished his desire for sex and strong drink; indeed, he writes of “wandering about for years in brothels and wine shops.”32 

. His enlightenment didn’t spare him, though, from emotional anguish: Ryo –kan writes of shedding tears of loneliness.33 "

 It could also be that the enlightenment of the above Zen masters, while not enabling them to master desire completely, enabled them to master it to the extent humanly possible. This last conjecture, if true, would be a testament to the power of desire."

 “Amish attempts to harness selfishness, pride, and power are not based on the premise that the material world or pleasure itself is evil. . . . Evil, the Amish believe, is found in human desires for selfexaltation, not in the material world itself.”3

Adopting semiarbitrary rules for living is also an important way to fight human insatiability. In the words of Schopenhauer, “ Limitation always makes for happiness. We are happy in proportion as our range of vision, our sphere of work, our points of contact with the world, are restricted and circumscribed.”6 

"One important Amish insight into desire is that self-set and self-enforced limits on our behavior are fragile things. It is for this reason that the Amish let their community set and enforce behavioral limits."

"Many people want absolute freedom to pursue the objects of their desires. They want other people not just to tolerate this pursuit but to endorse it. What they fail to realize is that by putting no bounds at all on their desires, they are unlikely ever to gain satisfaction. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the Amishman, faced with humiliation if he puts a telephone in his living room, has a better shot at lasting happiness than
the person who spends his days striving to fulfill whatever desires enter his head, regardless of what his God or his neighbors think. "

who successfully embodies Stoic principles—a so-called Stoic sage—“must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”9 (Seneca adds that compared to these joys, the pleasures offered by “the wretched body” are “paltry and trivial and fleeting.”)10 More generally, the Stoics are not out to banish the emotions; they are out to reduce, to the extent possible, negative emotions, such as feelings of anger or grief, that will disrupt our tranquility. They value positive emotions, with feelings of joy being at the top of their list."

" The Stoics don’t advocate that we meditate to gain mastery over our desires, as a Zen Buddhist might, or pray for the strength to master our desires, as a Christian might. Instead they argue that if we pay close attention to and think carefully about our desires, we can gain the upper hand on our undesirable desires. As a result, the Stoics became keen observers of desire. Their advice on how to master desire is based on these observations."

Thus, we find Stoic philosopher Epictetus (50–138) observing that if we wish to preserve our tranquility, we need to keep in mind that “some things are up to us and some things are not.”11 Among the things up to us are our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions; among the things we can’t control—or have at best partial control over—are our physical circumstances and our reputation. The key insight of Epictetus is that it makes no sense to fret about the things that aren’t up to us. Doing so is a waste of time and energy, and this kind of fretting is a recipe for a life filled with disappointment.12 You will be much happier, Epictetus argues, if you spend your time and energy concerning yourself with those aspects of life you can control. Stated differently, you should play only those games you are sure to win, for then you can be invincible.13 Wanting only what is in our power to obtain and retain, besides preserving our tranquility, provides us with the maximum possible freedom. “A person’s master,” says Epictetus, “is someone who has power over what he does or does not want, either to obtain it or take it away. Whoever wants to be free, therefore, let him not want or avoid anything that is up to others. Otherwise he will necessarily be a slave.”14"