Everything we think and say is informed by unconscious processing. Our emotional reactions, beliefs, and opinions – even our most carefully deliberated decisions – are determined to a large extent by mental processes outside our conscious awareness.
Conscious perceptions are a bit like takeaway meals. By the time we get them, they have been processed, packaged, transported, and presented for consumption by a chain of invisible workers. Their original ingredients may no longer even be recognizable.
The workers that produce the contents of consciousness are specialized brain modules that process raw information arriving at our sense organs into sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, decisions, and beliefs. Only some of this processing reaches consciousness. ” with the vast majority remaining unconscious. This unconscious processing is vitally important, constantly directing our actions by molding our conscious decisions, or, sometimes, by overriding chem.
The Chemical Unconscious
Consider, for example, what happens when you notice someone looking at you in a restaurant or when queuing for a bus. As soon as you make eye contact, the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine (sometimes called the brain’s pleasure chemical) in your brain is affected. Typically dopamine levels rise if the stranger’s face is attractive (symmetrical, young, and smiling) and fall if it is unattractive (asymmetrical, aged, and frowning). Significantly, this reaction occurs before you have consciously registered the face, so by the time the image does arrive in consciousness, your unconscious mind has already ‘approved ‘ or ‘ disapproved ‘ of the face. With now; y of knowing what is happening to your dopamine levels, you naturally suppose that your first assessment of the person is based on rational deliberation.
It is not hard to see how such unconscious processing feeds into behavior. For example, candidates for jobs are likely to fare better in interviews if they are attractive rather than unattractive; interviewers do not consciously judge by looks; they know that one candidate makes them feel hopeful and the other disappointed.
Patterns of influence
Every idea, attitude, and emotion that we hold in our mind is encoded in the patterns of neural firing in our brains. Some of these ideas can be dragged out into consciousness, where they can be molded and modified by reflection, thought, and experience. But others – like the dopamine effect described above – are permanently hidden in the back rooms of the brain and only manifest themselves by their effect on behavior.
When these patterns are inactive, they are ‘ out of mind’ and do not influence our actions. But many patterns fire away at a low rate – not enough to become part of consciousness, but enough to feed into the unconscious information processing that precedes consciousness. These habitual thought processes form a background template of ideas, beliefs, and prejudices through which all new information is filtered.
These backgrounds and unconscious thought patterns include many of the fixed ideas that we have about the physical world. A good example is the idea of ‘ object permanence ‘. We all know that objects do not cease to exist simply because they are hidden from view. This assumption develops in all human infants at the age of about eight months – long before they have enough experience to have arrived at it by deduction. Similarly, we all tend to assign intentions to move inanimate objects: an observer who sees a small ball rolling along followed by a larger ball will invariably interpret the scene as the large ball ‘chasing’ the smaller one. And the larger the object, the more ‘intention al’ it will be perceived to be.
These deep-rooted ideas probably evolved because they were of great survival value to our ancestors: any animal that assumes an object is still present when it is hidden is exercising caution – and is less likely to be eaten by a predator that hides behind a bush. Similarly, it is safer to assume that moving objects have motives – a fast-approaching blur may be a wind-blown branch, but it may also be a vicious animal.
However, these quick and easy evaluations are not always useful in a sophisticated environment. The ‘folk physics’ wired into the brain makes it easy for magicians to fool people and means that we find it difficult to grasp scientific concepts that conflict with our intuitions. And rules of thumb that were once useful when we lived in small tribes and depended on physical strength for survival are now potentially damaging. For example, the idea that people whom we resemble physically are more likely to be friendly now forms the basis of social pathologies, such as racism and elitist prejudices.
Learning from experience
Many of the things we learn are held in our minds unconsciously. People can be ‘primed’ to react to something in a particular way by exposing them. to an influential stimulus for such a short time that they do not register it consciously – that is, it is presented subliminally. In one laboratory experiment, researchers divided volunteers into two groups. An image was then flashed up in front of the volunteers so quickly – for about 150 milliseconds – that they were not even aware of seeing it. One group was shown an image of a leaf, and the other an image of a cup. The two groups were then shown the word ‘tea’ and asked to add a second word. Most of the group that had been exposed to the image of the leaf wrote ‘ tea leaf,’ while most of those who had been shown the cup wrote ‘teacup.’ Yet when asked, none of the volunteers was aware that a visual image had influenced their choice of words.
Many of our behavioral tendencies are primed by experience. If a child is bitten by a dog, for example, she is likely to think ‘dan ger’ whenever she sees a dog later in life, even if the original incident is long forgotten and buried in the unconscious. She is also likely to rationalize her fear of dogs – explaining to herself that ‘all dogs are vicious and unpredictable’ – because her brain seeks an explanation for her irrational fear. Many psychologists have demonstrated such a ‘post-rationalization ‘ of behavior. In one experiment, researchers invited women to choose between two pairs of stockings, which, unknown to the subjects, were identical. Nearly all the subjects chose the pair, which was presented to their right. This was predictable because previous studies had already shown that people favor that side in all sorts of ways. But when asked why they had picked that product, the subjects did not mention its placement. Instead, they claimed to have detected some superiority of quality, such as feel, texture, or color. Imaginary differences that gave spurious reason to what was an entirely unconscious choice.
Another vital unconscious influence on our behavior is known as implicit learning. We can learn to do something – even something complex, such as playing the piano to an expert level – without consciously knowing or being able to say what we have learned. This also applies to non-physical skills: when we use language – speaking, listening, or reading – much of the mental work is, in fact, carried out at an unconscious level. You can see this when you find yourself unable to describe the complex grammatical reasons behind your choice of a word (such as ‘l’ or ‘ me ‘) in conversation, even though your unconscious mind has correctly selected this word in a fraction of a second.
In a laboratory experiment, UK psychologists Diane Berry and Donald Broadbent used a complex ‘control task’ to study implicit learning. In the task, a simulated factory had to be ‘ managed’ to produce a specific level of output. Some people were given explicit information on the output related variables, while others were left to learn through practice. Remarkably, the explicit information was found not to improve performance at all. At the end of the experiment, those in either group who had learned successfully to control the output were all unable to explain how they did it. This finding has clear consequences for how best to encourage learning: it seems that, even in areas that have more to do with judgment and decision-making, book-learned knowledge is no substitute for hands-on experience.
Processing Meaning
It’s tempting to think that the unconscious modules that process information lack the sophistication of the conscious mind. However, studies suggest it is the conscious mind that sometimes makes the clumsier distinctions.
In one experiment, people were shown a sentence with a word missing. It read: ‘She looked very (blank) in her new coat ‘. The subjects wore headphones through which experimenters could relay spoken words. Half of the subjects were played the word ‘snug ‘ at a normal volume; half were played the same word subliminally – that is, so quietly that subjects were not conscious of hearing it. The subjects were then asked to ‘fill in ‘ the gap, choosing between the words ‘smug’ and ‘cozy.’
The experimenters found that those who could clearly hear the word ‘snug’ were more likely to choose ‘smug, ‘but those who could hear it only subliminally preferred ‘cozy.’ This means that the conscious mind was being directed more by the sound of the word, while the unconscious concentrated on meaning – an aspect that seems more sophisticated and more useful than mere sound.
Subliminal Advertising
In the late 1950s, when paranoia about brainwashing was at its height, James Vicary, a marketing expert in New Jersey, USA, sparked controversy by experimenting with subliminal advertising in the cinema. Vicary claimed to have flashed the messages ‘Eat popcorn’ and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ between the frames of a film showing at the time, too fast for the messages to be registered consciously. He also reported that this boosted sales of Coca-Cola by 58 percent and of popcorn by 18 percent.
Subsequent research failed to verify Vicary’s claims, and there are suspicions that he invented his results to publicize his company. Nevertheless, subliminal advertising is now banned in the UK and many other countries.
