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When it comes to your intellectual life, the Higher Mind values truth above all else. The Higher Mind’s intellectual mission is to steer your beliefs— your perception of reality —as close to actual reality as he can.

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

The hard thing is, we’ve all been trained to think in only one dimension—in the What dimension. We look at people’s behavior, their words, their tendencies, their habits, their demeanor, their disposition—and we stop there. The Psych Spectrum adds the critical second dimension to the equation that asks why people act the way they do. Or you can put... See more

In our thinking square, a person’s x-axis position shows us where they landed at Point B—the output of their thinking process. Their y-axis position tells us about the kind of arrow that led them there—about the process and the rationale underlying what they believe.

How the Two Minds Think

Where you are on this spectrum at any given point is determined by the status of the internal struggle between the two minds.

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.

Humans are so complicated for a simple reason: we’re each the product of a struggle between two fundamentally different, often contradictory forces.

Once you get this second dimension into your thinking, you’ll notice yourself applying it everywhere.