Despite how we’ve evolved, life doesn’t always encourage acting to gain reward or freezing to avoid punishment. Sometimes we must restrain ourselves to gain a reward (baseball batters can get on base by not swinging at bad pitches), or take action to avoid a penalty (tax cheats can come forward during amnesties). Acting counter to our ingrained “Pavlovian” biases is a matter of the brain recognizing the conflict between the rational course of action and the instinct.

via Theta brainwaves reflect ability to beat built-in bias.