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that the iconic religious leader, despite being a married man with four young children, was a “womanizer.”Besides having an ongoing affair with a woman he saw frequently, King allegedly also engaged in numerous short-term liaisons with other women while he was traveling.According to biographer David Garrow, King’s promiscuity caused him to feel extreme guilt.But that guilt was not enough to alter his behavior.When faced with temptations of the flesh, Dr.King repeatedly put aside his higher moral values.
    Did King’s moral lapses result from an occasional breakdown in the operation of the otherwise rational man inside his head?Or might there be another explanation for his behavioral inconsistencies?We argue that Martin Luther King Jr.suffered from a common form of multiple personality disorder.Even without reexamining the evidence from his biographies or consulting a single psychiatrist, we believe we can diagnose King as having at least seven personalities.
    In fact, when we say King had a “common” form of multiple personality disorder, we are understating the case.Multiple personalities are not just common; they are universal.Without knowing a single thing about the particulars of your life, we argue that you also have at least seven personalities.Although it feels as if there is just one single self inside your head, at a deeper evolutionary level, you have a multiplicity of selves.And worse yet, each of these selves is like a little dictator who completely changes your priorities and preferences when he or she takes charge.This is important because it means that the same person will make different choices depending on which self is currently at the helm.
    SELVES WITHIN THE SELF
    A famous clinical case study of multiple personality disorder was turned into the movie The Three Faces of Eve , in which the central characterswitches between the timid and self-effacing “Eve White” and the dangerously fun-loving and flirtatious “Eve Black.”The real-life character depicted in this movie was Chris Sizemore, whose psychiatrists claimed had not just three but twenty different personalities.While the majority of people do not suffer from the clinical version of multiple personality disorder, each normal person does have multiple selves.
    At first blush, it might seem shockingly counterintuitive to claim that there is not one single you running the show inside your head.But an overwhelming body of scientific evidence supports the idea of multiple selves.Some of the earliest research came from a classic series of studies on “split-brain” patients, conducted in the 1960s by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W.Sperry.Gazzaniga and Sperry studied people whose left and right cerebral hemispheres had been surgically separated (as a treatment for epilepsy).For these people the verbal left side of the brain could not communicate with the nonverbal right side.If the researchers showed an image (a picture of a spoon, for example) to the subject’s verbal left brain (by flashing it into the right half of the visual field), the person was able to name it.But if the same image was flashed into the left half of the visual field (thus appearing only to the nonverbal right brain), the person could point to a spoon to indicate that it was the object in the image, but was unable to name it.This work, which became a cornerstone of modern neuroscience and eventually won a Nobel Prize, began to challenge the idea of a unified consciousness.It showed that our conscious experiences can be very different depending on which part of the brain is currently active and processing incoming information.
    In the intervening fifty years, many other findings—from human and animal neuropsychology, biology, and studies of learning and memory—have revealed that there is not one single executive system inside your head but a conglomeration of separate systems, running different subprograms to deal with different problems.Reviewing the evidence in his