Unraveling the mystery of the unconscious
The world beyond the conscious mindYou've always had a certain melody playing in your head every time you closed your office door. You always prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi. A certain look on your spouse's face somehow inspires love or anger in you. And how your reasons for marrying your spouse in the first place now seem implausible.
These are all proof that your unconscious is actively at work. Although these examples may seem unrelated on the surface, they all reveal a rich inner world that is less rational than the conscious mind. Long before Freud made the world realize that what we do depends on the mysterious power of memory and emotion, there is a renewed search for the depths of the mind and heart. Paul Whelan, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, says, "Most of our actions in every moment are unconscious. If everything was at the forefront of consciousness, life would be a mess."
With putative neuroimaging technology, questions such as "how do we make hasty decisions," "why do we feel uneasy about decisions we have no reason to make," and "what satisfies us? Questions such as "how do we make hasty decisions," "why do we feel uneasy about unexplained decisions," and "what makes us happy" are about to be answered not by studying the secrets of someone's childhood, but by looking at neural impulses in specific parts of the brain. New research in this area is published almost weekly. Pop culture is so enamored with neuroscience that Malcolm. Gladwell's book, "In the Blink of an Eye: The Power of Unconscious Thinking," has remained on the best-seller list for four weeks.
Most of us are willing to accept the idea that we make judgments about things through thoughts that take place somewhere out of reach. But now scientists have found the neural connections to these thought processes, located in parts of the brain that have never received much attention, that liaise with other parts of the brain, triggering neurotransmission and leading to our behavior. Clinton Kilts, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University, says, "Nothing you do, no thought, no conscious or unconscious, no day-to-day activity, is not neurally coded. Our biggest challenge is figuring out how to study and unravel those codes."
The initial understanding of the human unconscious is far-reaching, both for individuals and for the medical community. The realization that human behavior may not all be the result of higher rational thought may shake our belief in certain cherished values, such as free will, the ability to make choices, and a sense of responsibility for those choices. We can never control the rhythm of our heartbeat or the activity of our brain's limbic system. However, Gladwell writes, "our snap judgments and first impressions are both warranted and manipulated ...... To explain our behavior, we must recognize that a flash of thought has the same value as a long period of rational analysis."
Cognitive neuroscientists believe that people are conscious of only about 5 percent of their cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviors depend on that 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond consciousness. From heartbeats and shopping carts to deciding not to harm a litter of kittens, we rely on something called the "adaptive unconscious," which is the brain's way of recognizing the world with which our minds and bodies must interact. The adaptive unconscious allows us to drive around a corner without having to use complex calculations to figure out the exact angle of the turn, the speed of the car, and the driving radius. It also allows us to understand the correct meaning of ambiguous sentences.
Commercial applications of unconsciousness research Gerald Saltzman is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, but he thinks like a neuroscientist -- about layers of consciousness. He's also one of the founding partners of Olson Saltzman Colleague Consulting, which guides businesses to better understand their customers. As a marketing professor, Saltzman likes to study what motivates people to buy one thing over another in the field of neuroscience, which goes to the heart of questions about motivation.
In his work to probe customer consciousness, Saltzman tries to find a way to get past the often-unreliable sample-panel surveys, to avoid the distractions of extraneous factors, and to get at what customers really want. That would make sales and promotions more productive.
He applied for a U.S. patent for the method, which he called "Saltzman Metaphorical Elicitation Technique" (ZMET). The patent certificate describes it as a "technique for deriving interrelated constructs that influence thought and behavior. ZMET has long been used to create messages that elicit responses from the vital 95% of the customer's brain that drives many of their choices. It works by obtaining those deep metaphors that people unconsciously associate with a certain product or feeling.
Language, Saltzman says, is too limited to confuse it with thought itself. But images are a step closer to accessing complex and contradictory slices of the unconscious sensory world. He asked his subjects to draw pictures that represented their thoughts and feelings about something, even if they couldn't explain why they drew it that way. Saltzman found that when people did this, they often found "a profound metaphor placed in a unique situation." After conducting research around the world, he believes that the variety of these unconscious metaphors is limited, and that metaphors expressing emotions such as hope and sadness are universally applicable to all people.
Saltzman found that even metaphors have practical uses. He was asked by an architectural firm to help design a new children's hospital that managed to make the environment less intolerable for hospitalized children, their parents, and the hospital staff than it had been in the past. Using ZMET technology, the children, parents and staff drew images of what the hospital reminded them of. The researchers then questioned them about these drawings for nearly two hours, uncovering their thoughts, feelings and associations. A series of metaphors emerged from the conversation. After a series of further processing, the core themes finally emerged, despite the wide variety of expressions and emotions. For this children's hospital, the primary metaphor was transformation, and the supporting metaphors were control, communication and energy.
How did these themes materialize?
When the hospital was completed in 2008, patients and their families were surrounded by butterflies, a symbol of transformation, as they walked in. The wards are more like family rooms, where children have some control over their personal space. A large garden, visible from all wards, symbolizes transformation, communication and energy. Previously, design was a gamble, a matter of luck," says one of the designers. Now we know that the deepest theme of this hospital has to do with transformation."
Of course. Saltzman isn't the only one who's studied his clients' ideas. In his book, "In the Blink of an Eye," Gladwell describes a costly mistake made by the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola changed the formula of the drink based on data from blindfolded taste tests, but the "New Coca-Cola" was a flop in the marketplace. In fact, Coca-Cola remained the leader in soft drinks, even though the flavor was not as popular as Pepsi. A new study released after Gladwell's book was completed may explain that.
Researchers at Baylor University School of Medicine gave 67 supporters of Coca-Cola and Pepsi a choice. When blindfolded, they preferred Pepsi. But when they saw the company's logo before drinking it, 3/4 of them preferred Coca-Cola. Researchers scanned the subjects' brains during the test and found that the Coca-Cola logo triggered intense activity in parts of the brain associated with memory and self-image, while Pepsi had little effect on those areas, despite tasting better to most people. When the study was released last October, Reid, of the Brown Foundation's Human Neuroscanning Laboratory at Baylor University. Montague explained it by saying, "The Coca-Cola trademark powerfully affects activities in the human brain related to behavioral control -- memories and flashes of self-image."
The key, he says, is that the brain responds in a way that can influence behavior." Strangely, this response is irrelevant to preferences at the conscious level. The dog primed for the unconscious mind will come up and sniff you. If it remembers you, and in its mind you're a nice person, then it immediately starts wagging its tail and perhaps rewarding you with a lick on the wrist. But it may also avoid you at a distance, associate you with food, or take a quick bite out of you. All of these impressions, these connections are triggered by a single sniff. Except for the fact that they don't walk over to sniff another person, people are actually - in this respect - the same as dogs. Dolores, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
"An odor is not just a symbol, it encompasses a wide range of things," says Malaspina. "He explained that olfactory information is distinctive because it is the only one of the five human senses that doesn't linger in the brain's relay station, the thalamus, but arrives directly in the forebrain cortex. The sense of smell doesn't need to be relayed or filtered to slam into the forebrain cortex. Researchers have found that, without us realizing it, the sense of smell plays an important role in our choice of mate. The menstrual cycles of women living in the same house tend to coincide because the smell they unconsciously smell kick-starts their endocrine systems. Marasdona said, "Our brains develop from fetal life, but are destined to cede control to the sense of smell."
But what happens if the sense of smell doesn't work properly? Malaspina and other researchers are studying the sense of smell in people with mental disorders and have come to some intriguing conclusions. Although schizophrenia is seen as a disorder of hallucinations and illusions, one of the more obvious and devastating symptoms of the condition is social impairment. Some people with schizophrenia are unable to pick up on social cues and deal with social relationships. While hallucinations and delusions can be controlled with medication, the underlying social impairment makes coping with daily life much more difficult.
Studies have shown that many schizophrenics also suffer from "clinically significant olfactory deficits," which include dysfunctions of the parietal lobe (which is responsible for synthesizing sensory information in order to make sense of something, such as picking up on a social cue or synthesizing those cues). Since a scent can immediately evoke a picture of a particular time and place, the lack of this ability can cause a person to lose the basic let's and emotional support points in life. Says Malaspina, "We are coming to realize that scent is a good way to study the unconscious basis of social skills and social interest."
A brain-damaged patient lies in bed, not completely unconscious or in a coma, but the sparks of awareness are only fleeting, with only subtle gestures to prove that he or she is alive or aware that a friend or relative is close by. Medically, these patients are said to be in a minimally conscious state. An estimated lO million to 300,000 Americans are now in this state.
The journal Neurology published a startling study in which researchers studied the brains of two people with minimal levels of consciousness using MR*** vibrational imaging equipment and then compared them with the brains of seven healthy men and women. The scans showed that the lowest-consciousness patients had less than -half the brain activity of the others. The researchers then played the subjects tapes recorded by their family members or friends, recounting pleasant memories or ****same experiences. One of the least conscious patients listened to his sister's recollections of her wedding and his toast. The results were striking: all those scanned, including the least conscious, showed similar brain activity, and some showed activity in the visual cortex.
Despite evidence that the unconscious is widespread in everyday life for both damaged and healthy brains, even ardent believers in unconscious thinking like Saltzman advise against jumping to conclusions. "I don't think we know yet what proportion of purely rational thinking, and what seems to be purely intuitive thinking, are each involved." The balance between the two, the mix of the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious, the 5% and the 95% - is what pioneers of the vast and complex world of the mind will continue to explore. Yet it is likely that we will never get to the bottom of it. After all, the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of the brain, will always be the ultimate riddle of what makes a human being a human being.