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March 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:57
1602 Yale Article - The Definitions of and Latest Research on the Unconscious

A fascinating article - and scientific evidence for the MEcosystem.

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Alrighty, this is Steph, of course.
This is an article which I'm reviewing for a variety of reasons, which I thought would be worth chatting with you about.
It's called The Unconscious Mind by John A. Barg and Ezequiel Morsella from Yale University.
The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a, quote, real conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart.
I'm going to be commenting about this, but I'll do the comment in an outrageous Persian accent.
Right, so this is, you know, we have the organized, the stereotype is the sort of organized, deliberative, Goal-oriented and planning-based conscious mind, and then the sort of chaotic and id-based and seething unconscious mind.
This is empirically proven pretty solidly to be a false dichotomy.
So he says, the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than its counterpart.
He continues, or they continue this, quote, conscious-centric bias is due in part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal.
And he goes into this in a little bit more detail, so hang on.
We review the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature.
This research has demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems, perceptual, evaluative, and motivational.
From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind, that action precedes reflection.
Actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind, that action precedes reflection.
We'll get this in more detail.
Now, when he's talking about phylogeny and ontogeny, phylogeny is a study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms, species, or populations, and it's discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices.
So it's evolution among various groups of organisms, ontogeny, Describes the origin and the development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form.
So not evolution, intergenerational evolution, but the evolution that can occur within an organism's single lifetime.
This means evolving from a simple or two more complex forms, such as the early human brain to the late human brain, but also more importantly, given brain plasticity, it's the adaptation of the human organism, particularly the brain, to its surrounding social and particularly cultural circumstances.
To continue with the article, these guys write, Contemporary perspectives on the unconscious mind are remarkably varied.
In cognitive psychology, unconscious information processing has been equated with subliminal information processing, which raises the question, how good is the mind at extracting meaning from stimuli of which one is not consciously aware?
So cognitive psychology deals with core beliefs that are unconscious.
So a belief about myself. I'm bad.
I'm lovable. I'm entitled.
I'm owed stuff or whatever.
So people have these core beliefs, which they're unconscious of, and they only can find out these core beliefs.
The philosophy of self, as I would sort of put it, through rigorous introspection and a comparing of actions, behavior, and outcomes with goals, right?
So if you constantly have a goal to do X and you do the opposite of X, then clearly you have...
That's a very brief and, of course, amateur description of cognitive psychology.
To continue, because subliminal strength stimuli are relatively weak and of low intensity, by definition, the mental processes they drive are necessarily minimal and unsophisticated.
And so these studies have led to the conclusion that the powers of the unconscious mind are limited.
And that the unconscious is rather dumb, right?
So, if you equate the unconscious with subliminal processing, and subliminal processing is sort of, by definition, not goal-oriented, kind of weak, right?
So, you know, you see the things where people are suggested, auto-suggestion makes people do things, I mean, from the ridiculous, like, pretend you're a chicken, to the more sophisticated, then that's pretty weak.
It's pretty weak tea when it comes to the brain's powers.
So, if you equate the unconscious with merely subliminal information processing, then the unconscious looks rather dumb.
And this is, of course, not the guy's perspective.
Or mine, of course. To continue, social psychology has approached the unconscious from a different angle.
The traditional focus has been on mental processes of which the individual is unaware, not on stimuli of which one is unaware, right?
So not information that's coming in through the senses which are unaware, right?
Like you see a pretty girl out of the corner of your eye, you find yourself sexually aroused, you don't know where it came from because you don't remember the girl, or boy, or sheep, depends which area of Scotland you're from.
But they're talking not about the...
They're talking about the mental processes to which we are unaware, not just external stimuli of which we're unaware.
To continue, over the past 30 years, there has been much research on the extent to which people are aware of the important influences on their judgments and decisions and of the reasons for their behavior.
This research, in contrast with cognitive psychology tradition, has led to the view that the unconscious mind is a pervasive, powerful influence over such higher mental processes.
And of course, the Freudian model of the unconscious is still with us and continues to exert an influence over how many people think of the unconscious, especially outside of psychological science.
Freud's model of the unconscious as the primary guiding influence over daily even today is more specific and detailed than any to be found in contemporary cognitive or social psychology.
However, the data from which Freud developed the model were individual case studies involving abnormal thought and behavior.
Not the rigorous scientific experimentation on generally applicable principles of human behavior that inform the psychological models, right?
So, the Freudian model, and I've argued for this before, the Freudian model of the mind is based on pathology.
It would be like if the only people, if you were an alien and you came to Earth, and the only human beings that you were able to study were those dying of cancer in an oncology ward, then you would not end up with a very accurate view of human nature, of the human body and of human health.
It's the same thing with Freud. To continue, over the years empirical tests have not been kind to the specifics of the Freudian model, though in broad brush terms the cognitive and social psychological evidence does support Freud as to the existence of unconscious mentation and its potential to impact judgments and behavior.
Regardless of the fate of his specific model, Freud's historical importance in championing the powers To continue, how one views the power and influence of the unconscious relative to conscious modes of information processing largely depends on how one defines the unconscious, of course.
Until quite recently, in the history of science and philosophy, mental life was considered entirely or mainly conscious in nature, e.g.
Descartes' Cogito and John Locke's mind-first cosmology.
The primacy of conscious thought for how people historically have thought about the mind is illustrated today in the word used to describe other kinds of processes.
All are modifications or qualifications of the word conscious, i.e., Unconscious, preconscious, subconscious, non-conscious.
Meanwhile, there has been high consensus regarding the quality of conscious thought processes.
They are intentional, controllable, serial in nature, consumptive of limited processing resources, and accessible to awareness, i.e.
verbally reportable, right?
So you say to somebody, what are you thinking?
He's thinking about an orange. He says, I'm thinking about an orange.
And serial in nature means that you can't do lots of parallel processing.
The unconscious is fantastic at parallel processing.
At parallel processing.
Just think of the amount of processing it requires to give you a dream at night.
It's mad. And so the unconscious is incredible at parallel processing, all the way down to the fact that you can be thinking about an orange while your unconscious is taking care of your breathing or heartbeat and so on, changing your temperature if your air temperature changes.
As has often been talked about, the consciousness is like a laser and the unconscious is like a light that lights up the whole world, like the sun.
But I would say more like the consciousness is like the word processor that you're typing on and you're typing.
The unconscious is the operating system and the internet which is checking your email in the background and making sure the hard drive is running and making sure all the electricity and all that makes all that possible.
No such consensus, these guys continue, no such consensus exists yet for the unconscious.
However, because of the monolithic nature of the definition of a conscious process, if a process does not possess all the qualities of a conscious process, it is therefore not conscious, at least two different, quote, not conscious processes were studied over the course of the 20th century within largely independent research traditions that seemed barely able to notice the other's existence.
The new look research in perception involving the pre-conscious analysis of stimuli prior to the products of the analysis being furnished to conscious awareness.
And skill acquisition research involving the gain in efficiency of processes with practice over time until they become subconscious.
I'm not saying these guys are the easiest writers to interpret, but let's take a swing.
So they say there's these two independent streams of research.
The new look research in perception involving the pre-conscious analysis of stimuli prior to the products of the analysis being furnished to conscious awareness.
So, for instance, if you were beaten with sacks of bananas as a kid, and then you see a bunch of bananas, you will unconsciously feel sort of sweat and anxiety and problems and you'll feel tense and all that, and you won't really know why.
And so this is the pre-conscious analysis of stimuli prior to the products of analysis being furnished to conscious awareness.
This also happens in more benign and positive ways, in that if you touch something that's hot, the nerves will travel up your arm, the pain will travel up your arm to your spine and back down to your arm, and you will jerk your arm back before you even feel the heat.
And then it later goes to the brain at the owie, it's hot.
That's sort of one thing. And the other is you play piano until you can just play piano without even really thinking about it.
You learn how to type until you can just type without really thinking about it.
So that is stuff going from the unconscious up to consciousness, which is stimuli in your environment that you then notice or don't notice, but it still has an effect on you.
And the other is you sort of consciously want to become good at something like riding a bike or a pogo stick or whatever.
And you practice and you practice and you practice until the skills become unconscious and automatic.
So we continue. Note how the qualities of the two not-conscious processes differ.
In the New Look research, the person did not intend to engage in the process and was unaware of it.
In the Skill Acquisition research, the person did intend to engage in the process which one started was capable of running off without need of conscious guidance.
Typing and driving a car, for the experienced typist and driver respectively, are classic examples of the latter.
Both are efficient procedures that can run off outside of consciousness, but nonetheless both are intentional processes.
One doesn't sit down to type without meaning to in the first place, and the same applies to driving a car.
These and other difficulties with the monolithic all-or-nothing division of mental processes into either conscious or unconscious have resulted today in different, quote, flavors of the unconscious, different operational definitions that lead to dramatically different conclusions about the power and scope of the unconscious.
And these questions are fantastic, in my opinion.
It's really, really important that we know what the unconscious is.
And, of course, I have my own thoughts, but let's listen to the experts first.
So, they continue. We therefore oppose the cognitive psychology equation of the unconscious with subliminal information processing for several reasons.
First, this operational definition is both unnatural and unnecessarily restrictive.
Subliminal stimuli do not occur naturally.
They are by definition too weak or brief to enter conscious awareness.
Thus, it is unfair to measure the capability of the unconscious in terms of how well it processes subliminal stimuli because unconscious, like conscious, processes evolve to deal and respond to naturally occurring regular strength stimuli.
Assessing the unconscious in terms of processing subliminal stimuli is analogous to evaluating the intelligence of a fish based on its behavior out of order.
As one might expect, the operational definition of the unconscious in terms of subliminal information processing has led to the conclusion of the field that the unconscious is, well, rather dumb.
An article in a special issue of American Psychologist once asked the question, is the unconscious smart or dumb?
Because unconscious was treated as subliminal, or how smart people are when reacting to stimuli of which they are unaware, the consensus reached by the contributors and issue editors was that the unconscious is actually rather dumb, as it is capable only of highly routinized activities, and it perceives little without the aid of consciousness.
Note that while the unconscious may be dumb in regard to subliminal stimuli, it's still smarter than consciousness, which can't even tell that such stimuli have been presented.
The issue contributors concluded for the most part that although concept activation and primitive associative learning could occur unconsciously, anything complex requiring flexible responding integration of stimuli or higher mental processes could not.
Now, just to jump, I mean, of course, I don't believe that this is true of the unconscious at all.
I think the conscious is highly intelligent and highly adaptive and very current with what is happening.
You know, so when I talk to people about dreams, I sort of say, well, what happened that day?
I assume the unconscious is listening and a lot of times a hell of a lot better than the consciousness.
So these guys continue. However, the term unconscious originally had a different meaning.
The earliest use of the term in the early 1800s referred to hypnotically induced behavior in which the hypnotized subject was not aware of the causes and reasons for his or her behavior.
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin, in 1859, used the term to refer to unconscious selection processes in nature and contrasted them with the intentional and deliberate selection long engaged in by farmers and animal breeders to develop better strains of corn, fatter cows, and bullier sheep.
Freud, who credited the early hypnosis research with the original discovery of the unconscious, also used the term to refer to behavior and ideation that was not consciously intended or caused, for example, Freudian slips.
And nearly all the examples given in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Freudian book, involved unintended behavior, the source or cause of which was unknown to the individual.
In all these cases, the term unconscious referred to the unintentional nature of the behavior or process.
And the concomitant lack of awareness was not of the stimuli that provoked the behavior, but of the influence or consequence of those stimuli, right?
So we're talking here about, let's say, a man who is promiscuous, right?
He claims he's looking for love, he's looking for the one, but anytime anyone gets close to him, he'll back away at anxiety or sleep with somebody new, and that's sort of what we were talking about.
Or a Freudian slip is if your girlfriend is like your mom and you occasionally will refer to her as mom.
That's a Freudian slip. If you're not conscious of it.
They continue. Thus the use of the term unconscious was originally based on one's unintentional actions and not on one's ability to process subliminal strength information as the technology needed to present such information did not yet exist.
Right? Like Every tenth frame in a movie, that sort of Fight Club way.
And this equation of unconscious with unintentional is how unconscious phenomena have been conceptualized and studied within social psychology for the past quarter century or so.
Nisbet and Wilson's 1977 seminal article posed the question, to what extent are people aware of and able to report on the true causes of their behavior?
That's a very important question, and it's one we've talked about a lot of this show.
To what extent are people aware or able to report on the causes of their behavior?
The answer was not very well.
See also Wilson and Brecht, 1994, which was surprising and controversial at the time, given the overall assumption of many that judgments and behavior, the higher mental processes, were typically consciously intended and thus available to conscious awareness.
If these processes weren't available to awareness, then perhaps they weren't consciously intended.
And if they weren't consciously intended, then how in fact were they?
This latter question motivated the social psychology research into priming and automaticity effects which investigated the ways in which the higher mental processes such as judgment and social behavior could be triggered and then operate in the absence of conscious intent and means.
This is very important for persuading people about the truth and philosophy and so on.
We continue. Consequently, this research operationally defined unconscious influences in terms of a lack of awareness of influence or effects of a triggering stimulus and not of the triggering stimulus itself.
And what a difference this change in operational definition makes.
If one shifts the operational definition of the unconscious from the processing of stimuli of which one is not aware to the influences or effects of stimulus processing of which one is not aware, suddenly the true power and scope of the unconscious in daily life become apparent.
Defining the unconscious in terms of the former leads directly to the conclusion that it is dumb as dirt, whereas defining it in terms of the latter affords the opinion that it is highly intelligent And adaptive.
So let's just make sure that we understand what these guys are saying about this difference.
So if you define the unconscious as simply that which processes a triggering stimulus, it receives a triggering stimulus and you're not aware of it, right?
Like the 10th frame in a movie has a hamburger and suddenly you're hungry kind of thing.
Well, the unconscious is kind of dumb.
It's just receptive, right? But if you define the unconscious Of a lack of awareness of the influences or effects of a triggering stimulus.
And not just the triggering stimulus itself, that's a world of difference.
Because the one is really at the perceptual levels and process anything, just sort of triggers, you know, like it's Pavlovian.
But, like, you ring a bell and you train the dogs to get hungry and to salivate when you ring a bell.
But if it's a whole process that you're not aware of, then the processing that is being described in the unconscious is much, much, much larger, more to happen, much, much...
To continue, this expanded and enhanced view of the unconscious is also more compatible with theory and evidence in the field of evolutionary biology than is the subliminal-only view of cognitive psychology.
As did Darwin and Freud, evolutionary biologists also think of the unconscious much more in terms of unintentional actions than unawareness of stimuli.
Unintentional actions versus unawareness of stimuli.
In his seminal work The Selfish Gene, Dawkins in 76 noted the awe-inspiring and intelligent designs in nature that arose merely through blind natural selection processes.
He called nature the blind watchmaker, the unconscious watchmaker, because there was no conscious, intentional guiding hand in producing these intelligent designs.
The natural and conscious of evolutionary biology.
Consonant with these basic assumptions in natural science, social cognition research over the past 25 years has produced a stream of surprising findings regarding complex judgmental and behavioral phenomena that operate outside of awareness.
Because the findings did not make sense given the dumb unconscious perspective of the psychological science mainstream, to wit, how could a processing system so dumb accomplish so much in the way of adaptive self-regulation?
We had to look outside of psychology to understand and their implications for the human mind.
Happily, when placed in the broader context of the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biology, the widespread discoveries of sophisticated unconscious behavior guidance systems not only make sense, they turn out to have been predicted on a priori grounds.
Genes, culture, and early learning.
Given the uncertainty of the future and the slow rate of genetic change, our genes have provided us not with fixed responses to specific events, because these cannot be anticipated with any degree of accuracy, but with general tendencies that are adaptive across local variations.
It is for this reason that evolution has shaped us to be open-ended systems.
This open-ended equality gives room for fine-tuning the newborn to local conditions.
Much of this is given to us by human culture, the local conditions, mainly social, of the world in which we happen to be born.
Dawkins noted that phenotypic plasticity enables the infant to absorb entirely automatically, quote, an already invented and largely debugged system of habits in the partly unstructured.
The gleaning of cultural knowledge is a giant step towards the adaptation to the local current environment.
Any human infant born today can be relocated immediately to any place and any culture in the world and will then adapt to and speak the language of that culture just as well as any child born there.
The cultural guides to appropriate behavior, including language, norms and values, are, quote, downloaded during early childhood development, thereby greatly reducing the unpredictability of the child's world and his or her uncertainty as to how to act and behave in it.
And I just want to point out that we are not conscious for the most part.
Most of us are not conscious of the degree to which we absorb culture, and it shapes our brains, and we replace culture with truth, right?
We replace local custom with virtue, and it becomes our identity, which is why we're so resistant to change, right?
So we're so adaptable to our culture, but we can only really adapt to our culture by considering it true.
If we remember that it's our culture, we kind of have to adapt to it.
And so the fact that we're so adaptable, in my view, is one of the things that makes us so, makes culture so damn hard to change, because people think it's just true.
And you're trying to talk people out of gravity when you're trying to talk them out of something silly like patriotism.
They continue, and it is not just overall cultural norms and values that are so readily absorbed during this early period of life.
Also absorb the particulars of the behavior and values of those closest to us, providing still finer tuning of appropriate behavior tendencies.
In a review of 25 years of infant imitation research, Meltzoff concluded that young children learn much about how to behave by mere passive imitation of fellow children and also their adult caretakers.
Infants, in particular, are wide open to such imitative tendencies, having not yet developed cognitive control structures to suppress or inhibit them.
Now, with all due respect to these learned gentlemen, this is all nonsense.
The idea that we learn culture and then we learn about the individuals closer to us could only be put forward seriously by men who have not spent a lot of time around their children where children were infants.
Of course, I mean, what does my daughter know about Canada?
What does she know about any of that sort of stuff?
She only knows Myself and my wife and a few other people, right?
So the idea that there's culture and then also there is those close to us is nonsense.
It's completely backwards. And this is the kind of stuff, I'm sure, that drives some child psychologists or infant psychologists quite mad when they see this kind of stuff, right?
Because this is not just over. We also absorb the particulars and behaviors of those closest to us, but that's where it all starts.
And culture is an infectious meme, right?
Culture and personalities, I would say personalities are an infectious meme, and we can see this with the roleplays that I've done with people in my show.
We can see that people can very easily inhabit and accurately reflect and roleplay the personalities that they grew up with very, very easily.
We can see this with writers who write about moms, or Tennessee Williams, moth women, and so on.
The personalities are infectious, and if those personalities are destructive, then you are regularly inhaling smoke when you spend time around them.
It's just going to damage you repeatedly.
You stop breathing in the smoke.
So, to continue. Unconscious goal pursuit in an open-ended system.
Genes primarily drive our behavior through motivation.
The active goal or motive is the local agent by which the genetic influence from the distant past finds expression.
Evolution works through motives and strategies.
The desired end states that we seek.
From whatever starting point in history and geographical location, the cards of fate have dealt us.
That's a little bit confusing. Let's try to figure out what they're talking about.
Okay, genes primarily drive our behavior through motivations.
That makes sense. The active goal or motive is the local agent by which the genetic influence of the distant past finds expression.
Oh, so like a sex drive, you're hungry, whatever.
Okay, fair enough. Many recent studies have now shown that unconscious goal pursuit produces the same outcomes the conscious goal pursuit does.
This is very, very important to read that.
Many recent studies have now shown that unconscious goal pursuit produces the same outcomes the conscious goal pursuit does.
The goal concept, once activated without the participant's awareness, operates over extended time periods without the person's conscious intent or monitoring to guide thought or behavior toward the goal.
For example, unobtrusive priming of the goal of cooperation causes participants playing the role of a fishing company to voluntarily put more fish back into a lake to replenish the fish population, thereby reducing their own profits, than did participants in a control condition.
So, let's just sort of make sure that you all know what that means.
A priming is when you mentally prepare or sort of quasi-program people to respond in a certain way.
So, unobtrusive priming of the goal of cooperation, so talking to people about cooperation in a very, very subtle way, or showing them movies which have slightly higher percentages of people cooperating and so on, so you're priming their unconscious, because it is unconscious, because they're not aware if this is going to change their behavior.
You prime them with the goal of cooperation, and this causes them To become more cooperative, and they're not at all aware of this, right?
So, this is all going into the unconscious, and the unconscious is taking the moral lesson, is applying the moral lesson, is modifying behavior, and they're completely conscious of it, right?
That is a lot more than just the processing of subliminal stimuli.
To continue, moreover, the qualities of the underlying process appear to be the same, as participants with interrupted unconscious goals tend to want to resume and complete a boring task even when they have more attractive alternatives, and will show more persistence on a task in the face of obstacles than do participants in control conditions.
So you have an unconscious goal that you've been primed to complete and you will want to.
You will just have an urge to complete it.
The unconscious will drive that task completion.
And this is why you can't deal with life, with goals, with changing yourself, with changing others, with becoming a better person.
You can't deal with any of that without a rigorous process of self-examination.
These features have long characterized conscious goal pursuits.
What accounts for the similarity between unconscious and conscious goal pursuit?
Given the late evolutionary arrival of conscious modes of thought and behavior, it is likely that conscious goal pursuit exact or made use of already existing unconscious motivational structure.
This is very important. Everything that we value about the consciousness, about our consciousness, is very likely to have been inherited from the unconscious.
So if we think it's great that we have goal-oriented action in our conscious, it is simply a template that is taken over from the unconscious.
So everything, I would say, just about everything that's in the conscious is taken over from the unconscious.
To continue, the open-ended nature of such unconscious goal pursuits is revealed by the fact the goal operates on whatever goal-relevant information happens to occur next in the experimental stimuli situation, superliminal, of course, which could not be known to the person beforehand, just as our genes programmed us to be capable of adapting to and thriving in local conditions far into a future that could not be anticipated in any detail.
So, sorry, that's any words there.
Subliminal simply means available to conscious, right?
So subliminal is under consciousness, subliminal is above consciousness, so it's conscious.
So what that means is that the unconscious is able to process that which is occurring within consciousness, but the reverse is so often not the case, that the consciousness is not able to process what is occurring within the unconscious mind.
And of course, right, you and I can't detect the part of us which makes our heart beat, which regulates our temperature, or whatever, feels pain.
Feels, uh, processes pain, whatever feels pain.
Like, we can feel, if we hurt our finger, we can feel our finger hurting, but we can't feel the part of our brain that feels the finger hurting.
And we can't predict what we're going to dream that night, and sometimes we can't even figure out why the hell we dreamt what we dreamt.
So if you prime somebody to the unconscious with a particular goal, the unconscious will grab that which is occurring even to the conscious mind and use that, right?
So you can reach out from the unconscious and easily access and even automatically access that which is occurring to consciousness, but the reverse is not the case, which is why the unconscious is It's so powerful, right?
The unconscious includes the ability to reference consciousness, but not the way around so often.
To continue, that the unconsciously operating goal is able to adapt to whatever happens next and use that information to advance the pursuit of the goal clearly demonstrates a level of flexibility that belies the dumb unconscious caricature in which the unconscious is said to be capable only of rigid and fixed responses.
The notion of the inflexible unconscious is also inconsistent with basic observations in the study of motor control, as highly flexible online adjustments are made unconsciously during a motor act, such as grasping a cup or blocking a soccer ball.
Social behavior as unconsciously guided by the current context.
All of this stuff is so important to understand as to why people are so resistant to philosophy.
The open-ended nature of our evolved design, these guys say, has also caused us to be highly sensitive and reactive to the present local context.
Just as evolution has given us general, quote, good tricks for survival and reproduction, and culture and early learning have fine-tuned our adaptive unconscious process to the more specific local conditions into which we were born, contextual priming is a mechanism that provides still more precise adjustment to events and people in present time.
In contextual priming, the mere presence of certain events and people automatically activates our representations of them and concomitantly all of the internal information, goals, knowledge, effect, stored in those representations that is relevant to responding back.
You can think of a nun looking at Jesus on the cross.
Or a guy with a flag.
The evolved innate basis of these ubiquitous priming effects is revealed by the fact that they are present soon after birth, underpinning the infant's imitative abilities.
Such priming effects, in which what one perceives directly influences what one does, depend upon the existence of a close automatic connection between perception and behavior.
Indeed, this tight connection has been discovered in cognitive neuroscience with the discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex, which become active both when one perceives a given type of action by another person, as well as when one engages in that action oneself, right?
So, when you perceive someone doing something, these are active whether you're doing it or somebody else is doing it, right?
Which is how people get, quote, inside your head and push your buttons, right?
The automatic perception, sorry, that's why they're called mirror neurons, because whether you're doing the action or somebody else is doing an action, they're both, they're activated the same way.
To continue, the automatic perception behavior link results in default tendencies to act in the same way as those around us.
Thus, as a default option or starting point for your own behavior, blindly or unconsciously adopting what others around you are doing makes good adaptive sense, especially in new situations and with strangers.
These default tendencies and their unconscious and unintentional nature have been demonstrated several times in human adults.
In the research of Chaton and colleagues, not only do people tend to adopt the physical behavior of strangers, with whom they interact without intending to or being aware that they're doing so, but this unconscious imitation also tends to increase liking and bonding between the individuals.
Serving as a kind of natural social clue.
Further supporting this notion of natural contextual tuning of one's behavior to the present environment, cognitive research indicates that action-oriented objects activate multiple action plans in parallel, and that action production is driven by some form of selective disinhibition.
For example, findings suggest that ambient stimuli, e.g.
hammers, Automatically set us to physically interact with the world, e.g.
perform a power grip. The simultaneous activation of multiple action plans is obvious in action slips and in the neuropsychological syndrome of utilization behavior in which patients are incapable of suppressing actions that are elicited by environmental action-related objects.
Now, this is a fun, I think, a fancy way of saying, and this is not to, I mean, criticize the writing because it's not my style, but what the restrictions are as academics, but...
That we absorb and reflect unconsciously the behavior of those around us.
We absorb, inhabit, and reflect and repeat the behavior of those around us.
And that's why you can't be free to be who you are if you're around abusive people.
You can't be. They are a toxin.
They activate your brain in negative ways.
They cause unconscious mirroring of self-destructive behavior.
You can't, can't, can't be free if you're around continually toxic people.
You can't be who you are. You will simply be forever fighting this slow poison of savage others.
Preferences and feelings as unconscious guides to the present.
To continue. Evolution, as well as early learning and culture, influences our preferences, and through them our tendencies to approach or avoid aspects of our environment.
We are predisposed to prefer certain objects and aspects of our environment over others.
We are often guided by our feelings, intuitions, and gut reactions, which prioritize the things that are important to do or attend to.
These guides do not arise out of thin air, however.
Our present preferences are derived from those that served adaptive ends in the past.
A tenet of evolutionary theory, that is, is that evolution builds gradually on what it has to work with at that moment, changes are slow and incremental.
Knowledge gained at a lower level of blind selection, the shortcuts and other good tricks that consistently worked over our long-term evolutionary past are fed upwards as a starting point and appear as a priori knowledge, the source of which we are unaware.
Campbell called these shortcut processes because they save us individually from having to figure out from scratch which processes are helpful and which are dangerous.
And you understand, these paraphrasings are just my thoughts on this paper, but what this means is that if we grow up in a violent household, we're more likely to be violent.
We don't figure that out for ourselves.
We don't try a bunch of different things. It's just what nature does for us, right?
Because if we grow up in a violent household, we assume that resources are scarce.
And therefore, violence is going to serve us better than cooperation.
We won't be taken advantage of.
If we grow up in a peaceful household, we assume that resources are plentiful and cooperation is going to serve us better, so we grow up to be more peaceful and cooperative.
I think that's what they're talking about. To continue.
Under the present argument that the unconscious evolved as a behavioral guidance system and as a source of adaptive and appropriate action or impulses, these unconsciously activated preferences should be found to be directly connected to behavioral mechanisms.
Several studies have now established this connection.
Immediate and unintended evaluation processes are directly linked to approach and avoidance behavioral predispositions.
Chen and Barg showed that participants are faster to make approach movements of the arm, pulling a lever towards oneself, when responding to positive attitude objects, and are faster to make avoidant movements pushing the lever away when responding to negative attitude objects.
This was true even though the conscious task in the experiment was not to evaluate the objects at all, but merely to knock off the screen the names of those objects as soon as they appeared.
So the unconscious preferences are directly connected to behavioral mechanisms, and we're not conscious of.
This tight connection between immediate unconscious evaluation and appropriate actional tendencies is found throughout the animal kingdom.
Even single-celled paramecia have them.
That the automatic activation of attitudes leads directly to corresponding muscular readiness in adult humans is thus surprising only from the perspective that actions And behavior are always a function of conscious intent and guidance, which they're not.
Moreover, once one is engaged in these approach and avoidance behaviors, they feed back on our conscious judgments and feelings, so that subtly inducing a person to engage in approach-like or avoidant-like muscular actions produces positive or negative effects, respectively, which is further support for the notion that action precedes reflection.
We unconsciously make the decision before we act and then before we are conscious of the action.
The decisions, the impulses occur in the unconscious, manifest themselves in the body, and then we experience them, if we do at all, experience them consciously.
This is very, very important. To continue, the unconscious is the source of behavioral impulses.
The idea that action precedes reflection is not new.
Several theorists have postulated that the conscious mind is not the source origin of our behavior.
Instead, they theorize impulses to act, are unconsciously activated, and that the role of consciousness is as gatekeeper and sense maker after the fact.
Sense maker after the fact.
This has been around for over 25 years.
In this model, conscious processes kick in after a behavioral impulse has occurred in the brain.
That is, the impulse is first generated unconsciously, and then consciousness claims and experiences it as its own.
Yet to date there has been little said about where exactly these unconscious impulses come from.
Given the evidence reviewed above, however, there now seems to be an answer to this question.
There are a multitude of behavioral impulses generated at any given time, derived from our evolved motives and preferences, cultural norms and values, past experiences in similar situations, and from what other people are currently doing in that same situation.
These impulses have afforded us unconsciously operating motives, preferences, and associated evidence and avoidance behavioral tendencies, as well as mimicry and other behavior priming effects triggered by the mere perception of others' behavior.
There certainly seems to be no shortage of suggestions from our unconscious as to what to do in any given situation.
Let's look at that again. It's really, really important.
Think of this in yourself and those around you.
There are a multitude, they write, of behavioral impulses generated at any given time, derived from our evolved motives and preferences, and so think of the Balm of the Brains series in childhoods, cultural norms and values, past experiences in similar situations, which is why I would say, does this remind you of anything in the past?
That's what I question. And what other people are currently doing, in the same situation, we will unconsciously mirror the behavior of others that we are around.
We can't fight that.
We can't fight that.
I mean, I guess we can, but we can't.
That is how we are unconsciously primed, which is why I make the strong suggestion to not have relentlessly toxic people in your life.
You're going to mirror them, whether you like it or not.
To continue, conflict in consciousness.
Given the multiple sources of unconscious behavioral impulses occurring in parallel, conflicts between them are inevitable.
As behavioral activity, unlike unconscious mental activity, takes place in a serial world in which we can only do one thing at a time.
So, given the multiple sources of unconscious behavioral impulses occurring in parallel, conflicts between them are inevitable, right?
Behavioral activity, you can only do one thing, but your impulses will be highly conflicted.
This is why I talk about the MECO system.
Because the unconscious is a parallel processor.
It includes just about everyone we've met, just about everyone we've interacted with, just about every movie we've seen, just about every way of doing things.
Right? So, when we are in a conflict, we've seen tough guys shoot their way out.
We've seen sensitive guys talk their way out.
We've seen fraidy cats avoid it completely.
We've seen, you know, six million different ways.
We've seen manipulators manipulate their way out of it.
We have all these different templates, and they all are in us, and they're all occurring in parallel, and they will very often conflict, which is why everybody has to be at the table in the MECO system, right?
See, I don't just pull this stuff out of my ass, right?
I mean, there is a lot of science that I've read quite a lot about, which is the root of this way of thinking it's not just arbitrary As noted above, they continue, early in ontogeny, actions tend to reflect the actions of an unsuppressed mind, right? So, a baby will just mirror whatever you're doing, right?
If you pick your nose, the baby's going to pick their nose.
They're not going to say, oh, that's not good to do, right?
There is no question that an infant would fail to endure pain or suppress elimination behaviors in return for some future reward.
They can defer gratification.
During development, however, operant learning assumes a greater influence on behavior, and actions begin to reflect suppression.
By suppression here, they mean deferral of...
This leads to the suppression of an action program or a neural event having interesting properties.
It often involves conflicting intentions.
In the delay of gratification, conflict may consist of the inclination to both eat and not eat.
Conflicting intentions have an aversive subjective cost.
We don't like them. Regardless of the adaptiveness of one's plan, e.g.
running across hot desert sand to reach water, strife that is coupled with conflict cannot be turned off voluntarily.
Inclinations can be behaviorally suppressed, but not mentally suppressed.
So you can say, I'm hungry, but I'm not going to eat.
But you can't say, I'm not hungry.
You can, but you won't be your controller.
Unconscious agents no longer influence behavior directly, but they now influence the nature of consciousness.
Inclinations continue to be experienced consciously, even when they are not expressed behaviorally.
Thus, they function like internalized reflexes that can be co-opted to play an essential role in mental simulation.
As known by engineers, the best way of knowing the consequences of a course of action, short of actually performing it, is to simulate it.
One value of simulation is that knowledge of outcomes is learned without the risk of performing the actions.
Indeed, some theorists now propose that the function of explicit conscious memory is to simulate future potential actions.
You have to let your kids take risks, of course.
You can't keep them bubble boys forever.
But at the same time, your mind is constantly playing out ways in which the children can get hurt, ways in which the children can get hurt.
So every time I put Isabel in the car seat, I have to remind myself, I'll make sure you adjust the straps and write, just in case there's a car accident.
Then I think about the car accident, what might happen, and I actually start to feel stressed about it.
So that reminds me to take extra care.
And this can get, of course, problematic when we catastrophize about everything.
The function of explicit conscious memory is to simulate future potential actions.
To continue, unconscious guidance of future behavior.
Such simulacra, i.e.
the products of simulation, are worthless without some capability of evaluating.
If a general had no idea regarding what constitutes a favorable battle outcome, there would be no utility in simulating battle formations.
Simulation can construct simulacra by itself cannot evaluate.
Evaluating potential actions is challenging because it depends on taking diverse considerations into account, e.g. physical or social consequences.
Most knowledge regarding what is favorable is already embodied in the very agentic systems that, before the advent of suppression, controlled behavior directly.
These now suppressed agents respond to simulacra as if they were responding to real external stimuli.
These internalized reflexes furnish the evaluative judgment or gut feeling that simulations require.
So, if I imagine Isabella getting hurt, I feel queasy, sick, stressed, horrified, and so on.
They're responding as if it were actually happening.
Unconscious conflict resolution processes thus furnish valuable information to conscious processes of planning for the future.
Given sufficiently strong motivations and commitment to the planned course of action, specific action plans such as when X happens, I will do Y themselves operate automatically when the future opportunity arises.
Right? So, if I think about somebody getting hurt, I, of course, as a nice guy, want to avoid that.
If I think about someone getting hurt and I'm a sadist, then I want that, right?
If I'm a torturer or a sadist or whatever, right?
So the unconscious will sort of give us a guide, but the conscious is the rehearsal for that.
It's really interesting. Conclusion.
For most of human history, only the concepts of conscious thought and intentional behavior existed.
In the 1800s, two very different developments, hypnotism and evolutionary theory, both pointed to the possibility of unconscious unintended causes of human behavior.
But nearly two centuries later, contemporary psychological science remains wedded to a conscious-centric model of the higher mental processes.
It hasn't helped that our view of the powers of the unconscious mind have come largely from studies of subliminal information processing.
This research, with its operational definition of the unconscious as a system that handles Subliminal strength stimulation from the environment has helped to perpetuate the notion that conscious processes are primary and that they are the causal force behind most, if not all, human judgment and behavior.
We propose an alternative perspective in which the unconscious processes are defined in terms of their unintentional nature and the inherent lack of awareness is of the influence and effect of the triggering stimuli, and not of the triggering stimuli, because nearly all naturally occurring stimuli are supraliminal.
Sorry about this. I messed that sentence up.
I tried that again. We propose an alternative perspective in which the unconscious processes are defined in terms of their unintentional nature and the inherent lack of awareness.
is of the influence and effect of the triggering stimuli.
The inherent lack of awareness is of the influence and effect of the triggering stimuli, and not the triggering stimuli itself, because nearly all naturally occurring stimuli are conscious.
Alright, so this is back to the beginning, and I'm sorry that this sentence was tough to read.
So what they're saying is that unconscious processes are defined in terms of their unintentional nature and the inherent lack of awareness of the conscious and the mind is of the influence and effect of the triggering stimuli, not just of the triggering stimuli itself.
And it's really hard to get subliminal stimuli in the real world.
You kind of have to use technology to flash images of the brain unconsciously and so on.
To continue, by this definition of the unconscious, which is the original and historic one, contemporary social cognition research on priming and automaticity effects have shown the existence of sophisticated, flexible, and adaptive unconscious behavior guidance systems.
These would seem to be of high functional value, especially as default behavioral tendencies when the conscious mind As is its want, travels away from the present environment into the past or the future.
It is nice to know that the unconscious is minding the store when the owner is absent.
In the rest of the natural sciences, especially in neurobiology, the assumption of conscious primacy is not nearly as prevalent as in psychology.
Complex and intelligent design in living things is not assumed to be driven by conscious processes on the part of the plant or animal, but instead by blindly adaptive processes that accrue through natural selection.
This is not to say that human consciousness plays no role, or that it is not special in its powers to transform, manipulate, and convey information relative to the mental powers of other animals, but that this consciousness is not necessary to achieve the sophisticated, adaptive, and intelligent behavioral guidance demonstrated in the emerging priming literature.
Unconscious processes are smart and adaptive throughout the living world, as Dawkins contended, and the psychological research evidence that has emerged since the time of his writing has confirmed that this principle extends to humans as well.
In nature, the unconscious mind is the rule, not the exception.
And so I just, you know, why am I reading this to you?
Well, because podcasts work.
Well, the reason I'm reading this to you is that we are not out of the field of science.
We're not just making things up.
I'm not. I'm just making stuff up.
I mean, I've done a lot of reading on this stuff for many years.
The ecosystem perfectly complements the fact that personalities are mirrored, in the mirror neurons and in the brain, and in the very deep parts of the brain, and that they have an effect.
They have an effect. And we have conflicting personality structures, what DeMoss calls altars, and what are here called these opposing drives and stimuli.
We have them all.
And so the ecosystem is entirely in line with modern science.
And the power of the unconscious to respond to daily events is entirely in line with the research that is available, that is occurring.
The fact that the unconscious has plans, goals, intent, that it has access to that which is in the conscious mind...
It is entirely borne out by the science, right?
So, it may seem like we talk about some freaky shite here, and it may be that we experience it as freaky, but it is entirely in line with what is going on in the latest research.
And by latest, I mean over the past, well, I guess since 1985, right?
That is the past 25 years, past quarter century.
And I first started reading about that stuff, you know, way back in the day, right?
I mean, before I went to college.
So I hope that that gives you some comfort as to the stuff that we talk about here, that, you know, we're not out of the field.
We're way out of the field of general culture, but general culture is opposed to this stuff.
And power structures are highly opposed to this stuff.
The state and the church is highly opposed to this stuff.
Because once we realize that most of what we consider a fact is just the matrix substitute for reality that is generated by irrational and exploitive cultures, then we arise out of those cultures, we arise out of the state and out of religion, of mythology, and sometimes out of family, particularly if the family is destructive.
So it's easy to understand why we have significant inhibitions around these things, but it is very important to go back to the evidence at all times, and hopefully this gives you some comfort that where we are is sort of on the cutting edge of science, though not that new, but certainly underreported, and it's very much in line.
And if you don't know this stuff about yourself, if you don't know what is motivating you in the unconscious, you can't be wise.
You can't be wise. You can't change the world.
You can't be good until your unconscious is on board, which means that you have to deal with whatever's going on.
Self-knowledge is the key.
So I hope that that helps.
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