We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.

You know, you take a little infant and you turn on the music mobile on their crib and you find that if you give them a music mobile which turns on automatically versus a music mobile in which - if by chance their little legs or their little hands accidentally touches it - turns on they're so much more excited if by chance it turns on because they touched it, so that desire for control over their environment is... really appears from very early on and if you look at children's first words, "no, yes."

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI?

We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.