You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (3 page)

In a hidden place—your unconscious mind—your experience is always being crunched so suggestions can be handed up to your conscious mind. Thanks to this, if a situation is familiar you can fall back on intuition. However, if the situation is novel, you will have to boot up your conscious mind. The spell of highway hypnosis on a long trip is always broken when you take an exit into unfamiliar territory. The same is true in any other part of your life. You are always drifting back and forth between the influence of emotion and reason, automaticity and executive orders.

Your true self is a much larger and more complex construct than you are aware of at any given moment. If your behavior is the result of priming, the result of suggestions as to how to behave handed up from the adaptive unconscious, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions and musings because you aren’t aware of the advice you’ve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.

When you hug someone you love and then feel the rush of warm emotions, you have made an executive decision which then influenced the older parts of your brain to deliver nice chemicals. Top-down influence makes intuitive sense and isn’t disturbing to ponder.

Bottom-up influence is odd. When you sit next to a briefcase and act more greedy than you usually would, it is as if your executive brain centers are nodding in agreement to hidden advisers whispering in your ear. It seems mysterious and creepy because it’s so clandestine. Those who seek to influence you are sensitive to this, and try to avoid creating in you the uncomfortable realization that you have been duped. Priming works only if you aren’t aware of it, and those who depend on priming to put food on the table work very hard to keep their influence hidden.

Let’s look at casinos, which are temples to priming. At every turn there are dings and musical notes, the clatter of coins rattling in metal buckets, symbols of wealth and opulence. Better still, casinos are sensitive to the power of the situation. Once you are inside, there are no indications of the time of day, no advertisements for anything not available inside the box of mutually beneficial primes, no reason to leave, whether to sleep, eat, or anything else—no external priming allowed.

Coca-Cola stumbled onto the power Santa Claus has to prime you during the holidays. Thoughts of childhood happiness and wholesome family values appear in your subconscious as you choose between Coke or a generic brand of soda. Grocery stores noticed an increase in sales when the smell of freshly baked bread primed people to buy more food. Adding the words “all natural” or including pictures of pastoral farms and crops primes you with thoughts of nature, dissuading thoughts of factories and chemical preservatives. Cable channels and large corporations prime potential audiences by adopting an image, a brand, so as to meet you halfway before you decide how to engage and judge them. Production companies spend millions of dollars to create trailers and movie posters to form first impressions so you are primed to enjoy their films in a certain way right up until the opening titles. Restaurants decorate their interiors to communicate everything from fine dining to psychedelic hippie communes in order to prime you to enjoy their cheese sticks. From every corner of the modern world advertisers are launching attacks on your unconscious in an attempt to prime your behavior to be more favorable for the bottom lines of their clients.

Businesses discovered priming before psychologists did, but once psychology started digging into the mind, more and more examples of automaticity were uncovered, and even today it isn’t clear how much of your behavior is under your conscious control.

The question of who is truly in the driver’s seat was made far more complex in 1996 by a series of studies published by John Bargh in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
.

He had New York University students unscramble thirty separate five-word sentences. He told them he was interested in their language abilities, but he was really studying priming. He assembled three groups. One unscrambled sentences with terms associated with aggression and rudeness such as “brazen,” “disturb,” and “bluntly.” Another group unscrambled words from a bank of polite terms like “courteous” and “behaved.” A third group served as a control with words like “gleefully,” “prepares,” and “exercising.”

The experimenters told the students how to complete the task and once they were done to come find them to receive the second assignment, but this was the real experiment. When each student approached the researcher he or she found him already engaged in a conversation with an actor who was pretending to be having trouble understanding the word puzzles. The researcher completely ignored the student until he or she interrupted the conversation or ten minutes passed.

The results? The polite-word group waited on average 9.3 minutes to interrupt; the neutral group waited about 8.7 minutes; and the rude-word group waited around 5.4 minutes. To the researchers’ surprise, more than 80 percent of the polite-word group waited the full 10 minutes. Only 35 percent of the rude-word group chose not to intrude. The subjects were interviewed after the experiment and couldn’t pinpoint why they chose to wait or to interrupt. The question never entered their minds because as far as they knew, their behavior had not been influenced. The scrambled sentences, they believed, had not affected them.

In a second experiment, Bargh had participants unscramble sentences that contained words associated with old age, like “retired,” “wrinkled,” and “bingo.” He then clocked participants’ speed as they walked down a hall to an elevator and compared it to the speed they walked when they first strolled in. They took about one to two extra seconds to reach their destination. Just as with the rude-word groups, the old-word groups were primed by the ideas and associations the words created. To be sure this was really a result of priming, Bargh repeated the experiment and got the same results. He ran it a third time with a control group who unscrambled words related to sadness to be sure he hadn’t simply depressed people into walking slower. Once again, the old-age group tottered along the longest.

Bargh also conducted a study in which Caucasian participants sat down at a computer to fill out boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or Caucasian men flashed on the screen for thirteen milliseconds, faster than the participants could consciously process. Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning. Those exposed to the images of African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw Caucasian faces. Even though they didn’t believe themselves to be racist or to harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual.

Studies of priming suggest when you engage in deep introspection over the causes of your own behavior you miss many, perhaps most, of the influences accumulating on your persona like barnacles along the sides of a ship. Priming doesn’t work if you see it coming, but your attention can’t be focused in all directions at once. Much of what you think, feel, do, and believe is, and will continue to be, nudged one way or the other by unconscious primes from words, colors, objects, personalities, and other miscellany infused with meaning either from your personal life or the culture you identify with. Sometimes these primes are unintended; sometimes there is an agent on the other end who plotted against your judgment. Of course, you can choose to become an agent yourself. You can prime potential employers with what you wear to a job interview. You can prime the emotions of your guests with how you set the mood when hosting a party. Once you know priming is a fact of life, you start to understand the power and resilience of rituals and rites of passage, norms and ideologies. Systems designed to prime persist because they work. Starting tomorrow, maybe with just a smile and a thank-you, you can affect the way others feel—hopefully for the best.

Just remember, you are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances. If you bring a grocery list, you’ll be less likely to arrive at the checkout with a cart full of stuff you had no intention of buying when you left the house. If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve. Just like the briefcase on the table, or the clean aroma in the room, you can fill your personal spaces with paraphernalia infused with meaning, or find meaning in the larger idea of owning little. No matter, when you least expect it, those meanings may nudge you.

When a movie begins with the words “Based on a True Story,” what crosses your mind? Do you assume every line of dialogue, every bit of clothing and song in the background is the same as it was in the true event on which the film was based? Of course you don’t. You know movies like
Pearl Harbor
or
Erin Brockovich
take artistic license with facts, shaping them so a coherent story will unfold with a beginning, middle, and end. Even biopics about the lives of musicians or politicians who are still alive are rarely the absolute truth. Some things are left out, or some people are fused into single characters. The details, you think when watching, are less important than the big picture, the general idea.

If only you were so savvy when it came to looking back on the biopic in your head, but you are not so smart. You see, the movie up there is just as dramatized, and scientists have known this for quite a while.

It all starts with your brain’s desire to fill in the gaps.

Take your thumbs and place them side by side in front of you. Close your left eye and slowly move your right thumb away in a horizontal line to your right. Notice anything? Probably not. Somewhere along the line is your blind spot, the point where your optic nerve breaks into the retina. You have one per eye, and in this area of your vision you can’t see anything. It is larger than you think too—roughly 2 percent of your eyesight. If you want to see for yourself, take a blank sheet of paper and draw on it a dot about the size of a dime. Now, about two inches to the right, draw another. Close your left eye and focus on the left-hand dot. Move the paper closer to you until the right-hand dot disappears. There it is, one of your blind spots.

Now look around the room with your eye closed. Try the same trick above with some words on this page. Notice anything? Is there a giant gap in your vision? Nope. Your brain fills it in with a bit of mental Photoshopping. Whatever surrounds the blind spot is copied and pasted into the hole in an automatic imaginary bit of visual hocus-pocus. Your brain lies to you, and you go about your business none the wiser.

Just as the brain fills in your blind spot every moment of the day without your consciously noticing, so do you fill in the blind spots in your memory and your reasoning.

Have you ever been telling a story about something you and someone else did long ago, and then they stop you to say, “No, no, no. That’s not how it happened,” just as you get on a roll? You say it was at a Christmas party when you acted out the final episode of
Lost
with stockings on your hands; they say it was Easter. You remember opening presents and drinking eggnog, but they promise it was eggs and it wasn’t even you. It was your cousin, and they used a chocolate bunny to represent the smoke monster.

Consider how often this seems to happen, especially if you are in a relationship with someone who can call you out in this way all the time. Is it possible if you had a recording of everything you’ve ever done it would rarely match up with how you remember it? Think of all the photographs that have blown your mind when you saw yourself in a place you had completely deleted from memory. Think of all the things your parents bring back up about your childhood that you have zero recollection of, or which you remember differently. But you still have a sense of a continuous memory and experience. The details are missing, but the big picture of your own life persists. But the big picture is a lie, nurtured by your constant and unconscious confabulation, adding up to a story of who you are, what you have done, and why.

You do this so much and so often that you can’t be sure how much of what you consider to be the honest truth about your past is accurate. You can’t be sure how you came to be reading these words at this moment instead of languishing on a street corner or sailing around the world. Why didn’t you go in for the kiss? Why did you say those horrible things to your mother? Why did you buy that laptop? Why are you really angry with that guy? What is the truth about who you are and why you are here?

To understand confabulation, we have to head into surgery. Every once in a while, in extreme cases where nothing else will work, doctors resort to splitting a patient’s brain right down the middle. And what they discover is fascinating.

To get a rough idea of how large and how halved your brain is, hold your hands out in front of you and form two fists. Now bring them together so that if you were wearing rings they would be facing upward. Each fist represents a hemisphere. Your two hemispheres communicate with each other via a dense series of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Imagine when you made those fists you grabbed two handfuls of yarn—the yarn is your corpus callosum. In a corpus callosotomy (which is sometimes performed when a case of epilepsy becomes so severe and unmanageable that no drug will bring relief and normalcy) that yarn is cut. The two halves of the brain are disconnected in a careful way that allows the patients to live out their lives with as much normalcy as possible.