Our lives are filled with a nonstop barrage of inner and external motivations competing for our attention, and it’s a crucial part of the PFC’s function to prioritize these.

Probably the most important characteristic of the PFC is its connectedness. Virtually all other parts of the brain link to it directly. All of your senses, your feelings and memories, even the parts of your brain regulating your inner biology, have direct neural connections to your PFC.

If we want to steer our civilization on another course, though, it’s not enough to make a few incremental improvements here and there. We need to take a long, hard look at the faulty ideas that have brought us to this place and reimagine them. We need a new worldview – one that is based on sturdy foundations.

Jonathan Haidt has suggested that feelings are so much more central to our lives than reason that they dominate most of what we do and even form the basis of our moral judgment.

‘theory of unconscious thought’. Their theory indicates that the more complex the problem, the more you should let your unconscious decide.

If the information available is fuzzy or ambiguous, the left hemisphere simply fills in the gaps with whatever it can find, creating an elaborate story, if necessary, to make everything comprehensible.

An integrated worldview

there is no relationship more important than the one you have with yourself.

The contrast between the brain’s hemispheres is, however, just the most obvious manifestation of a split in human consciousness that is recognized by a wide array of the world’s leading neuroscientists.