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So it seems like an important question to ask: Why do we actually come to believe the things we end up believing?

Looking at everything in one dimension just shows us what’s on the surface of all these parts of reality. But when we lift the covers off the What of life and look at what lies beneath, we’re reminded that there’s a second dimension to everything as well.

The challenge of human growth is outlined, for each of us, by our personal list of Psych Spectrum trouble areas. This list is why life will be hard. It’s why we’ll hurt others. It’s why we have regrets. It’s what stands in between us and the life we know we should be living.

Where we are on this y-axis is a result of the state of our internal tug-of-war, so the first question we need to ask is: how do the two minds think?

As we discussed in Chapter 1, the animal world is really a world of strands of genetic code, each in a never-ending quest for immortality. Animals are just the biological containers that genes use as temporary homes during this quest. And to control their containers, genes have their animals running on primitive automated software.

When we’re low on the Psych Spectrum, we’re short-sighted, we’re small-minded, we think and act with our pettiest emotions and our ego, we lack self-awareness, we’re short on compassion, high on hypocrisy—and because the Primitive Mind is an unconscious software program, we’re usually too foggy to see our own shittiness for what it is.

The tug-of-war isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. Let’s call it the Psych Spectrum.

Your Psych Spectrum position ebbs and flows throughout each day, each month, and each year of our lives, as we go through happy times and hard times, great days and terrible ones, good moods and crankiness. Even a single bad night’s sleep has the potential to lower you down the spectrum the next day. But if we could quantify all of your various sta... See more

When you’re high up on the Psych Spectrum, you get the best of all worlds. The Higher Mind understands that primitive pleasures like sex, food, and all-in-good-fun tribalism like sports fandom are awesome, and often necessary, parts of a human life. And like a good pet owner, the Higher Mind is more than happy to let the Primitive Mind have its fun... See more