Being constantly late, losing your phone, spending too much money, dating the same inadvisable people—these are all errors that human beings make over and over again. But it has more to do with how the brain is wired than with a lack of discipline. In attempting to understand where we went wrong, our brains create “mistake pathways,” ruts that we get into when we try not to make another misstep. In this short video, staff writer Olga Khazan explains the psychological reasons why it’s so hard not to keep repeating mistakes.

Subscribe to The Atlantic on YouTube: http://bit.ly/subAtlanticYT