David Brooks today:
In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant. Context — which stimulus triggers which response — matters a lot.
Um, David, Psychoanalysis began to study this ~100 years ago. It is certainly nice that our biotech/neurotech tools have begun to catch up to our observational data, but please don't tell us this is new.
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