It's an instance of a more general pattern: your rational mind is superseded by another, more primitive part of you, which really only understands one type of "

It's an instance of a more general pattern: your rational mind is superseded by another, more primitive part of you, which really only understands one type of "argument"--Pavlovian conditioning. A lot of things started to make sense when I began viewing myself this way (e.g. willpower). The second major revelation was that this primitive part should not be dismissed as weakness or a useless carryover from a different evolutionary era. I know that in my case, if I always acted in ways that seemed perfectly rational to me at the time, with nothing inhibiting me, I'd be dead many times over by now.