The problem with therapy-- include self help and mind hacks-- is its amazing failure rate. People do it for years and come out of it and feel like they understand themselves better but they do not change. If it failed to produce both insights and change it would make sense, but it is almost always one without the other.
Is it our bias towards optimism? (And is that bias there because pessimists take fewer risks, and therefore don't succeed at much and therefore get eliminated from the gene pool?)
I heard (on a PRI podcast, I think) a brain scientist give an interpretation of the brain as a collection of agents, with consciousness as an interpreting layer that invents reasons for our actions after we've actually done them. There's evidence of this post-fact interpretation - and while I suspect this is only part of the story, it does give a hint that our conscious mind is ...
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: