Leonard Mlodinow is the author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, one of the plethora of books lately exploring how little control we have over what our brain is doing. The other entries in this field include Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and Michael Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.
Mlodinow spoke at the RSA recently - the first video (I highly recommend the podcast, link included below, for the full conversation) - and as part of the Authors@Google series (a longer talk on his part). Both videos are presented below.
Subliminal: The new unconscious and what it teaches us about ourselves
Watch academic and bestselling author Leonard Mlodinow as he unravels the mysteries of the unconscious mind, and shows its remarkable and unexpectedly powerful effect on all aspects of our lives.
Listen to the podcast of the full event including audience Q&A.
Mlodinow also spoke at Google a while back, where he offered a much longer talk than the RSA posted.
Leonard Mlodinow, "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior"
Every aspect of our mental lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us. Over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the unconscious, or subliminal, workings of the mind. This explosion of research has led to a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live. As a result, scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that how we experience the world--our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment--is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed.
Mlodinaw seems to be conflating several kinds of unconscious processes. The classical example is language. We have no access to most of the rules that we use in speech formation and comprehension. Likewise, we have no access to the processes that construct our view of the sensory world from raw data impinging on the retina.
ReplyDeleteBut unconscious social processes are a little different. We are capable of becoming aware of how certain looks in a photograph sway our opinion of the person, and we are also capable of being aware of how being touched makes us inclined to be friendlier to another person. After all, we can if asked judge photographs according to how confident they appear, and we can, if so instructed, remember if someone touched us. We are also capable of making a connection between a confident appearing demeanor and a favorable opinion, and between being touched and having a warm feeling. So in these cases, the problem is lack of awareness of something we are capable of being aware of, rather than lack of awareness of something we are incapable of being aware of.
Being unaware of things we are capable of being aware of is just another way of describing sleep, the ordinary state of consciousness. Higher consciousness brings processes like these into awareness, but it does not bring, e.g., language processing or sensory construction of the world into awareness. The latter are truly subconscious, below the level of ordinary awareness. They remain as refractory to higher consciousness as they are to ordinary consciousness. Social processes might better be described as superconscious, above the level of ordinary awareness. It’s not so much that they are buried deep in the individual brain as that they are out there in relationships we have with others. They are processes critical to maintaining social organizations, and as individuals we are only imperfectly aware of them. But higher consciousness transcends social organizations, and in so doing brings these processes into awareness.
Or better still, every process has a sub- and super- component. The workings of language rules are subconscious processes. But the effects that certain words have on us—another topic discussed by Mlodinaw—are superconscious. While we can’t access why we feel the way we do about particular words (including the most rudimentary feeling, that a word is grammatical or not), we are capable of becoming aware that we do have these feelings. Likewise, we can’t access why touch generates positive emotions, but we are capable of being aware that there is a connection.