EntranceLeonard Mlodinow. (Neo)conscious
Christoph Koch of Laboratory K and everyone who has dedicated themselves to understanding the human mind.
It may seem that the subconscious aspects of everything that happens to us play a very small role in our Everyday life… [but] they are the subtle roots of our conscious thoughts.
Carl Gustav Jung
In June 1879, the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, sailing in a first-class cabin on a steamship from Boston to New York, had his gold watch stolen. Pierce reported the theft and demanded that the entire crew of the ship be gathered on deck. He interrogated everyone, but achieved nothing, after which, after wandering around in thought for a while, he did something strange: he decided to guess the attacker, although he had no evidence, like a poker player going all-in with two deuces in his hands. As soon as Pierce poked blindly, he immediately believed that he had guessed correctly. “I went for a walk, just for a minute,” he later wrote, “suddenly turned around - and even the shadow of doubt disappeared.”
Pierce confidently approached the suspect, but he was also no mistake and denied all accusations. Without any logical evidence, the philosopher could not do anything - until the ship arrived at its destination port. Pierce immediately hailed a cab, went to the local Pinkerton agency and hired a detective. The next day he found the watch in a pawnshop. Pierce asked the owner to describe the person who returned the watch. According to the philosopher, he described the suspect “so colorfully that it was almost certainly the person I pointed to.” Pierce himself was at a loss as to how he managed to identify the thief. He concluded that the clue had come from some instinctive feeling, something beyond his conscious mind.
If the story ended with such a conclusion, any scientist would find Peirce's explanation no more convincing than the "bird whistled" argument. Five years later, however, Peirce found a way to turn his ideas about unconscious perception into a laboratory experiment, modifying a method used in 1834 by the psychophysiologist E.G. Weber. He placed one after another small weights of different weights on the same place on the subject’s body and thus determined what the smallest difference in weight a person could distinguish. In the experiment of Peirce and his best student Joseph Jastrow, weights with a difference in mass slightly less than the threshold of sensation of this difference were placed on the subject’s body (the subjects were, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow themselves in turn). Neither could consciously feel the difference in weight, but they agreed that they would still try to determine which load was heavier, and would indicate the degree of confidence in each guess on a scale from zero to three. Naturally, in almost all attempts, both scientists rated this degree as zero. However, despite their lack of confidence, both guessed correctly 60% of the time - which is much higher than simple chance. Repeating the experiment under different conditions—evaluating surfaces that differed slightly in illumination—produced similar results: They were able to guess the answer even without conscious access to the information that would allow them to draw the appropriate conclusions. Thus arose the first scientific evidence that the unconscious mind has knowledge that is not available to the conscious mind.
Pearce later compared the ability to pick up unconscious signals with great precision to "the musical and aeronautical talents of a bird... these are the most refined of our - and the bird's - instincts." He also described these abilities as “an inner light... a light without which humanity would have died out long ago, without any opportunity to struggle for existence...” In other words, the work produced by the unconscious is an integral part of our evolutionary survival mechanism. For more than a hundred years, theorists and practitioners of psychology have recognized that we all lead an active subconscious life, parallel to the one in which our conscious thoughts and feelings live, and we are only now learning to evaluate the influence of this life on everything conscious of us with at least some accuracy.
Carl Gustav Jung wrote that “there are events that we do not notice on a conscious level; they, so to speak, remain beyond the threshold of perception. They occurred, but were perceived subliminal...” The word “subliminal” comes from the Latin expression “under the threshold.” Psychologists use this term to refer to everything that lies below the threshold of consciousness. This book is about the processes occurring in the unconscious part of the mind, and how these processes affect us. To achieve a true understanding of the human life experience, we need to understand both the conscious and unconscious selves and their relationships. Our subconscious mind is invisible, but it influences our most significant experiences: how we perceive ourselves and those around us, what meaning we attach to everyday events, how quickly we can draw conclusions and make decisions on which our very lives sometimes depend, how we act based on own instinctive impulses.
Over the past hundred years, the unconscious aspects of human behavior have been discussed enthusiastically by Jung, Freud, and many others, but the knowledge gained by the methods they proposed—introspection, observation of external behavior, studying people with brain injuries, inserting electrodes into the brains of animals—is vague and indirect. Meanwhile, the true roots of human behavior remained hidden. Things are different these days. Tricky modern technologies revolutionized our understanding of that part of the brain that operates beneath the layer of the conscious mind - the world of the subconscious. Thanks to these technologies, for the first time in human history, a real science of the subconscious arose; it is precisely this that is the subject of this book.
Until the 20th century, physics quite successfully described the material Universe as we perceive it in our own experience. People noticed that if you throw something, it usually falls, and they found a way to measure how fast this happens. In 1687, Isaac Newton put this everyday understanding into mathematical form - in the book "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" which translated from Latin means “Mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” The laws formulated by Newton turned out to be so omnipotent that they could be used to calculate the orbits of the Moon and distant planets. Around 1900, however, this perfect and comfortable view of the world came under threat. Scientists have discovered that behind Newton's picture of the world lies another reality - a deeper truth known to us as quantum theory and the theory of relativity.
Christoph Koch of Laboratory K and everyone who has dedicated themselves to understanding the human mind.
The subconscious aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play a very minor role in our daily lives... [but] they are the subtle roots of our conscious thoughts.
Carl Gustav Jung
In June 1879, the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, sailing in a first-class cabin on a steamship from Boston to New York, had his gold watch stolen. Pierce reported the theft and demanded that the entire crew of the ship be gathered on deck. He interrogated everyone, but achieved nothing, after which, after wandering around in thought for a while, he did something strange: he decided to guess the attacker, although he had no evidence, like a poker player going all-in with two deuces in his hands. As soon as Pierce poked blindly, he immediately believed that he had guessed correctly. “I went for a walk, just for a minute,” he later wrote, “suddenly turned around - and even the shadow of doubt disappeared.”
Pierce confidently approached the suspect, but he was also no mistake and denied all accusations. Without any logical evidence, the philosopher could not do anything - until the ship arrived at its destination port. Pierce immediately hailed a cab, went to the local Pinkerton agency and hired a detective. The next day he found the watch in a pawnshop. Pierce asked the owner to describe the person who returned the watch. According to the philosopher, he described the suspect “so colorfully that it was almost certainly the person I pointed to.” Pierce himself was at a loss as to how he managed to identify the thief. He concluded that the clue had come from some instinctive feeling, something beyond his conscious mind.
If the story ended with such a conclusion, any scientist would find Peirce's explanation no more convincing than the "bird whistled" argument. Five years later, however, Peirce found a way to turn his ideas about unconscious perception into a laboratory experiment, modifying a method used in 1834 by the psychophysiologist E.G. Weber. He placed one after another small weights of different weights on the same place on the subject’s body and thus determined what the smallest difference in weight a person could distinguish. In the experiment of Peirce and his best student Joseph Jastrow, weights with a difference in mass slightly less than the threshold of sensation of this difference were placed on the subject’s body (the subjects were, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow themselves in turn). Neither could consciously feel the difference in weight, but they agreed that they would still try to determine which load was heavier, and would indicate the degree of confidence in each guess on a scale from zero to three. Naturally, in almost all attempts, both scientists rated this degree as zero. However, despite their lack of confidence, both guessed correctly 60% of the time - which is much higher than simple chance. Repeating the experiment under different conditions—evaluating surfaces that differed slightly in illumination—produced similar results: They were able to guess the answer even without conscious access to the information that would allow them to draw the appropriate conclusions. Thus arose the first scientific evidence that the unconscious mind has knowledge that is not available to the conscious mind.
Pearce later compared the ability to pick up unconscious signals with great precision to "the musical and aeronautical talents of a bird... these are the most refined of our - and the bird's - instincts." He also described these abilities as “an inner light... a light without which humanity would have died out long ago, without any opportunity to struggle for existence...” In other words, the work produced by the unconscious is an integral part of our evolutionary survival mechanism. For more than a hundred years, theorists and practitioners of psychology have recognized that we all lead an active subconscious life, parallel to the one in which our conscious thoughts and feelings live, and we are only now learning to evaluate the influence of this life on everything conscious of us with at least some accuracy.
Carl Gustav Jung wrote that “there are events that we do not notice on a conscious level; they, so to speak, remain beyond the threshold of perception. They occurred, but were perceived subliminal...” The word “subliminal” comes from the Latin expression “under the threshold.” Psychologists use this term to refer to everything that lies below the threshold of consciousness. This book is about the processes occurring in the unconscious part of the mind, and how these processes affect us. To achieve a true understanding of the human life experience, we need to understand both the conscious and unconscious selves and their relationships. Our subconscious mind is invisible, but it influences our most significant experiences: how we perceive ourselves and those around us, what meaning we attach to everyday events, how quickly we can draw conclusions and make decisions on which our very lives sometimes depend, how we act based on own instinctive impulses.
Over the past hundred years, the unconscious aspects of human behavior have been discussed enthusiastically by Jung, Freud, and many others, but the knowledge gained by the methods they proposed—introspection, observation of external behavior, studying people with brain injuries, inserting electrodes into the brains of animals—is vague and indirect. Meanwhile, the true roots of human behavior remained hidden. Things are different these days. Cunning modern technologies have revolutionized our understanding of the part of the brain that operates beneath the layer of the conscious mind - the world of the subconscious. Thanks to these technologies, for the first time in human history, a real science of the subconscious arose; it is precisely this that is the subject of this book.
Until the 20th century, physics quite successfully described the material Universe as we perceive it in our own experience. People noticed that if you throw something, it usually falls, and they found a way to measure how fast this happens. In 1687, Isaac Newton put this everyday understanding into mathematical form - in the book "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" which translated from Latin means “Mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” The laws formulated by Newton turned out to be so omnipotent that they could be used to calculate the orbits of the Moon and distant planets. Around 1900, however, this perfect and comfortable view of the world came under threat. Scientists have discovered that behind Newton's picture of the world lies another reality - a deeper truth, known to us as quantum theory and the theory of relativity.
Scientists formulate theories that describe physical world; we, social beings, formulate our own “theories” of the social world. These theories are an element of a human odyssey in the ocean of society. With their help, we interpret the behavior of others, predict their actions, make guesses about how we can get what we want from others, and, finally, decide how to treat them. Should I trust them with money, health, car, career, children, heart? As in the physical Universe, the social Universe also has a lining - a different reality, different from the one that we perceive naively. A revolution in physics arose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - technology made it possible to observe the amazing behavior of atoms and newly discovered atomic particles - the proton and electron; new methods of neuroscience give us the opportunity to deeply study the mental reality hidden from the eyes of the observer throughout human history.
The most revolutionary technology in the study of the mind has proven to be functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It is similar to the MRI that doctors use, only fMRI reflects the activity of various brain structures, the activity of which determines their saturation with blood. The smallest ebb and flow of blood is recorded by fMRI, generating a three-dimensional image of the brain from the inside and outside, with millimeter resolution, in dynamics. Imagine: enough fMRI data from your brain for scientists to recreate the picture you're looking at - that's the power of this method.
Take a look at the illustrations below. On the left is a real image that the subject is looking at, and on the right is a computer reconstruction created exclusively from fMRI data of the subject’s brain: by summing up the activity indicators of brain areas responsible for different segments of a person’s visual field, and those areas that are responsible for different subject topics. Then the computer went through a database of six million images and selected the ones that best match the data received:
The result of such research is no less a revolution in scientific consciousness than the quantum revolution: a new understanding of the functioning of the brain has emerged - and of who we are as human beings. This revolution gave birth to a whole new discipline - neurosociology. The first meeting of scientists dedicated to this new branch of science took place in April 2001.
© Leonard Mlodinow, 2012
© Shashi Martynova, translation, 2012
© Livebook, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.
©The electronic version of the book was prepared by liters company ( www.litres.ru)
Christoph Koch of Laboratory K and all those who have dedicated themselves to understanding the human mind
Prologue
The subconscious aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play a very minor role in our daily lives... [but] they are the subtle roots of our conscious thoughts.
In June 1879, the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, sailing in a first-class cabin on a steamship from Boston to New York, had his gold watch stolen. Pierce reported the theft and demanded that the entire crew of the ship be gathered on deck. He interrogated everyone, but achieved nothing, after which, after wandering around in thought for a while, he did something strange: he decided to guess the attacker, although he had no evidence, like a poker player going all-in with two deuces in his hands. As soon as Pierce poked blindly, he immediately believed that he had guessed correctly. “I went for a walk, just for a minute,” he later wrote, “suddenly turned around - and even the shadow of doubt disappeared.”
Pierce confidently approached the suspect, but he was also no mistake and denied all accusations. Without any logical evidence, the philosopher could not do anything - until the ship arrived at its destination port. Pierce immediately hailed a cab, went to the local Pinkerton agency and hired a detective. The next day he found the watch in a pawnshop. Pierce asked the owner to describe the person who returned the watch. According to the philosopher, he described the suspect “so colorfully that it was almost certainly the person I pointed to.” Pierce himself was at a loss as to how he managed to identify the thief. He concluded that the clue had come from some instinctive feeling, something beyond his conscious mind.
If the story ended with such a conclusion, any scientist would find Peirce's explanation no more convincing than the "bird whistled" argument. Five years later, however, Peirce found a way to turn his thoughts about unconscious perception into a laboratory experiment, modifying a method used in 1834 by the psychophysiologist E. G. Weber. He placed small weights of different weights one after another on the same place on the subject’s body and thus determined what the smallest difference in weight a person could distinguish. In the experiment of Peirce and his best student Joseph Jastrow, weights with a difference in mass slightly less than the threshold of sensation of this difference were placed on the subject’s body (the subjects were, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow themselves in turn). Neither could consciously feel the difference in weight, but they agreed that they would still try to determine which load was heavier, and would indicate the degree of confidence in each guess on a scale from zero to three. Naturally, in almost all attempts, both scientists rated this degree as zero. However, despite their lack of confidence, both guessed correctly 60% of the time - which is much higher than simple chance. Repeating the experiment under different conditions—evaluating surfaces that differed slightly in illumination—resulted in similar results: They were able to guess the answer even without conscious access to the information that would allow them to draw the appropriate conclusions. Thus arose the first scientific evidence that the unconscious mind has knowledge that is not available to the conscious mind.
Peirce later compared the ability to accurately detect unconscious signals with "the musical and aeronautical talents of a bird... these are our most refined - and the bird's - instincts." He also described these abilities as “an inner light... a light without which humanity would have died out long ago, without any opportunity to struggle for existence...” In other words, the work produced by the unconscious is an integral part of our evolutionary survival mechanism. For more than a hundred years, theorists and practitioners of psychology have recognized that we all lead an active subconscious life, parallel to the one in which our conscious thoughts and feelings live, and we are only now learning to evaluate the influence of this life on everything conscious of us with at least some accuracy.
Carl Gustav Jung wrote that “there are events that we do not notice on a conscious level; they, so to speak, remain beyond the threshold of perception. They occurred, but were perceived subliminal...” The word “subliminal” comes from the Latin expression “under the threshold.” Psychologists use this term to refer to everything that lies below the threshold of consciousness. This book is about the processes occurring in the unconscious part of the mind and how these processes affect us. To achieve a true understanding of the human life experience, we need to understand both the conscious and unconscious selves and their relationships. Our subconscious mind is invisible, but it influences our most significant experiences: how we perceive ourselves and those around us, what meaning we attach to everyday events, how quickly we can draw conclusions and make decisions on which our very lives sometimes depend, how we act based on own instinctive impulses.
Jung, Freud, and many others have speculated passionately about the unconscious aspects of human behavior over the past hundred years, but the knowledge gained by their methods—introspection, observation of external behavior, studying people with brain injuries, inserting electrodes into the brains of animals—is uncertain and indirect. Meanwhile, the true roots of human behavior remained hidden. Things are different these days. Cunning modern technologies have revolutionized our understanding of the part of the brain that operates beneath the layer of the conscious mind - the world of the subconscious. Thanks to these technologies, for the first time in human history, a real science of the subconscious arose; it is precisely this that is the subject of this book.
Until the twentieth century, physics was quite successful in describing the material universe as we perceive it in our own experience. People noticed that if you throw something, it usually falls, and they found a way to measure how fast this happens. In 1687, Isaac Newton put this everyday understanding into mathematical form - in the book "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" which translated from Latin means “Mathematical principles of natural philosophy”. The laws formulated by Newton turned out to be so omnipotent that they could be used to calculate the orbits of the Moon and distant planets. Around 1900, however, this perfect and comfortable view of the world came under threat. Scientists have discovered that behind Newton's picture of the world lies another reality - a deeper truth, known to us as quantum theory and the theory of relativity.
Scientists formulate theories that describe the physical world; we, social beings, formulate our own “theories” of the social world. These theories are an element of a human odyssey in the ocean of society. With their help, we interpret the behavior of others, predict their actions, make guesses about how we can get what we want from others, and, finally, decide how to treat them. Should I trust them with money, health, car, career, children, heart? As in the physical universe, the social universe also has a lining - a different reality, different from the one that we naively perceive. A revolution in physics arose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - technology made it possible to observe the amazing behavior of atoms and newly discovered atomic particles - the proton and electron; new methods of neurobiology give us the opportunity to deeply study the mental reality hidden from the eyes of the observer throughout the history of mankind.
The most revolutionary technology in the study of the mind has proven to be functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It is similar to the MRI that doctors use, only fMRI reflects the activity of various brain structures, the activity of which determines their saturation with blood. The smallest ebb and flow of blood is recorded by fMRI, generating a three-dimensional image of the brain from the inside and outside, with millimeter resolution, in dynamics. Imagine: enough fMRI data from your brain for scientists to recreate the picture you're looking at - that's the power of this method.
Take a look at the illustrations below. On the left is a real image that the subject is looking at, and on the right is a computer reconstruction created exclusively from fMRI data of the subject’s brain: by summing up the activity indicators of brain areas responsible for different segments of a person’s visual field, and those areas that are responsible for different subject topics. Then the computer went through a database of six million images and selected the ones that best match the data received:
The result of such research is no less a revolution in scientific consciousness than the quantum revolution: a new understanding of the functioning of the brain has emerged - and of who we are as human beings. This revolution gave birth to a whole new discipline: neurosociology. The first meeting of scientists dedicated to this new branch of science took place in April 2001.
Carl Jung believed that to understand the human experience it was necessary to study dreams and mythology. The history of mankind is a set of events that occurred in the development of civilization, and dreams and myths are expressions human soul. The motives and archetypes of our dreams and myths, according to Jung, do not depend on historical time and cultural characteristics. They come from the unconscious, which governed our behavior long before instincts were hidden under layers of civilization, out of sight, so myths and dreams tell us what it is like to be human at the deepest level. Nowadays, by putting together an overall picture of how the brain works, we can directly study human instincts and their physiological origins. By unlocking the secrets of the unconscious, we can understand both our connection to other species and what makes us human.
This book is an exploration of our evolutionary heritage, the amazing and strange forces that move our minds from beneath its surface, and the influence of unconscious instincts on what we have come to think of as rational volitional behavior - an influence far more powerful than has been commonly thought. If we really want to understand society, ourselves and others, and most importantly, how to overcome many of the obstacles that prevent us from living a fulfilled life, rich life, we will have to figure out how the subconscious world hidden in everyone influences us.
Christoph Koch of Laboratory K and everyone who has dedicated themselves to understanding the human mind.
The subconscious aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play a very minor role in our daily lives... [but] they are the subtle roots of our conscious thoughts.
In June 1879, the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, sailing in a first-class cabin on a steamship from Boston to New York, had his gold watch stolen. Pierce reported the theft and demanded that the entire crew of the ship be gathered on deck. He interrogated everyone, but achieved nothing, after which, after wandering around in thought for a while, he did something strange: he decided to guess the attacker, although he had no evidence, like a poker player going all-in with two deuces in his hands. As soon as Pierce poked blindly, he immediately believed that he had guessed correctly. “I went for a walk, just for a minute,” he later wrote, “suddenly turned around - and even the shadow of doubt disappeared.”
Pierce confidently approached the suspect, but he was also no mistake and denied all accusations. Without any logical evidence, the philosopher could not do anything - until the ship arrived at its destination port. Pierce immediately hailed a cab, went to the local Pinkerton agency and hired a detective. The next day he found the watch in a pawnshop. Pierce asked the owner to describe the person who returned the watch. According to the philosopher, he described the suspect “so colorfully that it was almost certainly the person I pointed to.” Pierce himself was at a loss as to how he managed to identify the thief. He concluded that the clue had come from some instinctive feeling, something beyond his conscious mind.
If the story ended with such a conclusion, any scientist would find Peirce's explanation no more convincing than the "bird whistled" argument. Five years later, however, Peirce found a way to turn his thoughts about unconscious perception into a laboratory experiment, modifying a method used in 1834 by the psychophysiologist E. G. Weber. He placed small weights of different weights one after another on the same place on the subject’s body and thus determined what the smallest difference in weight a person could distinguish. In the experiment of Peirce and his best student Joseph Jastrow, weights with a difference in mass slightly less than the threshold of sensation of this difference were placed on the subject’s body (the subjects were, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow themselves in turn). Neither one nor the other could consciously feel the difference in weight, but they agreed that they would still try to determine which load was heavier, and would indicate the degree of confidence in each guess on a scale from zero to three. Naturally, in almost all attempts, both scientists rated this degree as zero. However, despite their lack of confidence, both guessed correctly 60% of the time - which is much higher than simple chance. Repeating the experiment under different conditions—evaluating surfaces that differed slightly in illumination—produced similar results: They were able to guess the answer even without conscious access to the information that would allow them to draw the appropriate conclusions. Thus arose the first scientific evidence that the unconscious mind has knowledge that is not available to the conscious mind.
Pearce later compared the ability to pick up unconscious signals with great precision to "the musical and aeronautical talents of a bird... these are the most refined of our - and the bird's - instincts." He also described these abilities as “an inner light... a light without which humanity would have died out long ago, without any opportunity to struggle for existence...” In other words, the work produced by the unconscious is an integral part of our evolutionary survival mechanism. For more than a hundred years, theorists and practitioners of psychology have recognized that we all lead an active subconscious life, parallel to the one in which our conscious thoughts and feelings live, and we are only now learning to evaluate the influence of this life on everything conscious of us with at least some accuracy.
Chapter 1. The New Unconscious
The heart has its own laws that the mind does not know.
Blaise Pascal
When my mother was eighty-five, she inherited my son's prairie tortoise, Miss Dinnerman. The turtle was placed in the garden, in a spacious enclosure with bushes and grass, fenced with wire mesh. Mom’s knees were already giving out, and she had to give up her daily two-hour walk around the area. She was looking for someone to make friends with somewhere nearby, and the turtle turned out to be very helpful. Mom decorated the pen with rocks and driftwood and visited her every day, just as she once went to the bank to chat with the clerks or the cashiers at Big Lots. Sometimes she even brought flowers for the turtle to decorate his pen, but the turtle treated them like an order from Pizza Hut.
Mom was not offended by the turtle for eating her bouquets. This touched her. “Look how delicious it is for her,” my mother said. But despite the luxurious interiors, free accommodation, food and fresh flowers, Miss Dinnerman had one goal - to escape. In her free time from sleeping and eating, she walked around the perimeter of her property and looked for a hole in the fence. Uncomfortably, like a skateboarder on a spiral staircase, the turtle even tried to climb up the net. Mom also assessed these attempts from a human perspective. From her point of view, the turtle was preparing a heroic sabotage, like prisoner of war Steve McQueen from The Great Escape. “Every living thing is striving for freedom,” mother used to say. “Even if she likes it here, she doesn’t want to be locked up.” Mom believed that Miss Dinnerman recognized her voice and answered her. Mom believed that Miss Dinnerman understood her. “You are thinking too much about her,” I said. “Turtles are primitive creatures.” I even experimentally proved my point - I waved my arms and screamed like crazy; turtle zero attention. "And what? - Mom said. “Your children don’t notice you either, but you don’t consider them primitive creatures.”
It is often difficult to distinguish volitional, conscious behavior from habitual or automatic behavior. It is clear that it is so common for us humans to assume conscious, motivated behavior that we see it not only in our own actions, but also in those of animals. For our pets - and even more so. We anthropomorphize them - humanize them. Brave as a prisoner of war turtle; the cat described the suitcase to us because she is offended at us for leaving; The dog is obviously angry at the postman for good reason. The thoughtfulness and determination of simpler organisms may appear similar to those of humans. The courtship ritual of the pitiful fruit fly is extremely bizarre: the male pats the female with his front leg and performs a mating song, fluttering his wings. If the female has accepted the courtship, then she herself does nothing further - the male takes over the rest. If she is not sexually interested, then she will either hit her boyfriend with her feet or wings - or simply run away. And although I myself have caused horrifyingly similar reactions in human females, such behavior in fruit flies is deeply programmed. Fruit flies do not care how their relationships will develop in the future - they simply carry out their program. Moreover, their actions are so directly related to their biological structure that, applying to a male individual something discovered by scientists Chemical substance, literally within a few hours, a heterosexual male fruit fly will turn gay. Even roundworm behavior C. elegans - a creature consisting of about a thousand cells - may seem conscious and intentional. For example, he is able to crawl past a completely edible bacterium to another tasty morsel somewhere on the other edge of a Petri dish. There may be a temptation to regard this behavior of a roundworm as a demonstration of free will - we refuse an unappetizing vegetable or a dessert that is too high in calories. But the roundworm is not inclined to reason: I need to monitor the size of its diameter - it simply moves towards the nutrient mass that it is programmed to obtain.
Creatures like the fruit fly and the turtle are at the lower end of the scale of brain power, but automatic behavior is not limited to these primitive creatures. We humans also perform many actions unconsciously, automatically, but we usually do not notice this, because the relationship between the conscious and unconscious is too complex. This complexity comes from the physiology of the brain. We are mammals, and on top of the simpler cerebral layers inherited from reptiles are new ones. And on top of these layers there are others, developed only in humans. Thus, we have an unconscious mind, and above it we have a conscious mind. It is difficult to say which part of our feelings, conclusions and actions is rooted in one or the other: there is a constant connection between them. For example, you need to stop by the post office on your way to work in the morning, but for some reason the necessary turn flies by: acting on autopilot, unconsciously, you immediately head to the office. Trying to explain to the policeman your turn through the solid, you attract the conscious part of the mind and construct the optimal explanation, while the unconscious, meanwhile, is busy selecting the appropriate verb forms, subjunctive moods and endless prepositions and particles, providing reference for your justifications grammatical form. If you are asked to get out of the car, you will instinctively stand about a meter and a half from the policeman, although when communicating with friends, you automatically reduce this distance to sixty to seventy centimeters. Most obey these unwritten rules of maintaining distance from others, and we inevitably feel uncomfortable when these rules are broken.
Such simple habits (for example, a habitual turn on the road) are easy to recognize as automatic - you just have to notice them. It is much more interesting to understand to what extent our much more complex actions that significantly influence our lives are automatic, even if it seems to us that they are carefully thought out and completely rational. How does our subconscious mind influence decisions such as “Which house should I buy?”, “Which stocks should I sell?”, “Should I hire this person to babysit my child?” or “Is the fact that I look into those blue eyes a sufficient reason for a long-term relationship?”
Distinguishing unconscious behavior is difficult even in animals, and even more difficult in us humans. When I was in college, long before my mom's tortoise phase, I called her every Thursday evening around eight o'clock. And then one day he didn’t call. Most parents would think that I simply forgot or that I finally got on with my life and went off to have fun. But my mother’s interpretation turned out to be different. Around nine in the evening she started calling me at home and asking me to come on the phone. My flatmate apparently took the first four or five calls calmly, but then, as it turned out the next morning, her complacency had run out. Especially after my mother accused my neighbor of hiding from her the horrific injuries I received, which is why I am under anesthesia at the local hospital and therefore do not call. By midnight, my mother's vivid imagination had inflated this scenario even more: she now blamed my neighbor for covering up my untimely death. “Why are you lying to me? - she was indignant. “I’ll find out anyway.”
Almost any child would be embarrassed by the knowledge that your mother, a person who has known you closely since birth, would rather believe that you were killed than that you went on a date. But my mother has done such numbers before. To outsiders, she seemed completely normal - minus, perhaps, minor quirks like belief in evil spirits or love for accordion music. Such eccentricities are quite expected: she grew up in Poland, a country with an ancient culture. But my mother’s mind worked differently than anyone else we knew. Now I understand why, although my mother does not admit it: decades ago, her psyche was reshaped to perceive a context incomprehensible to most of us. It all started in 1939, when my mother was sixteen. Her mother died of intestinal cancer after suffering unbearable pain for a year. Some time later, my mother returned home from school one day and discovered that her father had been taken by the Germans. Mom and her sister Sabina were also soon taken to a concentration camp, and her sister did not survive. Almost overnight, the life of a loved and cared for teenager in a strong family turned into the existence of a hungry, despised, forced orphan. After her release, Mom emigrated, got married, settled in a peaceful Chicago suburb and lived a quiet middle-class life. There was no rational reason to fear the sudden loss of those dear to her, but fear ruled her perception of everyday life for the rest of her days.
Mom perceived the meanings of actions according to a dictionary different from ours, and in accordance with some grammatical rules unique to her. She made conclusions not logically, but automatically. We understand everything colloquial without conscious use of grammar; she understood the messages of the world addressed to her in the same way - without any awareness that previous life experiences had forever changed her expectations. Mom never admitted that her perception was distorted by an ineradicable fear that justice, probability and logic could lose their power and meaning at any moment. No matter how many times I urged her to see a psychologist, she always laughed at my suggestions and refused to consider that her past had any negative impact on her perception of the present. “Okay,” I answered. “Why then does none of my friends’ parents accuse their neighbors of conspiring to hide their deaths?”
Each of us has hidden frames of reference - well, if not so extreme - from which our way of thinking and behavior grows. We always think that actions and experiences are rooted in conscious thinking - and, just like my mother, we find it difficult to accept that we have forces operating behind the scenes of consciousness. But their invisibility does not diminish their influence. In the past, there was a lot of talk about the unconscious, but the brain always remained a black box, and its workings were inaccessible to understanding. The modern revolution in the way we think about the unconscious has occurred because, with the help of modern tools, we can observe how the structures and substructures of the brain generate feelings and emotions. We can measure the electrical conductivity of individual neurons, understand nervous activity, shaping human thoughts. These days, scientists go beyond talking to my mother and guessing about how her previous experiences affected her—they can determine which areas of the brain were changed by painful experiences in her youth and understand how those experiences cause physical changes in areas of the brain that are sensitive to stress.
The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such research and measurements, is often called the “new unconscious” to distinguish it from the unconscious popularized by neurologist-turned-clinician Sigmund Freud. Freud made remarkable contributions to neurology, neuropathology and anesthesia. He, for example, proposed the use of gold chloride to mark nerve tissue and used this technique in studying the neural interactions between the medulla oblongata, or bulb, located in the brain stem, and the cerebellum. In these studies, Freud was far ahead of his time: it would be decades before scientists realized the importance of connections within the brain and developed tools to study it. But Freud himself was not interested in these studies for long and soon switched to clinical practice. Using patients, Freud came to the correct conclusion: their behavior is largely controlled by unconscious mental processes. Lacking instruments to scientifically confirm this conclusion, Freud simply talked with his patients, tried to extract from them what was going on in the recesses of their minds, observed them and made assumptions that seemed reasonable to him. But we will see that such methods are unreliable, and many unconscious processes cannot in any way be revealed by therapeutic introspection because they appear in areas of the brain that are not accessible to the conscious mind. That is why Freud mostly hit the mark.
Human behavior is shaped by an endless stream of perceptions, feelings and thoughts experienced at both conscious and unconscious levels. It is difficult for us to accept that for the most part we are not aware of the reasons for our own actions. And although Freud and his followers shared the belief that the unconscious influences human behavior, research psychologists until recently were wary of it as “pop.” One scientist wrote: “Many psychologists refrain from using the term “unconscious,” otherwise their colleagues will think that they have gone crazy.” Yale psychologist John Bargh recalls that when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s, it was generally accepted that not only our social perceptions and evaluations, but also our behavior, were conscious and voluntary. Any attempts to undermine this belief were ridiculed: Bargh once told his close relative, an accomplished professional, about some developments that proved that people commit acts for which they have no idea the motives. Wanting to refute the results of such studies, Barg’s relative cited his own experience as an example: he could not remember anything in his actions that he did without realizing the motives. Bargh writes: “We all value very much the idea that we are the masters of our own souls, that we are at the helm, and the opposite is very scary. In essence, this is psychosis - a feeling of separation from reality, loss of control, and this will scare anyone.”
Modern psychology recognizes the importance of the unconscious, however internal forces of the new unconscious have little in common with those described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father and marry his own mother or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ. It is necessary, of course, to give Freud credit for understanding the enormous power of the unconscious - this understanding itself is a great achievement - but it must also be recognized that science seriously doubts the existence of many of the specific emotional and motivational factors of the unconscious that Freud identified as shaping the conscious mind. Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote that "because of the spirit of Freud's uncanny undewusst[of the unconscious] the whole concept turned out to be inedible.”
The unconscious as Freud saw it is, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; seething with lust and anger; hallucinatory, primitive, irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and more delicate—and more closely connected to reality.” In the new view, mental processes are seen as unconscious because there are areas of the mind that are not accessible to consciousness due to the architecture of the brain, not because they are affected by other motivational forces such as suppression. The inaccessibility of the new unconscious is not a defense mechanism or a sign of ill health. This is now considered the norm.
Even if I am talking about a phenomenon, and my reasoning smacks of Freudianism, the modern understanding of this phenomenon and its causes is not Freudian at all. The new unconscious plays a much more significant role than protection from obscene sexual desires (for our parents, for example) or from painful memories. On the contrary, it is a gift of evolution, necessary for our survival as a species. Conscious thinking is great for designing a car or understanding the mathematical laws of nature, but avoiding snake bites, being run over by a car that comes around a corner, or avoiding dangerous people Only an agile and dexterous unconscious can help. We will see how many different processes of perception, memory, attention, learning and judgment nature has designed for brain structures outside of awareness to perform, all in order to ensure our smooth functioning in the physical and social worlds.
Let's say your family went on vacation to Disneyland last summer. In hindsight, you might question the wisdom of queuing in 90-degree heat just to watch your daughter chatting away in a giant teacup. But then remember that when planning the trip, you evaluated all the options and came to the conclusion that one daughter’s smile from ear to ear would be worth it. We are usually confident that we know the motives for our behavior. Sometimes this confidence is justified. But, nevertheless, since forces outside our consciousness greatly influence our assessments and behavior, we definitely do not know ourselves as well as we are accustomed to believe. I chose this job because I wanted to try something new. I like this guy because he has a great sense of humor. I trust my gastroenterologist, because that dog ate due to intestinal diseases. We ask questions every day about what we feel and prefer, and we receive answers. Our answers usually seem reasonable, but still often turn out to be not at all correct.
How I love you? Elizabeth Barrett Browning thought she could list how, but she probably couldn't come up with an exact list of reasons. We can almost do it these days - take a look at the table below. It shows statistics about who married whom in three states in the southeastern United States.
Let's say all these couples married for love - yes, for sure. But what is the source of this love? A lover's smile? Generosity? Grace? Charm? Sensitivity? Or biceps sizes? For thousands of years, lovers, poets and philosophers have been thinking about the source of love, but with good accuracy it can be said that no one has flashed eloquence about the factor of names. The table, meanwhile, shows that the surname of the chosen one can latently influence the decisions of the heart - if these surnames coincide with you.
The top row and right column list the five most common American surnames. The numbers in the table are the number of marriages between the bride and groom with the corresponding surnames. The highest rates, as we see, are located along the diagonal, i.e. Smiths marry Smiths three to five times more often than Johnsons, Joneses or Browns. In fact, Smiths marry Smiths just as often as they marry people with other common names. The Johnsons, Williamses and Browns behave similarly. But here's what's even more striking: it doesn't take into account that there are twice as many Smiths as Browns, and all other things being equal, one would think that the Browns marry the notorious Smiths more often than the rarer Browns, but even with this correction, the most frequent marriages are with Browns - with other Browns.
What does this mean? We have a basic need to like ourselves, and so we tend to be biased: we prefer traits in others that are similar to our own, even in the case of something as trivial as a last name. Scientists have even identified a specific area of the brain - the striatum - that is responsible for such biases.
Research suggests that we humans are weak in understanding feelings, but also self-confident. There can be no doubt that new job- aspirations for more, although perhaps it is simply more prestigious. Although you swear that this guy is the best because he has a great sense of humor, in fact, I like him with a smile that reminds me of my mother’s. You might think that a gastroenterologist is trustworthy because of her professionalism, but you probably want to trust her because she knows how to listen. Many of us are quite satisfied with our own ideas about ourselves, confident in them, but we rarely have the opportunity to check them. However, scientists can now test our theories in the laboratory and find that they are strikingly wrong. Let's say you go to the cinema and a man who looks like a movie theater employee approaches you and asks you to answer a couple of questions about the theater and its services in exchange for free popcorn and a drink. What this person won’t tell you is that the popcorn they serve comes in two sizes of glasses: larger and smaller, but both are still so gigantic that you can’t handle them in a session, and they come in two “flavors.” Participants in the experiment will then say that one “taste” is “good”, “high quality”, and the other is “stale”, “undercooked”, “creepy”. Nor will you be told that you are being invited to participate in a scientific experiment to find out how much popcorn you will eat and why. Here's the question posed by the experimenters: what will have a greater impact on the amount of popcorn eaten - taste or portion size? To collect statistics; The researchers gave subjects one of four possible flavor-size combinations. Moviegoers received good popcorn in a smaller glass, good popcorn in a larger glass, bad popcorn in a smaller glass, or bad popcorn in a larger glass. Result? People tended to "decide" how much to eat based on both taste and package size - equally. Other studies support this finding: Increasing the serving size of a snack food increases consumption by 30–45%.
I put the word “decide” in quotation marks because in our perception it is associated with conscious action. It is unlikely that what is being discussed in our example falls under this definition. The subjects did not tell themselves, they say, This free popcorn is rubbish, but there is a lot of it, and the vinegar is sweet for free. On the contrary, such studies confirm what advertisers have long guessed: “external factors” - packaging design, serving sizes, descriptions of dishes on the menu - subconsciously influence us. But what is most striking is the scale of this effect and the reluctance of people to admit that they are being manipulated. Sometimes we notice that these factors affect people, but at the same time we assume - mistakenly - that they certainly do not affect us.
In fact, external factors have a powerful - and unconscious - influence not only on how much food we eat, but also on how it tastes. Suppose you eat not only at the movies, but sometimes you also go to restaurants - sometimes even to restaurants that serve not only different types hamburgers. In these more sophisticated establishments, the menu is full of names like “crispy cucumbers”, “velvet puree”, “beets on a bed of arugula, fried over low heat”, as if in other restaurants the cucumbers are limp, the puree has a woolly consistency, and the beets are fried with napalm and laid on a quinoa mattress. Would a crispy cucumber taste just as crispy if you called it something else? If you write "bacon cheeseburger" in Spanish, does it become a Mexican dish? Will mac and cheese turn a poetic description from a limerick into a haiku? Research shows that floridity not only encourages people to order lyrically described dishes on a menu, but also encourages them to rate those dishes. both tastier compared with identical dishes, but presented without frills. If you were asked what you prefer in haute cuisine and you answered that you like a side dish of cheerful adjectives, it would make a rather strange impression on your interlocutor. And yet, the description of a dish turns out to be an important component of taste. So the next time you invite friends over for lunch, don't serve them a salad from the supermarket next door—play it subconsciously: serve a melange of local greens.
Let's complicate the task. What do you like more - velvety puree or velvet puree? So far no one has undertaken to study the influence of font on the taste of puree, but an experiment has been carried out on how font affects cooking food. In this experiment, participants were asked to read a recipe for a Japanese dinner dish and rate the amount of effort and skill required to implement the recipe, as well as whether the dish could be prepared at home.
Subjects who were given a recipe in illegible font rated it as difficult and unlikely to be suitable for home cooking. The experiment was repeated, giving other subjects a description of a set of exercises instead of a recipe, and a similar result was obtained: those who received instructions printed in a hard-to-read font rated the exercises as difficult and said they were unlikely to do them. Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” The difficulty of understanding the form of information affects our perception essentially information.
The study of the new unconscious has accumulated a lot of data on similar phenomena - quirks in our assessments and perceptions of people and events, distortions that suddenly arise even in situations that our brain automatically copes with the best way. The whole point is that we are not a computer that grinds data more or less head-on and produces a numerical result. Our brain is the sum of many modules working in parallel and connected to each other, and most of them operate outside of consciousness. That is why the true reasons for our assessments, feelings and actions surprise us.
Not only academic psychology, but also sociological disciplines, until recently, were very reluctant to recognize the power of the unconscious. Economists, for example, have built textbook theories on the assumption that people make choices in their own best interests by consciously weighing all relevant factors. If the new unconscious is as powerful as psychologists and neuroscientists suggest, economists will have to reconsider their ideas. Of course, a growing minority of dissident economists have had great success in undermining the theories of the more traditionally minded majority. Nowadays, behavioral economists like Caltech's Antonio Wrangle are changing the way economists think about things - making serious arguments that prove textbook theories are incomplete.
Wrangle is not at all like an economist in the traditional sense - he is not a theorist of those who pore over numbers and construct cunning computer models to describe market dynamics. A burly Spaniard, a bon vivant and a weaver, Wrangle works with real people- student volunteers, whom he drags into his laboratory for experiments: they try his wine or stare at candy on an empty stomach. In a recent study, he and his colleagues showed that people are willing to pay 40–61% more per unit of junk food if the packaging was shown live rather than in a picture or computer monitor. The same study showed that if an object is hidden under glass and not given into the hands, the consumer’s desire to purchase it drops to the level of the picture shown. Strange, right? Will you rate one laundry detergent as the best because it comes in a blue and yellow box? If in trading floor German beer music is playing, would you rather buy German wine or French wine? Would you decide which pair of silk stockings is better based on their smell?
In all of these experiments, people were significantly influenced by irrelevant factors—factors in our subconscious desires and motivations that traditional economists neglect. Moreover, it turned out that the subjects, in their own words, were not aware of these factors and their influence. For example, in a study on the popularity of detergents, subjects were given three different packages of detergent and asked to use all three for several weeks, then report which was the best and why. One box was yellow, another was blue, and the third was blue with yellow spots. The vast majority of respondents chose the powder in a box of mixed colors. All commented on the comparative qualities of the detergents, but none mentioned the box in their report. Why? Cute packaging does not improve the quality of the contents. But in fact, these powders differed only in packaging - they were the same detergent. We judge a product by its packaging, a book by its cover, and even a company's annual report by the glossy paper it's printed on. That’s why doctors instinctively “pack” themselves into neat shirts and ties, and lawyers shouldn’t meet with clients wearing T-shirts with Badweiser symbols.
In a study of wine sales, four types of French and four types of German dry wines of the same price range were placed on the shelf in one English supermarket. IN different days French and German music played above the wine rack.
On days when French music was played, 77% of buyers chose French wine, and on “German music days” 73% of wine purchases were German. Obviously, music turned out to be the most important factor in purchasing choice, but when asked whether music influenced wine preferences, only one buyer out of seven answered positively. In the stocking experiment, respondents were offered four pairs of completely identical silk stockings (which the subjects were not informed about), differing, however, in a pre-applied light scent. Subjects "easily identified which pair was better than the others," describing differences in texture, weave, softness, shine and weight - everything except smell. Stockings with one particular scent were voted the best more often than others, but subjects rejected the idea that they were using smell as a selection criterion, and only 6 out of 250 participants in the experiment even noticed that the stockings had a scent.
“People believe that their satisfaction with a product is based on the quality of that product, but their satisfaction itself depends significantly on the market positioning of the product,” says Wrangle. - For example, the same beer, described in different ways or offered to consumers under different brands or at different prices, can taste very different. It’s the same with wine, although the public likes to think that it’s all about the grape variety and the skill of the winemaker.” Research convincingly shows that during blind wine tastings there is no direct connection between the taste of a wine and its price, but it is more than direct if the wines are tasted with open eyes. Since people generally believe that the more expensive a wine, the better it tastes, Wrangle was not at all surprised by the conclusion of the volunteers he gave two bottles of wine, marked only by price - $90 and $10 per bottle, to try: the first was better. . But Wrangle fooled everyone: both wines, perceived by the test subjects as different, were in fact the same - both from a $90 bottle. Another important detail: this study on volunteers was carried out simultaneously with a study of their brain activity using fMRI. The resulting images showed that the price of wine activated the activity of the area of the brain behind the eyeballs - the orbitofrontal zone, which is responsible for the experience of pleasure. The wines were the same, but the difference in tastes turned out to be quite real - in any case, the subjects experienced pleasure to different degrees.
How does the brain come to the conclusion that one drink tastes better than another if they are physically the same thing? It is naive to believe that sensory signals like taste travel from the sensory organ to a certain part of the brain, where they are interpreted more or less directly. We will see later that the architecture of the brain is more complex. Although we do not realize it, when we sip cool wine, we taste more than just it chemical composition, but also the price. Researchers observed the same effect while the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi wars were going on - only in relation to brands. This effect has long been called the “Pepsi paradox”: in blind taste tests, Pepsi always beats Coca-Cola, and when the subjects know what they are drinking, they prefer Coca-Cola. Many theories have been proposed to try to explain this phenomenon. The most obvious explanation is brand influence, but if you ask people whether it’s the cheerful Coca-Cola ad they choose to taste, almost no one will admit it. However, in the early 2000s, new brain research technologies confirmed that the area of the brain located next to the orbitofrontal zone, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is home to vague but pleasant sensations, like those we experience when thinking about a familiar brand of product. In 2007, researchers recruited a group of subjects with severe damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and a control group without damage. As expected, both groups, not knowing which of the two brands they were trying, preferred Pepsi. And, also quite predictably, in the group of people with healthy brains, preferences switched when the subjects in the second experiment were told what exactly they were drinking. But the group with damage to the ventromedial cortex—that is, the area of the brain responsible for “brand loyalty”—did not change their preferences. They liked Pepsi better in both cases. Without the opportunity to feel warm feelings towards the brand, the Pepsi paradox ceases to manifest itself.
But the truth is not in the wine or Pepsi. What is true of drinks and brands is true of our other experiences. Both direct, expressed aspects of life (such as a certain drink) and indirect, unexpressed aspects (such as price or brand) together create a mental experience (taste). Keyword- “create”. Our brains don't just record taste or any other experience, they create them. We will return to this more than once. We like to think that we prefer one type of guacamole over all others, because we have strong arguments - taste, calorie content, price, mood, the conviction that the right guacamole does not contain mayonnaise... and a hundred more factors, and we have everything under our control control. We assume that when we choose a laptop or laundry detergent, plan a vacation, buy a stock, accept a business proposal, evaluate the potential of an athlete, make a friendship, evaluate a stranger, or even fall in love, we understand what has influenced us most. Very often our conclusions are infinitely far from the truth, and therefore our most basic ideas about ourselves and about society are false.
Since the influence of the subconscious is so great, it manifests itself not only in individual situations in our personal lives - it is certainly noticeable in society as a whole. This is true - for example, in the financial world. Since money is an important substance for us, any individual, in theory, should make financial decisions solely on the basis of a conscious, rational choice. Therefore, the foundations of classical economic theory are based precisely on this premise: that people behave rationally and in full accordance with the key principle of self-interest. Until now, no one has figured out how to develop a general economic theory, which would take into account that “rational” is by no means a characteristic of human behavior, but many economic studies indicate how our collective deviation from the cold calculation of the conscious mind affects society.
Consider the fluency effect I mentioned earlier. If you were deciding which stock to invest in, you would probably evaluate the state of the sector, the general business climate, and the financial details of the company before investing your savings in it. Is it easy to pronounce the name of the company - this factor will clearly be at the tail of any list of rational reasons, who will argue? If this turns out to be the reason for your investment choice, your relatives will probably begin to quickly make plans to hide your nest egg, since you clearly don’t have everything at home. And yet, we have already found that the degree of ease with which a person assimilates this or that information (for example, the name of a company) unconsciously influences how a person evaluates this information. Let's say you're willing to believe that ease of learning can influence your judgment of the complexity of a Japanese recipe, but does that influence extend to important decisions like investment strategies? Are companies with simple names doing better than those that are tongue-tied?
For example, a company is preparing for an initial public offering ( IPO). Its leaders present the brilliant future of the enterprise and support the presentation with available data. But private companies are usually much less known to potential investors than those already operating on the stock exchange, and since newcomers have no track record, investing in such companies is completely guesswork. To see if smart Wall Street traders who make big investments are actually unconsciously biased against companies with unpronounceable names, the researchers pulled up statistics on IPO. Take a look at the chart: Investors are indeed more likely to invest in companies with simple names.
Stock prices of companies with easy-to-pronounce ticker symbols on the New York Stock Exchange on the first day, week, six months, and year after going public, for the period from 1990 to 2004. A similar pattern was found for IPOs on the American Stock Exchange .
Please note that this effect smoothes out over time as the company gains a reputation in the market. (By the way, the same conclusion applies to books and their authors: notice how simple my last name is: Mlo-di-nov.)
Researchers have also identified other factors that have nothing to do with finance (but are quite significant for the human psyche) that influence stock prices. Here, let's say, the sun. Psychologists have long established that sunlight has an unconscious positive effect on human behavior. For example, one researcher assigned six waitresses at a Chicago shopping center restaurant to observe thirteen randomly selected spring days depending on the tip size and the weather. Visitors may not have realized that they were affected by weather conditions, but when it was a sunny day, they were more generous. Another experiment - with a similar result - was conducted with the participation of waiters serving rooms at a casino hotel in Atlantic City. Could the same factor push a consumer to throw an extra dollar at a waiter for a wavy potato straw and a sophisticated trader when assessing the promising profits of General Motors? And here you can check everything. Most trading on Wall Street is, of course, carried out on behalf of people living away from New York, and investors themselves can live anywhere, but the general patterns in the behavior of New York stockbrokers significantly influence the prices of the New York Stock Exchange. In particular, at least until the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, Wall Street activity was limited mainly to its own trading operations, that is, large companies traded themselves, from their own accounts. As a result, significant amounts of money were redistributed by people knowledgeable about the weather in New York: they themselves lived in this city. So one professor of economics and finance from the University of Massachusetts decided to find out the connection between the weather in New York and the daily movements of stock indices traded on Wall Street. After analyzing data from 1927 to 1990, he found that very sunny and very cloudy weather affected stock prices.
It is quite right to doubt such conclusions. Data mining, that is, sifting through numbers with the intention of finding a previously unrecognized pattern, is fraught with misconceptions. According to the law of chance, if you look around long enough, you will probably see something interesting. And this “something” may be just a spontaneous outburst, or it may actually be a trend, and to distinguish the first from the second, serious competencies are needed. Fool's gold for the information miner is statistical correlations of amazing depth, which in fact are completely meaningless. If we assume that the influence of weather on stock exchange trading is a pure coincidence, no connection should be found when analyzing stock market indicators in other cities. And then another pair of researchers repeated the data analysis - on stock indices of twenty-six countries from 1982 to 1997. The relationship was confirmed: according to the collected statistics, if there were exclusively sunny days in the year, the income of the New York Stock Exchange would be 24.8%, and if there were only cloudy days, then only 8.7%. (Unfortunately, the researchers also discovered that there was no way to make money from this pattern because tracking the weather would require too many traders, and all the profits would go toward transaction costs.)
We make personal, financial and business decisions with full confidence that we have taken everything into account important factors, we act in accordance with our assessments - and we know how we came to certain conclusions. But we comprehend only the influences we have realized and therefore do not have all the information; As a result, our ideas about ourselves, our motivations and society are a puzzle in which most of the pieces are lost. We somehow fill in the gaps and make guesses, but the true state of affairs is much more complex and intricate than we can understand through direct calculations of the conscious rational mind.
We perceive, remember what we have experienced, make assessments, act - and all this is influenced by factors that we are not aware of. There will be much further support for this conclusion in the pages of this book: I will outline several different manifestations of the unconscious part of the brain. We will see how our brain processes information on two parallel tiers - conscious and unconscious, and then we can recognize the power of the unconscious. Our unconscious mind is active, goal-oriented and independent. It itself is hidden, but the results of its activities play a key role in shaping how our conscious mind perceives and interacts with reality.
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