Subliminal

leonard mlodinow

Chapter 1 The New Unconscious

Fruit fly mating rituals are not anthropomorphic. It’s chemical programming. 

The lowly fruit fly, for example, goes through an elaborate mating ritual, which the male initiates by tapping the female with his foreleg and vibrating his wing in order to play her a courtship song. If the female accepts the advance, she will do nothing, and the male will take over from there. If she is not sexually receptive, she will either strike him with her wings or legs, or run away. 

Though I have elicited frighteningly similar responses from human females, this fruit fly mating ritual is completely programmed. Fruit flies don’t worry about issues such as where their relationship is headed; they simply exercise a routine that is hardwired within them. In fact, their actions are so directly related to their biological constitution that scientists have discovered a chemical that, when applied to a male of the species, will, within hours, convert a heterosexual fruit fly into one that is gay.

fMRI machines allow us to see almost to the neuronic level where blood ebbs and flows in the brain.

The current revolution in thinking about the unconscious came about because, with modern instruments, we can watch as different structures and substructures in the brain generate feelings and emotions. We can measure the electrical output of individual neurons. We can map the neural activity that forms a person’s thoughts. 

Freud was a pioneer but he was wrong

Though psychological science has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father in order to marry his mom, or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ.

We should certainly credit Freud with understanding the immense power of the unconscious—this was an important achievement—but we also have to recognize that science has cast serious doubt on the existence of many of the specific unconscious emotional and motivational factors he identified as molding the conscious mind

In the new view, mental processes are thought to be unconscious because there are portions of the mind that are inaccessible to consciousness due to the architecture of the brain

Chapter 2 Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality

⅓ of the brain is dedicated to visual processing

ONE OF THE most important functions of your unconscious is the processing of data delivered by your eyes. That’s because, whether hunting or gathering, an animal that sees better eats better and avoids danger more effectively, and hence lives longer. As a result, evolution has arranged it so that about a third of your brain is devoted to processing vision: to interpreting color, detecting edges and motion, perceiving depth and distance, deciding the identity of objects, recognizing faces, and many other tasks. Think of it—a third of your brain is busy doing all those things, yet you have little knowledge of or access to the processing. All that hard work proceeds outside your awareness, and then the result is offered to your conscious mind in a neat report, with the data digested and interpreted. As a result, you never have to bother figuring out what it means if these rods or those cones in your retinas absorb this or that number of photons, or to translate optic nerve data into a spatial distribution of light intensities and frequencies, and then into shapes, spatial positions, and meaning. Instead, while your unconscious mind is working feverishly to do all those things, you can relax in bed, recognizing, seemingly without effort, the lighting fixture on the ceiling—or the words in this book.

Phonemic Restoration

Chapter 3 Remembering and Forgetting

Certainly the law occasionally pays lip service to the fact that eyewitnesses can be mistaken, but most police departments still rely heavily on lineups, and you can still convict someone in court solely on the eyewitness testimony of a stranger. In fact, judges often prohibit the defense from introducing testimony about the scientific research on the laws of eyewitness identification. “Judges say it’s either too complicated, abstract, and unconnected for jurors to understand, and other times they say it’s too simplistic,” says Brandon Garrett, the author of a book called Convicting the Innocent.5The courts even discourage jurors who are deliberating from using the trial transcript to aid their memory of the testimony they heard in court. The state of California, for example, recommends that judges inform juries that “their memories should prevail over the written transcript.”6 Lawyers will tell you there are practical reasons for that policy—for instance, that deliberations would take too long if jurors pored over the trial transcripts. But to me, that seems outrageous, like saying we should believe someone’s testimony about an incident rather than a film of the incident itself

Hugo Munsterberg was the first psychologist to go against the literature status quo that the memory was a recorder after being confronted with a personal fabricated recounting.

Frans Van Liszt inspired a bunch of professors to illustrate memory fabrication by staging gunfights in the classroom. The gun would always go off, and he’d have students break into groups after to discuss what they remembered happening. None of the groups had identical responses

So have traded perfect recall for the ability to handle and process a staggering amount of information (11 million bits per second)

We remember memories, not events, so each time we try to reconstruct something it changes.

We can implant a false memory simply by telling someone about a prior incident that didn’t even take place.

The truth is we don’t want to remember everything, and we can’t. The magic of the mind is holding on to the important parts. Remembering everything is actually disabling. 

Solomon Shereshevsky remembered everything, and all the details he held in his mind mucked up his understanding of things. 

He couldn't remember faces. Most of us store in memory the general features of the faces we remember, and when we see someone we know we match their face from a limited catalog we have in our head. Solomon had a hard drive full of every expression of every face he’d ever seen. Each new expression or each face shone in a new light was logged as a new face, so if he saw someone he knew, he couldn’t recognize them unless they were in the same light or were making expressions he’d previously seen them make.

 We remember things that never happened to us when prompted. Phantom memories.

CHAPTER 4 - THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SOCIAL

The pain of a stubbed toe and the sting of a snubbed advance share a space in your brain, and so painkillers can actually dull you to emotional pain.

Milgrim invented the six degrees of separation with a study using people from nebraska and boston. They were sent a packet with a random person and asked to forward to that person if they knew them or to send it to the person they thought most likely to know them. Leading to the phenomenon that “six links of acquaintanceship are enough to connect any two people in the world. 

Men are aggressive because reproductive success is determined by competing with other males to mate with as many females as possible. 

Women are more nurturing because their reproductive strategy is based on investing in the production of few, new offspring. Success is determined by the quality of care and the ability to enable infant survival. 

Oxytocin promotes bonding, and without it some sheep leave their young to die. There’s a few hour window they have to bond. 

Monogamous voles have many receptors for oxytocin and a related hormone called vasopressin, but promiscuous voles have hardly any. Dampening or amplifying the receptors can turn one voles from monogamous to promiscuous and vice versa.

Oxytocin also engenders trust. 

In fMRI, or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 19th century scientists discovered the key to identifying what part of the brain is at work at any given time is that when nerve cells are active, circulation increases, because the cells increase their consumption of oxygen. 

With fMRI, scientists can map oxygen consumption from outside the skull, through the quantum electromagnetic interactions of atoms within the brain. 

Thus fMRI allows for noninvasive 3D exploration of the brain in operation. This is how mental processes can be associated with specific neural pathways and brain structures. 

CHAPTER 5 - READING PEOPLE

Evolution of a smile - when we stare at someone and they smile, we smile back and feel good. But if they don’t smile back we feel uncomfortable.

- If a submissive monkey wants to check out a dominant one, it will bare its teeth, because a direct stare is an aggressive signal. Baring teeth is a peace signal. 

Pratfall humor - we’ve evolved to laugh at others tragedy because in primitive time when a tribe ran from a predator, the slowest man in the tribe or the one who fell would be eaten. For everyone else this death would occur as a huge relief, and so all humor arises from escaping death. 

CHAPTER 6 - JUDGING PEOPLE BY THEIR COVERS

Women are attracted to deep, male voices. Low voices correlate with testosterone levels, and so women are triggered by men’s reproductive potential by the cadence of their voice. 

Like in the wizard of oz, there is a man or woman hiding behind the curtain of everyone’s persona. Because it takes people being comfortable with you to draw back the curtains on who they really are, we often use superficial qualities, voice, face, expression, posture and other nonverbals to mold the judgments we make about people. 

CHAPTER 7 - SORTING PEOPLE AND THINGS

Everything we encounter in this world is unique, but we wouldn’t function very well if we saw things that way. We don’t have time/bandwidth to observe/consider every detail of everything. Instead we employ a few traits to assign something a category and then judge that object/person based on that category rather than the thing itself. 

This is how we are able to expedite reactions. Evolution designed us this way because it was adaptive to categorize. Those who treated everything as individual were eaten by bears while still deciding whether this particularly fuzzy creature was as dangerous as the one that ate uncle bob.

Putting things in groups affects our categorization of them. 

Walter Lippmann invented the “stereotype.” He recognized stereotypes came from cultural exposure. His was an era in which mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, and the new medium of film, were distributing ideas and information to audiences larger and more far-flung that had ever before been possible. They made available to the public an unprecedentedly wide array of experiences of the world, without providing an accurate picture. Movies provided stock caricatures of peoples. 

We’re more likely to call out a shoplifter if they’re black and poorly dressed than we are 

Implicit Association Test (IAT) - Associating men with science and women with art

People are asked to associate men with science and women with art and the test measures how long it takes testers to make the connection. Then they switch the rules and ask testers to associate women with science and men with art and what they find is they take a lot longer to make this association because it doesn't fit as well with their internal associations. 

The idea is that if you have implicit pro-white anti-black associations, it will take you longer to sort words and images when you have to connect positive words with black images and negative words with white images. Even many black people score with this valence. 

Although you may think your evaluation of someone else is rational and deliberate, it is heavily informed by automatic, unconscious processes. 

Damage the VMPC and gender stereotyping disappears. 

Abraham Lincoln was a racist

CHAPTER 8 - IN GROUPS AND OUTGROUPS 

Messages meant to condemn socially undesirable norms often invite counterproductive behavior.

We are highly invested in feeling different from one another, almost to a self-sabotaging degree.

The more people in different defined in-groups find it advantageous to work together, the less they discriminate against one another.

CHAPTER 9 - FEELINGS

Our character is dynamic and changing and we all have many identities. Hormones, circumstance and environment affect how we behave. We act differently when in a good mood than when in a bad one. We act differently eating with our boss than we do when with subordinates. 

1958 Surgeons experimented on patients with chest pain. In some, they tied off arteries, in others, they didn’t. Both experienced the same amount of relief from pain - Knowledge of our feelings, even physical ones, is so tenuous that we can’t even reliably know when we are experiencing excruciating pain. 

If emotions are constructed from limited data rather than direct perception, similar to the way vision and memory are constructed, then as with perception and memory, there must be circumstances when the way the mind fills in the gaps in the data results in “getting it wrong” like experiencing arousal for no apparent reason and attributing it to the circumstance rather than something unexplained (the girl on the bridge study)

The left hemisphere is the talker and it is a deceptive one. It will make up answers when it doesn’t know. The left hemisphere cannot handle the unknown.

People must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness. 

Confabulation refers to falsifying memories when they aren’t there to retrieve, but we do the same thing with our feelings. 

When you come up with an explanation for your feelings and behavior, your brain searches your mental database of cultural norms and picks something plausible. 

When asked how we felt, or how we feel, we tend to reply with descriptions or predictions that conform to a set of standard reasons, expectations, and cultural and societal explanations for a given feelings. 

- Accurate introspection makes use of our private knowledge about ourselves, whereas identifying a generic, social-and-cultural norms explanation as the source of our feelings doesn’t. 

Spilling coffee will engender someone to you if they believe you’re smarter than them. 

Evolution didn’t design the brain to understand itself, it designed it to survive. 

We can use our minds to sometimes pierce our own cognitive illusions. We must also understand that if our mind skews something, it often does so for a reason.

CHAPTER 10 - SELF

The stronger the threat to feeling good about yourself, the greater the tendency to view reality through a distorting lens. 

Humans have causal arrows that go from belief to evidence, not vice versa.