Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
Five frogs were sitting on a log.
One decided to jump.
How many are left?
Story to be shortly continued.
The brain gives rise to all our mental experiences.
It causes our emotions, our actions, our decisions and thoughts.
But it's not this homogeneous processor
that uses predictable computations to come up with logical actions.
Instead, it's likely to be a dual brain
or a dual processor.
With the first system is a conscious, logical one,
and the other is a reflexive, nonconscious one.
So, the conscious brain is logical, within our awareness, intentional,
but it asks you for two things:
time - because it's slow -
and it asks you for your willingness to exert effort.
In return, it will make you feel like you're in control of what you're doing -
somewhat efficient.
The other mind is the nonconscious brain:
it is reflexive;
it's fast, outside your awareness,
but it's effortless,
and it causes all your mental reflexes.
We all like to think that we're in control 100% of the time - I know I do -
but many studies in the field of psychology have shown otherwise:
that actually the hero,
the hidden persuader,
is not the logical, conscious mind,
but it's rather the reflexive, nonconscious mind
that's running the show most of the time.
Paradoxically, when I first started studying the field of psychology,
the first lesson that I learned was:
we are in control;
we just need to decide, to make the decision, the intent.
And I'm sure all of you have heard the cliche
that nobody can make you feel inferior or embarrassed
unless you give them permission to.
But words have power
because saying that is kind of like saying,
"Upon our orders,
our logical mind is going to dress our egos
in a shield that protects us against painful and hurtful words."
Unfortunately though, it comes in a bit too late.
After the nonconscious mind has shrunken our egos -
as a result of listening to these words -
to a size that's too small for the in-preparation logical shield.
Words have power.
Words have started wars.
Words have spread peace.
Words have pushed him to attempt suicide,
but words have prevented him from jumping off a bridge.
Words have made her give up on school,
but words have paved a trajectory of possibilities for her.
Words have power
because they activate mindsets and scripts that we all do and have about ourselves,
that are consistent with the words that are being said.
Why? Because then the nonconscious mind can use self-fulfilling prophecy,
finding mindsets that match these words because it likes the easy way out,
and the easy way out is to make a coherent story
that's absent or doesn't have exception,
because making a complex story that's full of exception
is so much harder to do, and it requires effort.
Consider this study:
They had participants come in
and said, "Here are some words to play with.
I want you to arrange them in a way that's grammatically meaningful" -
sentences like "Let's play bingo."
Now, some of the participants, they were primed,
they played with some words that had to do with elderly-related words:
"Bingo," "Florida," "gray."
The other participants didn't.
And then they said, "Thank you for your participation in this experiment.
Do you mind doing just one more thing?
Just walk down the hall to this other office for some unrelated thing."
Now, the participants didn't know,
but the researchers were measuring how long it will take them
to walk down the hall.
And as it turned out,
the participants that were primed with elderly-related words
walked slower than the other group.
So the words can affect our actions.
Now, the words around us can have priming effects
that are a bit more costly than walking slowly.
For example,
for Asian-American participants, they gave them a math test.
But then when they were reminded, before the test, of their ethnicity,
their performance in math went up.
When they were reminded of their gender, female,
their performance went down.
Okay?
So words have power.
Words have power even if you're going to use them as a metaphor.
Because what the brain is going to do,
it's going to react to the psychological use of the word
by actually activating the sensory areas in the brain
that represent the physical experience of these words.
For example, when we describe someone as "soft-hearted,"
the word "soft" actually activates sensory neurons
that are activated when we touch a smooth, soft object.
When we describe a situation as "rough," a different group of neurons
that are activated during the sensory, the physical feeling of rough surface
is going to be activated.
So we inherited kind of stories and scripts from our previous ancestors
that probably says something like:
soft and furry is comfortable and safe, and rough surface tends to be painful.
And thus, we stayed consistently and linguistically okay with that story
and kept using it psychologically to mean painful and comfortable.
Now, the brain is not just a sensation-translator machine;
it also does perception.
So we can, I guess, define perception as the story that the brain makes,
given the sensory input it gathers from the environment.
Now, this perception or this story
does not need to be accurate or realistic or complete -
and in fact, it's often not -
as long as it serves the nonconscious mind
and is consistent with the goals of the logical mind.
Some of these perceptual things that we gather from the environment
are automatic and outside our consciousness.
So for example, if I ask you to name the color of the words -
Okay? Pretty easy to do.
Now, if I ask you to look at the words and don't read it -
don't process the color, just look at it, don't do anything with it.
Impossible.
Because your nonconscious brain,
when you look at a word, whether you like it or not,
it's going to make you automatically read it,
regardless of how many instructions I give your logical mind.
Now, let me invite you to a match
between your consciousness and your nonconsciousness
in this next task, the Stroop test.
Here the color, as you will notice, is inconsistent with the word.
So I'm going to invite you, again, to not read the word
but rather name the color.
Go for it.
Much harder isn't it? Much harder.
Why? Because your nonconscious mind
is fast, effortless - it takes the easy way out to perception.
And the easy way out is to read the word.
And then you appeal to your conscious mind
and say, "But I want to follow the instructions.
I don't want to make mistakes.
I'll give you what you want - you want time and effort" -
I'll give it to you.
So then you slow down your reaction time so you don't make mistakes,
and you make quite a bit of effort to get this right.
So, you're thinking, "Okay, the Stroop Test.
We don't live in a lab. Does this happen in the outside world?"
That's really what you care about.
And so let me take you to Social Etiquette 101.
We all learned "Do not judge people."
But here's the thing:
This is very similar instruction
to "Look at a word, don't process it,
don't read it, don't name its color,
don't think anything about it."
Unless your eyes are closed, it's impossible to do.
Judgment is a nonconscious, automatic, reflexive thing that the brain does.
When you meet people, you are going to make judgments.
These are going to be expectations and thoughts
that are going to be consistent with mindsets that are preprogrammed.
And of course, of these mindsets that have to do with race,
they're called "stereotypes."
Now, all professionals or at least most of them,
have to attend some sort of workshops and trainings
to make sure they battle things like racism and prejudice and the like.
Here is the thing:
Most of these workshops
target and persuade the logical, conscious mind,
but they don't target the nonconscious mind.
Most of these miscomputations, though,
are actually reflexes of the nonconscious mind.
So perhaps at best, these workshops will be efficient
in reducing deliberate actions of racism or prejudice,
but what about implicit ones?
We know that implicit kind of attitudes affect judgment and decisions,
and we know they exist.
Why? Because fMRI tells us so.
Numerous fMRI studies show that when we put participants in a scanner
and we expose them to faces of people of different races, different skin tone,
that what we see - we see that there is differential amygdala activation
to the different races.
What is the amygdala important for?
Well, the amygdala is a brain part
that's activated or processes fear and threats.
Interestingly, the amygdala activation
is correlated with implicit measures of these negative attitudes toward others
but not explicit measures.
So when we give people questionnaires about their attitudes toward other groups,
and they just pass with flying colors,
and it's not that they're lying in the questionnaire,
that's where their logical conscious brain is providing on that piece of questioning.
For any kind of efforts to be successful, it has to wed both.
Now you might be thinking,
"Well, I kind of want to know where I stand
on my implicit judgments towards people, because I thought I loved everybody
including trees.
So what should I do?
And an fMRI scanner did not exactly come with my furniture set."
No worries.
There is a behavior test that you can take online
that's called the race "Implicit Association Test."
Go ahead and expose yourself,
probably privately because you'll be shocked.
I personally would urge people who do the training at these workshops
to give implicit tests that are reputable and have shown reliability
to really show that they worked.
I would urge that hiring committees would take such tests into account
because decisions for a student to get accepted or not,
for someone to get hired or not,
will be affected not only by explicit
but also by implicit kind of attitudes as well.
Right? So, for any program to succeed,
it must appeal to both, the conscious and the nonconscious mind.
Now, one program that has miserably failed,
particularly in the U.S.,
is weight-loss program.
And it's a paradox
because in 2015
companies whose main business was weight-loss services
brought in more than six billion dollars.
But we're still overweight.
So what's going on?
It seems that the only thing that's getting smaller
is the bank account of dieters.
Now, many of these diet pills claim that they reduce appetite,
but here is the logical problem with that: is that there is no logic.
Because it then makes a kind of like a logical relationship
between two questions:
"Are you hungry?" and "Do you want to eat?"
And the nonconscious system can say,
"I'm not hungry, but yes, I want to eat."
While the logical system will say,
"No, I am not hungry. No thanks, I don't want to eat."
And the nonconscious mind will keep kind of quieting the logical system,
particularly for people who restrict their diet.
Consider this study:
They had people come in, and some people were offered no food,
others were offered one milkshake so that they were moderately full,
and others were offered this giant milkshake, so they were really full.
Then after they did that,
they said "Do you mind rating three flavors of ice-cream?"
The participants don't really know what's going on,
but what's going on is that the researchers want to know
how much ice-cream they will eat
as a function of being not full, a little bit full or very full,
and taking into account whether you are a dieter or not.
For the non-dieters, they did the logical thing;
when they didn't have anything to eat, they ate more ice-cream.
When they were full, they ate less ice-cream - very logical.
For the dieters, though, what they did was the opposite of that logical script.
So for the first group was the non-dieters.
Now, the dieters - what they did is the opposite of logic:
when they weren't offered food,
when they were hungry, they had the least amount of calories.
The more full they were, the more calories they had.
It's as though the nonconscious mind
had this reflex saying, "Violate your diet. Go all the way."
You know we all did it. Okay?
So, again, for weight-loss programs to work,
they have to really appeal to both the conscious and the nonconscious mind.
I think that we should try to implicitly program very early in life,
like why not have cartoons or more cartoons
where the main character is Broccola, a broccoli that is affable.
And she has all of these helpers that are vegetables of all colors
and so attractive, and kids are fascinated by them.
Don't tell that can't be done
because if you can get kids to be interested in one-eyed characters,
you can get them to like Broccola.
I mean, I would rather have a vegetable monster than a cookie monster.
Why not?
So, by now it's become clear
that if your two minds are going to wrestle,
that it's probably the reflexive, nonconscious one
is the one that is going to typically win,
for three reasons:
One is that it's fast - it comes on the scene much faster.
Two is that the logical mind requires effort,
and we are lazy thinkers.
In fact, we are so lazy and this is so prevalent
that psychologists came up with a law.
It's called "The Law of Least Effort."
And some social psychologists have even called us "cognitive misers."
Three is that when brain damage happens - stroke, whatever happens -
the last thing to be compromised is the nonconscious mind.
So now the question becomes, "Can we do anything about this?"
Can we reprogram our nonconscious mind
or are we just going to be at the whim of these reflexes
we can't do anything about.
The answer is "yes, yes and yes."
Just like the ads that show up, the annoying ads that show up,
but they're tailored to you, though,
because they take into account your own history;
sometimes, they're embarrassing.
And what I want to say, my dear sisters and brothers,
in the Law of Least Effort,
that you have successfully already preconditioned and pre-programmed
your nonconscious mind to produce reflexes called habits.
If we can train the brain to use brainwaves to play video games;
if we can successfully train the brain of cortically-blind people
to see, identify correctly, objects they can't see
using other types of energy like sound;
if we can use the brain and train it to use brainwaves
to move prosthetic arms,
you can recondition your nonconscious mind
so it's reflexing in your favor,
not against you.
Oh yeah.
What happened to that one frog that wanted - that decided - to jump?
Nothing, it didn't.
There's still five frogs on the log.
Thank you.
(Applause)