Oh! And one of the most stunning things about what we're seeing in neuroscience is the degree to which who you are and how you act and your beliefs, they're all driven by mechanisms running under the hood to which we have no conscious access. Narrator: It turns out that your brain makes most of your decisions without your conscious awareness.
This is what's talked about is the unconscious brain. In the 1960s, the psychologist Eckhard Hess ran an experiment where he showed men pictures of women's faces, and all they had to do was rate from 1 to 10 how attractive they thought the woman was. What the men didn't know was that half the photographs have the same women but with their eyes dilated, so their pupils were bigger. And here's the thing; all the men thought that the women with the dilated eyes were more attractive, but none of them noticed this explicitly, they didn't see that the pupil had a difference of a few millimetres, and importantly presumably none of the men knew that dilated eyes is a sign of sexual readiness in women, but their brains knew it, and that steered their decision-making. And this is emblematic of all the ways that our decisions get steered by signals that we're not even aware of, things that cause us to act a certain way, or to be attracted to certain things, or be repulsed by certain things. And we don't know why it's happening, but really the function of the brain is to gather information from the world and steer your behaviour appropriately, and that's it. You, the conscious you, doesn't have to be aware of any of how it's doing that. Here's an example of something that becomes automatized. You're driving and I want you to make a lane change into your right lane. What does that look like? What do your hands actually do? Most people will do this, they'll turn the wheel to the right and then they'll come back to centre, that's what they think a lane change looks like. In fact, if you did that, what's that done is that just steered your car and you've gone off the road into a storefront. The way that you actually do a lane change is by going to the right, back to centre, just as far to the left and back to centre again, that's what a lane change looks like. And people do it everyday, but if you quiz people on it, you'll find they have no idea how they do it. And the lesson here is that this is an analogy for essentially everything that we do. How we respond to the world, how we react, the kind of people we are, why we do the things we do, why we believe the kind of things we believe, all of these are so deeply automatized that we don't even know why we do them, we just think it's all true. Narrator: Eagleman says we're not only consciously unaware of what we do, we're also unaware of the reality that surrounds us. That is, until we stop and bring it to our attention. So when I walk out the front door, I think that I'm in the world and there's people and there's some activity out there, but really I'm only seeing the spot where I'm walking. It's only when I pay attention and ask questions that I see more details, like I can attend to the sound of the fountain, (water splashing) or this photographer, or a girl reading a book, or a couple laughing, or somebody's shoes. It's only when I ask myself the question of what am I experiencing here that I pull those details into my internal model and have an experience of them. And this just is another illustration of how much your brain is doing under the hood that's unconscious and you're just walking through life imagining that you're seeing everything, imagining that your reality is the correct reality, but, in fact, everyone's got their own reality going on, on the inside
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AuthorTim Sobers is a famous traveler and blogger, passionate camping and hiking lover. Tim is from Washington, D.C., US. He is also a writer at Students QA platform. ArchivesCategories |