Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
by Leonard Mlodinow (2012) 
1. Opening Thoughts
2. Table of Contents
3. Further Reviews and Summaries
4. Quotes from the Book
Opening Thoughts
In my latter years I
have come to the conclusion that we can either “guess” why we do things or we
can discover how God has made us and then try and understand how to align to
his design. This is especially true in
regard to how our 3 pounds of grey matter work.
For centuries we have guessed what goes on inside by what we do on the
outside. Only recently have scientists begun to unlock the mysteries of
what happens on the inside.
Leonard Mlodinow is a
very good writer. What is most
interesting is that he is not a brain researcher but a physicist with a bent to
understand how the mind works. His
research is put into print with both humor and simplicity. Being a scientist he can plow through the mounds
of research and yet distill important findings in a way that is easy to
understand for us nonscientists.
As you can see from
the Table of Contents he has targeted only a few important new insights to
share with us. In my readings on the
mind and brain I have concluded that research shows that our conscious mind
consumes less than 10% of our brain power.
So what does the rest of it do?
It has built in programs, I call them mind apps, that are designed to
help run our lives at the unconscious level.
As you emerge into this dangerous and sometimes hostile world you come
with the apps preloaded. But the apps,
like those on your smart phone, must have information in order to be of any
use. For example you have a mind app
that is designed to link you to those you have first contact with upon arrival
in this world. This bonding or
imprinting app is available to all animals and ties them (hopefully) to the
right mother who will nourish and protect them.
Another app that is ready to receive data and start working is the
imitation app. This one takes a few
weeks to kick in but is functional all your life. It seeks to sync your mind with the minds of
those you come into contact with. This
is so that you can fit in with others and understand them. It also is key to learning how to act in this
world. It can be seen in operation as a
baby mimics the silly faces an adult makes as it coos over the little bundle of
joy.
God has hardwired
hundreds of these mind apps into the brain.
Science is at the beginning stages of understanding and identifying
them. This books looks at a few of them. But the mind app is only as good as the
information it is fed. Like my expense
report app, it the wrong or bad information is fed into it then it will produce
flawed outcomes. Those flawed outcomes
in our lives lead to wrong beliefs, behavior and assumptions. Paul was spot on when he said in Romans 12
that we should not fill our mind apps with the world’s info, but instead let
God’s work realign us and our apps to the Word of God.
Table of Contents
PART I: The Two-tiered Brain
1. The New Unconscious: The hidden role of our subliminal selves . . . what it means when you don’t call your mother
2. Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality: The two-tier system of the brain . . . how you can see something without knowing it
3. Remembering and Forgetting: How the brain builds memories . . . why we sometimes remember what never happened
4. The Importance of Being Social: The fundamental role of human social character . . . why Tylenol can mend a broken heart
Part II: The Social Unconscious
5. Reading People: How we communicate without speaking . . . how to know who’s the boss by watching her eyes
6. Judging People by Their Covers: What we read into looks, voice, and touch . . . how to win voters, attract a date, or beguile a female cowbird
7. Sorting People and Things: Why we categorize things and stereotype people . . .what Lincoln, Gandhi, and Che Guevara had in common
8. In-Groups and Out-Groups: The dynamics of us and them . . . the science behind Lord of the Flies
9. Feelings: The nature of emotions . . . why the prospect of falling hundreds of feet onto large boulders has the same effect as a flirtatious smile and a black silk nightgown
10. Self: How our ego defends its honor . . . why schedules are overly optimistic and failed CEOs feel they deserve golden parachutes
1. The New Unconscious: The hidden role of our subliminal selves . . . what it means when you don’t call your mother
2. Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality: The two-tier system of the brain . . . how you can see something without knowing it
3. Remembering and Forgetting: How the brain builds memories . . . why we sometimes remember what never happened
4. The Importance of Being Social: The fundamental role of human social character . . . why Tylenol can mend a broken heart
Part II: The Social Unconscious
5. Reading People: How we communicate without speaking . . . how to know who’s the boss by watching her eyes
6. Judging People by Their Covers: What we read into looks, voice, and touch . . . how to win voters, attract a date, or beguile a female cowbird
7. Sorting People and Things: Why we categorize things and stereotype people . . .what Lincoln, Gandhi, and Che Guevara had in common
8. In-Groups and Out-Groups: The dynamics of us and them . . . the science behind Lord of the Flies
9. Feelings: The nature of emotions . . . why the prospect of falling hundreds of feet onto large boulders has the same effect as a flirtatious smile and a black silk nightgown
10. Self: How our ego defends its honor . . . why schedules are overly optimistic and failed CEOs feel they deserve golden parachutes
Further Reviews and Summaries
- From The Economist
“The unconscious mind”
“Hidden depths – “New thoughts on how the mind works”
“In his latest book, “Subliminal ”, Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist who has been developing a nice sideline in popular science writing, shows how the idea of the unconscious has become respectable again over the past couple of decades. This development has been helped by rigorous experimental evidence of the effects of the subconscious and, especially, by real-time brain-scanning technology that allows researchers to examine what is going on in their subjects’ heads,’” quoting the April 28th edition of The Economist. Read more
“The unconscious mind”
“Hidden depths – “New thoughts on how the mind works”
“In his latest book, “Subliminal ”, Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist who has been developing a nice sideline in popular science writing, shows how the idea of the unconscious has become respectable again over the past couple of decades. This development has been helped by rigorous experimental evidence of the effects of the subconscious and, especially, by real-time brain-scanning technology that allows researchers to examine what is going on in their subjects’ heads,’” quoting the April 28th edition of The Economist. Read more
Quotes from the Book (Kindle Edition)
CHAPTER 1 The New Unconscious The heart has its reasons of which
reason knows nothing. —BLAISE PASCALRead more at location 145
Instead, our brains are made up of a collection of many modules
that work in parallel, with complex interactions, most of which operate outside
of our consciousness. As a consequence, the real reasons behind our judgments,
feelings, and behavior can surprise us.Read more at location 355
Today, behavioral economists like Caltech’s Antonio Rangel are
changing the way economists think by presenting strong evidence that the
textbook theories are flawed.Read more at location 361
CHAPTER 2 Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality The eye that sees is
not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the
tradition in which its possessor has been reared. —RUTH
BENEDICTRead more at location 494
Today we believe that when you look at your mother-in-law, the
image you see is based not only on her optical qualities but also on what is
going on in your head—for example, your thoughts about her bizarre
child-rearing practices or whether it was a good idea to agree to live next
door. Kant felt that empirical psychology could not become a science because
you cannot weigh or otherwise measure the events that occur in your brain.Read more at location 509
The British physiologist and psychologist William Carpenter was
one of the most prescient. In his 1874 book Principles of Mental Physiology, he
wrote that “two distinct trains of Mental action are carried on simultaneously,
one consciously, the other unconsciously,” and that the more thoroughly we
examine the mechanisms of the mind, the clearer it becomes “that not only an
automatic, but an unconscious actionRead more at location 532
TODAY WE KNOW that Carpenter’s “two distinct trains of Mental
action” are actually more like two entire railway systems. To update
Carpenter’s metaphor, we would say that the conscious and unconscious railways
each comprise a myriad of densely interconnected lines, and that the two
systems are also connected to eachRead more at location 553
other at various points. The human mental system is thus far
more complex than Carpenter’s original picture, but we’re making progress in
deciphering its map of routes and stations.Read more at location 555
According to a textbook on human physiology, the human sensory
system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.Read more at location 562
The actual amount of information we can handle has been
estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second. So if your
conscious mind were left to process all that incoming information, your brain
would freeze like an overtaxed computer.Read more at location 564
One of the most fascinating of the studies that neuroscientists
have done on the visual system involved a fifty-two-year-old African man
referred to in the literature as TN. A tall, strong-looking man, a doctor who,
as fate would have it, was destined to become renowned as a patient, TN took
the first step on his path to pain and fame one day in 2004 when, while living
in Switzerland, he had a stroke that knocked out the left side of a part of his
brain called the visual cortex.Read more at location 606
After the second stroke, doctors did tests to see whether it had
rendered TN completely blind, for some of the blind have a small measure of
residual sight.Read more at location 628
The phenomenon exhibited by TN—in which individuals with intact
eyes have no conscious sensation of seeing but can nevertheless respond in some
way to what their eyes register—is called “blindsight.”Read more at location 683
Our unconscious doesn’t just interpret sensory data, it enhances
it. It has to, because the data our senses deliver is of rather poor quality
and must be fixed up in order to be useful. For example, one flaw in the data
your eyes supply comes from the so-called blind spot,Read more at location 786
As I said, in a way, every human mind is a scientist, creating a
model of the world around us, the everyday world that our brains detect through
our senses. Like our theories of gravity, our model of the sensory world is
only approximate and is based on concepts invented by our minds. And like our
theories of gravity, though our mental models of our surroundings are not
perfect, they usually work quite well.Read more at location 863
CHAPTER 3 Remembering and Forgetting A man sets himself the task
of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of
provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms,
instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers
that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his
face. —JORGE LUIS BORGESRead more at location 883
One measure of ToM is called intentionality.13 An organism that
is capable of reflecting about its own state of mind, about its own beliefs and
desires,Read more at location 1531
A second-order intentional organism is one that can form a
belief about someone else’s state of mind,Read more at location 1534
If you have third-order intentionality you can go a step
further, reasoning about what a person thinks a second person thinks,Read more at location 1537
And if you are capable of going a level beyond that, of thinking
I believe my friend Sanford thinks that my daughter Olivia thinks that his son
Johnny thinks she is cute or I believe my boss, Ruth, knows that our CFO, Richard,
thinks that my colleague John doesn’t believe her budgets and revenue
projections can be trusted, then you’re engaging in fourth-order
intentionality, and so on.Read more at location 1538
Fourth-order intentionality is required to create literature,
for writers must make judgments based on their own experiences of fourth-order
intentionality,Read more at location 1543
JAMES’S THEORY OF emotion dominated psychology for a while, but
then gave way to other approaches. In the 1960s, as psychology took its
cognitive turn, his ideas—now called the James-Lange theory—experienced a new
popularity, for the notion that different sorts of data are processed in your
brain to create emotions fit nicely into James’s framework.Read more at location 3306
As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to
get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining
their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want
to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also
attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. The human mind is designed to be
both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth
and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe. Together
these approaches vie to create our worldview.Read more at location 3628
The “causal arrow” in human thought processes consistently tends
to point from belief to evidence, not vice versa.19Read more at location 3639
As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an
absolutely outstanding lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a
coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the
impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker.Read more at location 3641
Visual perception, memory, and even emotion are all constructs,
made of a mix of raw, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting data. We use the
same kind of creative process to generate our self-image. When we paint our
picture of self, our attorney-like unconscious blends fact and illusion,
exaggerating our strengths, minimizing our weaknesses, creating a virtually
Picassoesque series of distortions in which some parts have been blown up to
enormous size (the parts we like) and others shrunk to near invisibility. The
rational scientists of our conscious minds then innocently admire the
self-portrait, believing it to be a work of photographic accuracy.
Psychologists call the approach taken by our inner advocate “motivated
reasoning.” Motivated reasoning helps us to believe in our own goodness and
competence, to feel in control, and to generally see ourselves in an overly
positive light. It also shapes the way we understand and interpret our
environment, especially our social environment, and it helps us justify our
preferred beliefs. Still,Read more at location 3644
Ambiguity creates wiggle room in what may otherwise be
inarguable truth, and our unconscious minds employ that wiggle room to build a
narrative of ourselves, of others, and of our environment that makes the best
of our fate, that fuels us in the good times, and gives us comfort in the bad.Read more at location 3654
Recent brain-imaging studies are beginning to shed light on how
our brains create these unconscious biases. They show that when assessing
emotionally relevant data, our brains automatically include our wants and
dreams and desires.29 Our internal computations, which we believe to be
objective, are not really the computations that a detached computer would make
but, rather, are implicitly colored by who we are and what we are after. In
fact, the motivated reasoning we engage in when we have a personal stake in an
issue proceeds via a different physical process within the brain than the cold,
objective analysis we carry out when we don’t. In particular, motivated
reasoning involves a network of brain regions that are not associated with
“cold” reasoning, including the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate
cortex—parts of the limbic system—and the posterior cingulate cortex and
precuneus, which are also activated when one makes emotionally laden moral
judgments.30 That’s the physical mechanism forRead more at location 3735
Motivated reasoning won’t work if it stretches credulity too
far, for then our conscious minds start to doubt and the self-delusion game is
over. That there are limits to motivated reasoning is critically important, for
it is one thing to have an inflated view of your expertise at making lasagna
and it is quite another to believe you can leap tall buildings in a single
bound. In order for your inflated self-image to serve you well, to have
survival benefits, it must be inflated to just the right degree and no further.
Psychologists describe this balance by saying that the resulting distortion
must maintain the “illusion of objectivity.” The talent we are blessed with in
this regard is the ability to justify our rosy images of ourselves through
credible arguments, in a way that does not fly in the face of obvious facts.Read more at location 3746
