Reviewer: Maria K.
Hi, I'm going to talk today about the unconscious mind
and how it affects your behavior and your perception of the world,
especially the social world.
So I should start by defining what I mean by the unconscious.
And what scientists today mean by unconscious processes
are processes that occur, first of all, with no effort on your part -
at least no conscious effort - and they're automatic.
You're not aware of them.
You don't need any willpower to create them,
and they're more or less beyond your control.
As a result, we don't really understand what's influencing us in many ways,
and we often can't avoid the behaviors that it produces.
But this is not the Freudian unconscious, so let me make that clear.
The Freudian unconscious is the concept of the unconscious
that is hidden from you for motivational or emotional reasons
and it can be revealed through introspection or through therapy.
But the modern idea of the unconscious is much different from that.
It's something that evolved evolutionarily to help us navigate our world,
our perceptual world, our social world,
and it takes place in parts of your brain
that are inherently inaccessible to your conscious mind.
And the field I'm going to talk about is called social neuroscience.
Social neuroscience is really a combination of three fields.
Traditionally, we have social psychology,
which is the field of the psychology of how people interact with each other,
and cognitive psychology, which is the science of how we think.
But in the mid-1990s, a new field grew up called neuroscience.
Neuroscience is largely based on a new technology,
many new technologies, but in particular one has been dominant,
and that's called fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging,
which is a bit of a mouthful,
but you may be familiar with MRI from medical testing,
which gives you a nice image of your internal organs.
Well, fMRI has that word "functional" in front of it
because it also tells, when you do it of the brain,
what part of brain is at work.
Here you can see, for instance.
It's totally revolutionized psychology
because the modern and social neuroscience, or psychology,
that's grown up from this is not only based on studies of behavior
but connects those studies to what's going on in the brain.
So it makes the concepts much more concrete
and makes them to much more of a hard science.
I'm going to give you one example of fMRI and how it works,
or the results that it can achieve.
This is a study done at Berkeley,
where subjects were shown different slides,
and you can see four of the slides here.
These subjects were looking at these slides on goggles
while they were laying in an fMRI machine.
The scientists took the data from their brain -
not the data from the slides, but purely the readings from their brain -
from their visual cortex and from other parts of the brain
that were related to the thematic nature of what they were seeing,
and they asked the computer to reconstruct the slides that the people were seeing -
a kind of mind reading.
That computer took all this data
and then looked at a database that had 6 million images
and picked the ones that were closest.
As you can see, it was very close,
not just in the layout and the physical data of the slides,
but thematically, it was really a kind of mind reading.
So I'm going to talk about today the unconscious mind in two areas.
One is our physical perception and the other is our social perception.
My real point here is that we create our image of other people,
of social situations, business, financial situations,
using not only our conscious thought but our unconscious mind.
I'm going to start by illustrating that in sensory perception,
partly because sensory perception
is much more dramatic and easy to illustrate in a talk like this
and partly because the ways that we reconstruct reality from limited data
are analogous in sensory perception and in social perception.
I want you to come away thinking that our perceptions,
both our visual, our auditory perceptions
and our memories and our social perceptions,
are all not literally what's out there,
but they're something constructed by our brain
from what's really out there plus many other things,
such as the context, expectation and even desire.
I want you to come away thinking that the way we experience the world
is largely driven by this unconscious processing.
Here's an example.
This is what you perceive when you look at a road, let's say.
Now, this is not really what's hitting your retina.
The data that's hitting your retina is much more fuzzy; it looks like this.
The yellow dot has been added just to show where the person was looking.
The black dot wasn't added.
It's where the optic nerve attaches to the retina, and there's no data at all.
So your eye takes this kind of fuzzy data
and without any effort and automatically and without any control on your part
turns it into that, into something that's very clear.
Let me illustrate that more specifically with this slide.
If you look at this, you see a checkerboard,
and you probably see the rectangle with the B in it -
it looks like a white square -
and the rectangle with the A in it looks like a black square.
But I'm going to tell you right now,
the truth is that A and B are identical,
so the actual physical light emanating from A and B, that you see on the screen,
are identical.
The square B is the same color as the square A.
So I want you now try and have your conscious mind override that.
I said it's automatic and you can't control it.
I want you to look at that and see B as the same color as A.
And you'll find that you can't do that.
Now, why do you see B as being lighter than A?
It's the context.
Your unconscious mind is taking the context of this photo
and making you see B as a white square and A as a black square.
And you can call it an optical illusion, but it's a gift to you
because you don't want to go through life taking in the actual literal physical data
and stopping every few seconds to figure out what it means
and to reconstruct this pattern from the data of light and dark.
In case you don't trust me, think I'm just making this up,
let me take the context away.
So watch the screen, and you'll see what happens to A and B
when I pull the context of the checkerboard away.
So now without the context, you can see that A and B are the same.
Thank you!
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I could, if I had more than 18 minutes, but I can't.
So this is a picture of Barack Obama, who you may recognize.
This is to illustrate the social component of your mental processing.
When you look at these two pictures of Obama,
they probably both look like Obama upside down and fairly normal.
But our social perceptions, our social interactions,
are extremely important to us,
and so our brain operates largely to help us with our social perception.
These pictures are actually very different,
they're not really very similar,
but your social perception is not really working in full speed
because he's upside down,
and we are not made to see people upside down -
maybe if you're a yoga instructor and stand on your head -
but most of us don't, so we don't notice that.
But look what happens when I turn them over.
So if you were to see this fellow on the street,
you go, "Whoa, looks a little like Obama, but something happened."
(Laughter)
Maybe that's how he'll look after the election race.
(Laughter)
If you see this fellow, you'll see a normal human being.
Well, now your social part of your brain is interpreting this for you,
and it's doing it automatically.
Let me turn them over again and see what happens.
So you see how that works?
The effect kind of disappears when he's upside down
and comes back when he's right side up.
(Laughter)
Now let me show you another example, in hearing,
just to show you this isn't just the way that our visual processing works,
but our hearing also.
We take the auditory data that comes into our ears,
and just as our brain plays games with us to construct an image and vision,
it does the same thing in audio.
Listen to this song you may recognize.
It's by Led Zeppelin - "Stairway to Heaven."
And it's not playing. One more time.
(Music: Led Zeppelin, "Stairway to Heaven")
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now.
It's just a spring clean for the May Queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run,
there's still time ...
This song probably sounds pretty normal to you,
and you can decode mentally
the eight or ten lines that are here in the song played forward.
And now, in a second, I'm going to play it for you backwards.
Listen to it backwards.
I want you to see,
Is Led Zeppelin clever enough to create an audio file
that makes sense both forwards and when played backwards?
(Backwards music: "Stairway to Heaven")
(Incomprehensible lyrics)
So now you've heard some lines of the song played backwards.
And you think if I gave you paper, you could write down the lines?
Or does it sound like gibberish?
I think it sounds to people like gibberish.
This is because it really is gibberish.
But this gibberish that comes into your brain
can be transformed into something
by helping your unconscious mind have a little context.
So I'm going to play it again with some words.
And just as the checkerboard looked different
when I took the squares away and put them in the context,
this song is going to sound different to you backwards
now that I played it with the context.
So please read along.
(Music)
[Oh. Here's to my sweet Satan.
The one whose little path would make me sad
whose power is Satan.
He'll give you, give you 666.
There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer,
sad Satan.]
So now we have two versions of reality.
The physics of it is the same -
you had the same audio the first time and this time,
but your perception is totally different
because now your mind has taken this and constructed something out of it.
To show you again that it's automatic and you can't avoid it,
and I'm sure you understand that it's been effortless,
I'm going to play it again.
Watch the words again, listen to it,
but hear it the way you heard it the first time
and not hear the words, just hear the gibberish, okay?
(Backwards music: "Stairway to Heaven")
So you couldn't avoid it now,
because once you've heard it, you're spoiled.
Because of this, some people actually think they're hearing messages,
subliminal messages, in backwards song,
but it's not really there.
If you go to sceptics.com, Michael Shermer's group,
you can see some discussions about how this is really false.
What I want to get onto now - I want to go to social perception.
The point is that all these same tricks
that your mind plays to create our visual and our auditory perception
also work in social perception.
One of the things our brains use to create a social perception, an image,
is appearance.
People are inherently very social animals.
We couldn't have survived as a species without social cooperation,
and, indeed, when scientists study it today,
they find that people with a low amount of social context,
with a small social network,
are at much higher health risks
than people who have a large social network.
In fact, having a very small social network
is as big a health risk as heavy smoking or obesity.
In this study, scientists gathered together people,
two groups of people,
and they showed them political data on two candidates -
a Republican and a Democrat.
The data was not only pure data on what they believed
but also a picture of the two, of each candidate.
To one group, they showed the Democrat in a photo that looked more competent
and the Republican in a less competent, less flattering photo,
and the other group, they switched it.
Not beauty, a look of competence.
The only difference between the two groups was they were seeing the same data
but a different view of the candidate,
and the question was, How much does this affect their voting?
The answer is it amounted to a vote swing of 14%.
So by switching the photos to being more confident versus less,
it was a 14% vote swing, which is enough to swing most elections,
and that's a very dramatic evidence.
But of course, it was in the laboratory, so what about the real world?
Fortunately, a psychologist at Princeton University
decided to test this out in the real world.
He gathered pairs of head shots
of the Democratic and the Republican candidates
in dozens of races for governorships and for Congress.
He brought hundreds of people into a laboratory,
and he showed them these pairs of photos and asked them
purely to judge which person looked more competent in each case.
He told them, "If you recognize one of the candidates, don't vote.
We're just looking at these photos of people
and picking who looks more competent."
Then he took a bold step,
and he predicted the outcome of each of these elections
based purely on who was voted more competent looking.
And the question is, How successful was he?
If competence had no effect, he would be 50% successful,
but he was 70% successful.
So 70% of the cases,
the more competent-looking person won the election.
Another thing that our brains use, our unconscious minds,
to fill in our social perception is touch.
I said that people are inherently very social animals.
In fact, all these primates - I'm showing four different kinds of primates
engaged in social touching behavior.
The non-human primates tend to touch each other for hours a day.
It's something they need physically to clean themselves,
but that would be accomplished in 10, 20 minutes a day,
yet they touch each other for hours a day
because touch helps create a sense of bonding and social cooperation.
In fact, scientists have recently found that people have specialized nerves,
especially in the forearms and the face,
that seem to be there just to transmit the social pleasure of touching.
So the question is, as we form our view of the world,
What kind of context does this add?
How does this affect our judgement of the world
whether or not we're being touched?
A group of French scientists, of course, did this interesting experiment.
They hired a few very handsome young Frenchmen
to stand on a street corner in Northern France
and proposition all the single young women who walked by.
They stood there, and they read the same script -
this is the translation of the script - to all the women.
They gave their name, asked for the women's phone number.
But to half of the women,
they gave a very light half-second touch on the elbow or the shoulder.
And to the other half, they didn't touch at all.
In exit interviews - they intercepted the women later -
most of them didn't even remember having been touched.
But did this signal affect the context of how they viewed the person
and the degree to which they would agree to a date?
And the answer is yes: it doubled it, from 10% to 20%.
This has been repeated in many other contexts.
For instance, waiters get higher tips if they briefly touch the customers,
and people taking surveys get more people to agree to take the survey on the street
and take some time out,
and in many other areas.
Now, normally when I explain these ideas,
I like to do a little experiment on the group, but it wasn't possible here.
so I'll just tell you about the experiment.
I ask people to look at this hotel room and this hotel, and I give them some data.
I tell them it's in Tahiti,
and it's a one bedroom, a little one bedroom cottage, etc.
I ask them what they would expect to pay for the room in Tahiti.
I get very dramatic results,
but I ask the first group - I divide them into two groups -
I ask the first group, before I ask them to tell me what the room costs,
I ask them this question:
Does this room cost more than $5,500 a night?
And the second group, before I ask them to write what the room costs,
I ask them this question:
Does it cost more than $55 a night?
Now, from the data they'd seen,
it's pretty clear the room is not $5,500 a night,
not anywhere near that,
and that it's a lot more than $55 a night.
So you would think these are throwaway questions.
But actually, these questions exercise a certain subliminal effect
on the audience.
And the ones who, by the way, saw this question
did not see this and vice versa.
So they only saw the one in the group that I assigned them to.
The question is,
How does this context affect their actual assessment of the room,
their perception of what that room is worth?
Here's the answer from several groups that I've done.
So typically, they'll guess around $1,000 if they saw the higher question first,
and they'll guess around $200 to $300 if they saw the lower question.
So this simple throwaway question
provides the context that changes their perception of the room,
just like the checkerboard provided the context
and the words in the backward song provided the context.
So let me just end the talk with this quote by Carl Jung:
"These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us
may seem to play little part in our daily lives,
but they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts."
Thank you.
(Applause)