“We take in 11,000,000 pieces of information a second,
but can process only 40 of them consciously” – so what happens to the remaining
11 million minus 40 pieces? Well, they are processed by the unconscious mind.
And we are not even aware of the filtering, selection and judgements happening
within our mind all the time. This invisible entity – Adaptive unconscious – is
the hero of the book “Strangers
to ourselves: Discovering the adaptive unconscious” by Timothy Wilson. If
you have read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking,
fast and slow” then you are familiar with the hero already (Kahneman calls
it system-1). However, I still enjoyed reading “Strangers to ourselves” because
of its lucid style and fresh narratives.
The two core questions the book explores are: (1) Why is
it that people often don’t know themselves very well? and; (2) How can they
increase their self-knowledge? I feel that the book does a good job of
answering these questions, particularly question-1.
When we returned to India in 1998 after a seven year stay
in the US, it was customary to be asked, “Why did you come back?” I soon
realized that my answers are not consistent and varied depending upon the
situation, mood etc. When I asked myself this question, I realized that I
didn’t know the real answer. Thanks to this book, I now know that it is not
that uncommon to not know the reason behind your behaviour/action. The
unconscious (intuition) takes the decision, the conscious (rational) mind
creates stories that justifies the decision – which are sometimes not consistent. Jonathan
Haidt calls this “The emotional dog and its rational tail” (see Haidt’s interview).
The main reason why we don’t know ourselves very well is
that much of what we want to know about ourselves resides outside of conscious
awareness. So who is really in control
of our life anyway – conscious mind or the unconscious mind? Consciousness as
the CEO metaphor says that consciousness is in charge of major decisions and the
unconscious mind reports to it. On the other extreme, consciousness is treated
more like a child who “plays” a video game at an arcade without putting any
money into it. He moves the controls unaware that he is seeing the demo program
that is independent of his actions. The truth lies somewhere in between. The
unconscious mind scans the environment quickly and detects patterns especially
those that might pose a danger. The conscious mind provides a check-and-balance
to speed and efficiency of the unconscious and plans about the future.
What is the implication? Let’s take the example of sexual
aggression – a topic of attention in India due to several reports of rapes in
the last few years. Wilson says that men likely to engage in sexual aggression
are unaware that they have a nonconscious association between sex and power and
unaware that this association is triggered automatically. This lack of
awareness makes it more difficult to prevent sexual aggression.
Wilson gives an interesting example of how a real estate
agent finds out the kind of house her clients want. When she meets with her
clients for the first time, she listens patiently as they describe their
preferences, nodding her sympathetically. Many people have a long list of
things they would have prepared before they visit the agent. Then the agent ignores everything the clients just said. And she takes them to a wide variety
of houses including type of houses which her clients told them they would never
consider. On these initial visits she observes the clients’ emotional reaction.
Based on that she infers what her clients really like.
What is the best use of consciousness? According to
Wilson, perhaps the best use of consciousness is to put ourselves in situations in
which our adaptive unconscious can work smoothly. Could this be the task
carried out by my conscious mind when we returned to India? I don’t know.
Related article:
Thinking,
fast and slow: A landmark book in intuitive thinking and decision making, my
book review, Feb 22, 2012.
Interesting book!
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