The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (18 page)
Authors: Daniel Bor
BOOK: The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning
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According to Dijksterhuis’s results, if there were only 4 facts per car, and 16 in total, then both groups did pretty well at choosing the best car, with the conscious group marginally on top. His interpretation was that, with few items, our conscious minds cope fine, because their very limited memory resources aren’t too taxed by the moderate weight of facts to assimilate. But if you make the task vastly more difficult and have 48 attributes in total, 12 per car, then only about a quarter of the conscious group chooses the highest ranked car correctly—in other words, no better than a totally random guess. Meanwhile, a tremendously healthy 60 percent or so of the unconscious group makes the correct choice. This is a staggering difference. It led Dijksterhuis to conclude that in almost every sphere of decision making, be it political, managerial, or whatever else, “it should benefit the individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complex matters to the unconscious.”
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There is one small problem with Dijksterhuis’s conclusion, though: It is utterly wrong. If you stop and think about the task, as if you were a participant, it isn’t difficult to see why. So you’ve just sat down in the small, stark testing room in front of a computer monitor. The environment is rather alien and you know that this is a psychology experiment, which makes your pulse race a little faster. What are these weird scientists going to test? Are they really going to look at what they will claim to be looking at, or will you be tricked in some way? Are you going to appear stupid? Socially awkward? A man with only half a brain? You’re told to pick the most desirable car out of a bunch of facts, so you immediately try to do your best. First you’re told, “The Hatsdun is very new.” That’s good, isn’t it? Or does the car need to be broken in? Are some positives better than others? You haven’t been given any instructions about this, which is disconcerting and confusing. You haven’t seen any other attributes yet, so what are you meant to do? You decide the Hatsdun is provisionally in the lead anyway. Then you’re told, “The Kaiwa has a poor sound system.” Okay, that’s bad, the Kaiwa is now at the bottom of your list (even though you only listen to the stereo for the news, and don’t really care about the quality of the sound system—but you’ll ignore this thought for the moment). It all feels a little overwhelming, with 48 facts to try to remember, but you do believe after a short while—only about 10 facts, actually—that one car clearly has accumulated more positive facts than the others. You can’t see why you need to see all the facts to make your decision, but you keep paying attention and thinking about your choices, ready to modify them at any stage, and by the time all 48 facts have been presented, you’ve made up your mind. You could give your decision now, and start to open your mouth helpfully to volunteer the information—but that’s not what the experimenter seems to want. They get you to delay your decision by doing anagrams, maybe to distract you, but you make sure you keep remembering your favorite car throughout, giving yourself a little reminder every so often. It’s the same if you were asked to think for 4 minutes. It’s actually pretty pointless, as it doesn’t change your mind, as you’d already decided somewhere in the middle of seeing these facts. But you do what the nice researcher wants, so you get your money, or your course credits, and keep him happy.
This kind of experiment, as the above scenario illustrates, doesn’t have much to do with the unconscious mind at all. It is a distinctly conscious task, and in a very similar study from another lab, this time carried out by Laurent Waroquier and colleagues, 70 percent of subjects reported explicitly applying various strategies while they were being presented with the facts to make up their minds, and had already made up their minds before they had seen all the facts. In other words, they admitted that their minds were fixed by the time the facts were all presented, with the other 4 minutes of distraction or deliberation being totally superfluous. So as an experiment designed to tap the unconscious domain, the test disastrously missed its target.
Furthermore, it failed the critical scientific test of replicability. If you add together all the studies that use this design, on average they find absolutely no advantage for unconscious processing. In fact, even some of Dijksterhuis’s own experiments failed to find an unconscious-advantage effect. Other researchers, including a colleague of mine, Balazs Aczel, with whom I collaborated on an attempted replication, have found, if anything, that the opposite result was true: that even with long trains of facts, conscious deliberation provided an advantage over distraction. This is probably because being distracted, which fills up your conscious memory with other items, is more likely to dislodge your previously set correct memory for the order of the best cars. These dissenting papers, unfortunately, will never be splashed on the covers of any newspapers. But to me, the beauty and rigor of a sequence of carefully controlled experiments, doggedly seeking the truth, are far more exciting and fascinating than many sexy papers that spark an inferno of media interest by their novel, unreplicated results.
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So again, the message is clear: There’s absolutely nothing superior about the forms of learning possible when only our unconscious minds can perform the calculations.
FEELING YOUR WAY TO KNOWLEDGEA more established and reliable body of evidence in this field involves performing some surface task, and unconsciously, accidentally, absorbing the underlying information within it. If I write the phrase, “Yesterday, the prime minister drive past me in the street,” we all would know that it was grammatically wrong, but many times, with grammar, words just
feel
wrong, and we aren’t necessarily clear about which explicit rule has been violated. It is possible to experimentally reproduce this impression that we can know that some item is correct or incorrect, without knowing why. The main format for such experiments is for researchers to show subjects incomprehensible sets of long letter strings—for instance, “XMXRTVM.” The experimenter then tells these poor volunteers, rather sadistically, to memorize every one they see. After this part of the test, the participants are informed that the order of the letters in each string obeyed a complex set of rules, a kind of artificial grammar, but they will not be told what these rules are. For instance, one rule might be that the letter strings will always end with an M if there’s an R in the mix. The subjects will now be shown more letter strings and have to say whether they obey the same rules or not. Even though subjects think they are entirely guessing much of the time, it turns out that they still get significantly more answers correct than they would by chance. It’s nowhere near 100 percent, but then again, we had years to learn our native language’s grammar with many thousands of examples, and these people just have a few dozen instances over 20 minutes or so.
feel
wrong, and we aren’t necessarily clear about which explicit rule has been violated. It is possible to experimentally reproduce this impression that we can know that some item is correct or incorrect, without knowing why. The main format for such experiments is for researchers to show subjects incomprehensible sets of long letter strings—for instance, “XMXRTVM.” The experimenter then tells these poor volunteers, rather sadistically, to memorize every one they see. After this part of the test, the participants are informed that the order of the letters in each string obeyed a complex set of rules, a kind of artificial grammar, but they will not be told what these rules are. For instance, one rule might be that the letter strings will always end with an M if there’s an R in the mix. The subjects will now be shown more letter strings and have to say whether they obey the same rules or not. Even though subjects think they are entirely guessing much of the time, it turns out that they still get significantly more answers correct than they would by chance. It’s nowhere near 100 percent, but then again, we had years to learn our native language’s grammar with many thousands of examples, and these people just have a few dozen instances over 20 minutes or so.
Just how complex can these rules be? One of the most impressive examples is that we can unconsciously detect the connections between musical notes (when told just to memorize them in the same way as in the experiment above) and transfer that learning to the same connections in letters, all while still believing we are guessing randomly—but again I should stress that this learning is statistically above chance, but not by much, hovering around 60 percent (where chance between two choices is 50 percent), so it’s miles away from infallible knowledge.
What does all of this show about the unconscious mind? It falls far short of showing that we can learn relatively complex information
in the absence of consciousness
, and for very similar reasons to the paradigm by Dijksterhuis shown in the previous section.
in the absence of consciousness
, and for very similar reasons to the paradigm by Dijksterhuis shown in the previous section.
In order to learn anything at all about the strings of letters, we still have to be very conscious of the letters and attend closely to them when we first see them. If we’re distracted, so that we are no longer reading the strings—even if we’re staring right at them—then we learn absolutely nothing.
What’s more, when we’re asked just to memorize the letter strings in the first half of the experiment, most of us will be doing a lot more. Because of our exceptional consciousness, we are constantly looking for patterns; so in this instance, we just can’t help noticing things like, “These strings always end with M—I wonder if that means anything.” These thoughts quickly fade from awareness as we’re trying to perform the main task of memorizing these difficult sets of letters, but perhaps these observations converge in our minds and allow us, consciously, to learn a little bit of the grammatical structure at a time, to pull us above chance. So, in other words, as with the Dijksterhuis experiments, with this experimental setup we cannot rule out the very real possibility that the structure is being learned consciously, at least to some degree, even if we later forget the conscious progress we originally made.
At the same time, these kinds of experiments are certainly not arguing for an unconscious advantage. There’s no doubt that, had the initial instructions for these letter strings been to attempt to spot the rules that govern the sequence of letters, instead of simply to memorize them, subjects would have been considerably better at later deciding which letter strings obeyed the initial rules.
In many instances in life we at least semiconsciously build up these little observations, these tiny chunks of knowledge. Afterward, when we are not consciously recalling the rules, but only, at best, feeling a sense of familiarity, the initial groundwork nevertheless allows for proficiency on the task. Again, tennis is a good example. We start by consciously practicing the forehand stroke, section by section, and eventually, when we’re proficient, we’re no longer aware of all the little rules that make up what we’re doing—all we need be aware of is the overall chunk: forehand. In fact, we might have virtually no memory of the learning process, but that has no bearing on our quality of play. Consciousness, therefore, may be required for any form of complex learning to occur, but once we’ve assimilated the task and the program is written, we merely have to execute it automatically. And if the heavy hardware of consciousness is accidentally reengaged on the habit, it often merely gets in the way.
And, of course, if the structure of some collection of information is particularly complicated, or especially hierarchical, then we absolutely need full-on consciousness in order to spot these patterns and learn them. Studies have shown that the unconscious mind is unable to cope, for instance, with most logical operations, with grasping cause and effect, with almost any type of sequence, with any mathematics beyond things learned by rote, such as multiplication tables, or with any of the various social and cultural facets of life we need to acquire in order to succeed.
So are there
any
sorts of tasks that the unconscious mind is unequivocally superior at performing, compared with the conscious mind? There are a collection of experiments that match this remit, albeit in a somewhat disappointing way: The unconscious mind can be superior when we consciously go a little overboard in our search for patterns. Just as pigeons can show superstitious behavior, by dancing for food that is delivered regularly regardless of their actions, so can humans entertain superstitious beliefs. But we can take this to exceptional levels, not only with astrology beliefs and the like, but also in more formal ways in the lab.
any
sorts of tasks that the unconscious mind is unequivocally superior at performing, compared with the conscious mind? There are a collection of experiments that match this remit, albeit in a somewhat disappointing way: The unconscious mind can be superior when we consciously go a little overboard in our search for patterns. Just as pigeons can show superstitious behavior, by dancing for food that is delivered regularly regardless of their actions, so can humans entertain superstitious beliefs. But we can take this to exceptional levels, not only with astrology beliefs and the like, but also in more formal ways in the lab.
Imagine that you’re sitting in front of a computer monitor, and you have to predict whether a light will flash on screen to the right or the left. That’s the only task there is, but there are very many trials. In actual fact, eight out of ten times the lights will flash on the right, but in a random, unpredictable way. What’s the best strategy here? If you’ve learned this pattern optimally, you’ll respond to the right every single time, and end up with a score of 80 percent. That is what animals such as rats do when a correct answer leads to a food reward. But it is
not
what most humans do. Sometimes we as a species are just too clever for our own good. When we perform this task, we constantly look for some secret pattern, some hidden message in the apparently random stream. So, first of all, we lose marks by testing quite a few convoluted ideas about the pattern of the lights, most of which are wrong. Then, when we roughly understand that the lights flash on the right 80 percent of the time, we decide to second-guess it, and 8 out of 10 times we predict the right, but 20 percent of the time we predict the left. This one strategy actually lowers our score to 68 percent on average, because one-fifth of the time we’re picking a side very unlikely to elicit the light flash. So the lowly rat outperforms humans on this task by a healthy 12 percent. What’s more, if patients with damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex attempt this task, there is provisional evidence that they don’t generate the usual wacky, wrong theories but instead perform optimally, just like the rats. This brain region is probably the area most intimately associated with awareness.
not
what most humans do. Sometimes we as a species are just too clever for our own good. When we perform this task, we constantly look for some secret pattern, some hidden message in the apparently random stream. So, first of all, we lose marks by testing quite a few convoluted ideas about the pattern of the lights, most of which are wrong. Then, when we roughly understand that the lights flash on the right 80 percent of the time, we decide to second-guess it, and 8 out of 10 times we predict the right, but 20 percent of the time we predict the left. This one strategy actually lowers our score to 68 percent on average, because one-fifth of the time we’re picking a side very unlikely to elicit the light flash. So the lowly rat outperforms humans on this task by a healthy 12 percent. What’s more, if patients with damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex attempt this task, there is provisional evidence that they don’t generate the usual wacky, wrong theories but instead perform optimally, just like the rats. This brain region is probably the area most intimately associated with awareness.
In many ways, though, this form of unconscious advantage is a cheat, because researchers could easily explain statistics and probabilities to the volunteers and encourage them to modify their behavior, so that they instead would behave optimally and their conscious abilities would catch up with their unconscious minds.
But to me these experiments highlight a key detail: These spurious suppositions are a litmus test for the extent of consciousness. Although these mistaken beliefs are essentially failures of our cognitive system, they are also a reflection of just how many patterns we
can
spot, and how successfully we
can
understand the world around us. So when the pigeon twirls around for food, that is potentially a marker of minimal consciousness, and when a human believes in astrology, that is actually, strangely, a solid indication of a substantive form of consciousness—no other type of animal could have such a spectacularly irrational schema as astrology, and there is also no chance for our simplistic unconscious minds to generate these intricate, rich false theories. Such elaborate failures as astrology, or, more pathologically, conditions like schizophrenia, are perhaps the price we pay for our exceptional consciousness, our deep hunger for wisdom, and our incredibly successful ability to detect profound
real
patterns, greatly furthering science and technology in the process.
can
spot, and how successfully we
can
understand the world around us. So when the pigeon twirls around for food, that is potentially a marker of minimal consciousness, and when a human believes in astrology, that is actually, strangely, a solid indication of a substantive form of consciousness—no other type of animal could have such a spectacularly irrational schema as astrology, and there is also no chance for our simplistic unconscious minds to generate these intricate, rich false theories. Such elaborate failures as astrology, or, more pathologically, conditions like schizophrenia, are perhaps the price we pay for our exceptional consciousness, our deep hunger for wisdom, and our incredibly successful ability to detect profound
real
patterns, greatly furthering science and technology in the process.
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