Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (PEN Literary Award Winner)

Under the Surface, Understanding the Entire Brain
I enjoy books with great stories mixed with mind-blowing, insightful scientific experiments, and how they affect our daily, ever-accelerating lives in this mysterious, expanding universe wherein even a second is sacred. I was curious to know more about “how our unconscious minds rule our behavior,” so I read Mlodinow’s new, well-written book, Subliminal. I enjoyed M’s description of the intricacy and power of our brains, and became more convinced than ever that the balance between the conscious and unconscious in evolving human beings is worthy and necessary for survival and growth. As a teacher, I was interested to see if I could transform knowledge acquired from this reading into usable and practical strategies for improving y performance in the classroom. Kids learn both consciously and unconsciously. Our kids are always picking up vibes, good, bad and nuanced, and neutral. As M puts it, the “unconscious rules your behavior.” What and how children learn make all the difference in the world. Perhaps if we teachers understood the emotional context, originating in the unconscious, from which the individual student is evolving, we’d adapt our teaching methods, schedule, learning environment, and study materials, with access to the Internet, smart boards, and the like. We’d adjust our attitude to view teaching as collaborative with the students. Students are now programmed to respond to connectivity, and so we are adapting teaching methods. M’s book can be a stimulus for an explosion in flexibility and modernizing the world of U.S. education, or at the very least can initiate a meaningful discussion. Our environment and experience affects on many levels, much of which is on the unconscious level.Having read Feynman’s Rainbow and The Grand Design, I knew M’s book would be hard to put down. He’s conversational and humorous, a popular writer who makes scientific concepts clearer for the lay person. Though some scholars may disagree, popular writing is its own art form and I think as a writer, M is both an artist and able craftsman. I recommend this book to those interested in forming a workable inquiry into a fascinating topic: the unconscious of the brain in play with the conscious brain. It’s a fascinating read, inviting exploration and debate, a five star book for sure.Mlodinow serves up many experiments; I’ve picked two for consideration.Experiment one: Remarkable Power of the BrainM gives a masterful description of how an experiment is conducted. Using an fMRI (which measures the blood flow in the brain and maps it in three dimensions), data was collected from the brain to reconstruct an image of what a person is looking at, be it a bridge or a group of people singing, through reading the electromagnetic pictures of the brain. Without any reference to what the person is viewing,”the computer puts data from areas of the brain that respond to particular regions in a person’s field of vision together with data from other parts of the brain that respond to different themes. A computer then sorted through a database of 6 million images and picked the one that best corresponded to those readings.” Amazingly close matches. Understanding how the brain operates and who we are as human beings is called “social neuroscience.” To what degree does our brain determine and create so called reality? Can we participate in the evolution of our brain, and therefore of our experience? Is compassion based on understanding the unconscious expressions of the individual to feel good about himself or herself?Experiment Two: Well-Designed but Convincing?M states the second experiment to be “the first scientific demonstration that the unconscious mindpossesses knowledge that escapes the conscious mind.”M writes: “Peirce found a way to translate his ideas about unconscious perception into a laboratory experiment by adapting a procedure that had first been carried out by E.H. Weber in 1834. Weber had placed a small weight of varying degrees, one at a time, at a spot on a subject’s skin, in order to determine the minimum weight at which a difference could be detected by a subject. In the experiment performed by Peirce and his prize student, JJ, the subjects of the study (Pierce & JJ experimenting on each other) were given weights whose difference was just below the minimum detectable threshold. Although they could not consciously discriminate between the weights, they asked each other to try to identify the heavier weight anyway. Despite their lack of confidence, they in fact chose the correct object on more that 60 percent of the trials, significantly more than would have been expected by chance.”Does this experiment prove unconscious knowledge is the difference or were both subjects just better guessers than average? And if a valid experiment, how many subjects should be tested? I e-mailed two scholarly friends, Terren & Gary, for their opinions.Terren responded, “I remember when that first experiment was publicized, with sensational headlines like ‘scientists can read your mind.’ It is great stuff, and lots more of that is no doubt headed our way. One of the best applications of that will be to try and determine where people are when they are comatose, or to find new ways for brain injury/stroke victims to communicate (this has already happened actually). However, the experiment as such does not really deal explicitly with the distinction between conscious and unconscious, so not sure why Mlodinow included it, although that might be clear if I read the book myself. The second experiment indeed does not prove anything. In science you never really prove any kind of positive result. You can prove that a theory is wrong, but you can’t ever prove that a theory is right. That said, the experiment does provide some evidence that unconscious perceptions can influence conscious ones. The evidence provided isn’t very strong, as the number of subjects (2) is tiny, and I’m not sure how many trials they did, but it’s probably not enough to make the evidence very strong… but it’s evidence nonetheless. Personally I find the idea that unconscious processes affect conscious processes to be totally uncontroversial. ” Here is Gary’s perceptive response: “‘Guess’ has two different meanings: predicting an event uninfluenced by any knowledge; predicting an event uninfluenced by any conscious knowledge. Good guessers — i.e., those whose guesses do better than random — can be explained only if we identify some unconscious factor that accounts for their outperforming randomnitude. Peirce plausibly points to an unconscious perception of the difference in weights. In other words, `good guessers’ can’t be an explanation of anything: it merely references the explanandum = the fact that the `guessing’ follows a pattern that is not purely random. If we hold `proof’ to the certitude of conceptual/deductive proof, then of course nothing empirical can be proven. Strictly speaking, hypotheses are only supported. This is why, as Terren said, they can only be refuted, since we are able to determine conceptual inconsistencies. “********M subtly draped subliminal messages in light print on the cover, back and spine of the book: “Pssst…Hey there. Yes, You, Sexy, Buy! Buy! Buy!.” The unconscious possesses knowledge that escapes the conscious mind and is therefore a critical part of our evolutionary growth. What we might most passionately need may well reside in the unconscious. The unconscious is continually absorbing, learning below the surface. We might use the term “subconscious” is useful to explain subliminal messages on a movie screen or book cover since they are fairly accessible to consciousness with some attention in contrast with the deeper, less accessible unconscious. Or is it sufficient to consider any knowledge not immediately in present consciousness, no matter how shallow, unconscious? Terren wrote “For what it’s worth, the term “subconscious” is not really used in academic circles as its meaning is too imprecise. It is too hard, in other words, to try and parse a difference between “subconscious” and “unconscious.”To access hidden knowledge, to make the unconscious more conscious, is a very human endeavor says M. The brain is building memories, some conscious, some unconscious. Can we create rich memories? Do we call on deep memories to enrich us? Can we balance the bad ones? M gives examples of memories and experiences which fuel how we categorize things and stereotype people; how we favor our intimate circles; approach life from an unconscious emotional context; and humanly grow as we become aware of this process, the interplay between conscious and unconscious life.Leonard Mlodinow’s Amazing MomMlodinow tells engrossing stories about his mother, who tragically lost family in the Holocaust. Having that memory so deep within her, at times when her son failed to call her, she would be unduly anxious that “something bad had happened.” At one time, she was even convinced that her beloved son had been kidnapped. M’s mom had to be reassured to feel safe and secure. I taught English in a refugee program. I will never forget Cambodian students and their families relating their horrific experiences under Pol Pot. I don’t believe we ever completely survive an atrocity of this magnitude, even with forgiveness.M’s Mom presently lives in a completely different environment, yet as author David Brooks might say, “the soulscape,” not only the landscape, permeates us, ever deep and present. In America, Mom wasn’t really threatened by the cowardly, brutal, and inhuman Nazis. But going through her experience has emotional reverberations to this day as M beautifully relates. How could such an agony and violation not? Emotional memories are real for all of us even if we don’t know it. Mrs. Mlodinow, many blessings to her, is worthy of a book in her own right. What is more emotional than the significance of one’s personal history?M is a generous writer, well worth reading for a general audience searching for a scientific introduction to both the unconscious and conscious brain, and how such knowledge relates to modern day living. As M says,”Some scientists believe that the need for social interaction was the driving force behind the evolution of superior human intelligence. Social cooperation and the social intelligence seem to have been crucial to our survival.” Mlodinow’s gift is that he is both funny and expert in his writing; his wake-up call is for us to pay attention to our minds, to let all the knowledge deep within our unconscious, as well as our conscious minds, conspire to make us better human beings.

C est un livre que je recommande du debut a la fin. Certains ouvrages de neurosciences donnent l impression de copier-coller par rapport a des ouvrages anterieurs Celui ci est inspirant de bout en bout L intelligence de l auteur affleure a chaque page

Das Buch ist voller wissenschaftlicher Studien und Experimente, die auf geniale Art und Weise einige Mechanismen unseres Gehirns beleuchten. Es ist zudem sehr kurzweilig aufbereitet. Eine absolute Leseempfehlung für jeden den Psychologie u. Gehirnforschung interessiert.

Leonard has done an excellent job in telling us how a underlying processing goes on in our brains which we are not aware of and which is important for our survival nonetheless…it is an important read for psychologists as well as for neuroscientists and lay scientists…But thus unconscious he tells is just part of brain processibg unit…its different from Jungs collective unconscious….its a pure physicalist view of the brain.