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One thing that psychologists have discovered, and Tim Wilson and I were some of the first
to work on this kind of question, is how much that goes on in our heads is unconscious?
I mean, we think we know what's going on. I mean, Freud didn't know the half of it.
Most of what goes on in our heads, we have very little inkling of. Some of the work that's
come out recently about these priming effects, trivial little things, embarrassing that we're
affected by them. You ask me to read a persuasive communication and you happen to have introduced
a fishy smell into the room, I'm not as persuaded by it. "Something's fishy here."
Literally. Interesting.
Yes, literally. It works, and we know that that's what's going on. It's the fishy thing,
the metaphor, because there are some countries that don't have the metaphor: "there's something fishy about this".
That's your control group, is it? They don't have the experience.
That's right. There are some cultures that just don't have that. In Denmark, I think it's, "I smell a rat."
I get you.
Who knows what a rat smells like? I don't know if there's rat essence that you can spray in the air.
So then what's the upshot? You're saying—yes, so a lot of it is unconscious.
Yes, a lot. Process, in terms of my definition, is always unconscious. There is no such
thing as awareness of cognitive process. We claim it, but we don't claim that we have
awareness of the perceptual processes that we have. We have absolutely no idea. All these
various sensations are getting treated in—when you teach it in psychology, what perceptions
might be, virtually everything you tell people, they have no idea. There are a million visual
illusions, for example, which depend on the fact that we have certain perceptual processes
that operate in a particular way. If you give us something that's slightly off-base from
that, we make an error in it because the unconscious procedures that we have for perceiving the
world will lead us astray in those situations.
The thing I most want people to understand is that we solve problems—everything, from
the most common everyday problem like, "How do I make up to Joe after my unpleasantness
to him," to, "How do I solve this professional problem that I'm dealing with?" Most of that
goes on—first off, there's no access to process at all. We know what's in our heads,
some of it. Huge amounts we don't know what's in our head. The procedures that we use to
solve problems are often completely opaque to us. We don't know how we did it.
My favorite study like this that was ever done was in the 1930s. A psychologist whose
name was N. R. F. Maier had people do a problem, solve a problem. He had cords hanging from
the ceiling in different places. He said, "I want you to bring these cords together."
There were lots of things lying all around the room, and somebody would see something
that they could use, an extension cord, so they'd tie the extension cord on one and pulled it over to the other—easy solution.
After they had five or six of these, there was one other way to do it that they hadn't
yet discovered, which was much more difficult. After the subject had been stumped for 5 or
10 minutes, Maier, who's been wandering around the room the whole time, flips one of the
cords, sets it into motion. Within 45 seconds, the typical subject tied something to the
bottom of it and swung it like a pendulum, grabbed the other and tied them together.
Maier says, "That's great. That's the solution. How did you come up with that?" No one ever
gave him the answer—the correct answer. He ran some psychologists through this, and
they were hilarious in their rich accounts of what—"I thought of monkeys swinging through trees."
"The idea of a pendulum entered my head at the precise moment."
You have a slave who's working for you all the time. That's your unconscious. And we
don't take nearly as much use of it as we could.
There's a writer for "The New Yorker" who has a wonderful account of how you write,
how to do it. He says you have to sit down and think a bit about what you're going to do.
If you don't, nothing is going to happen. The next time you sit down, there's nothing,
but if you actually do that, spend a few minutes, think about what the problem is, how you're
going to get this thing across, it's been handed over to the unconscious and the unconscious
is working on it 24 hours a day, no matter what you're doing.
I find that in my own work all the time. When I'm teaching a seminar, I give
thought questions. If I wait until just before I have to do those thought questions, it's
an effort; they're not very good. If three or four days in advance, I sit and wonder,
"What are the best things that I want to make sure come out of the discussion here,"
and just spend five or ten minutes on it, three days later when I start to do it, it's
like I'm taking it by dictation and they're much better than I would otherwise have come up with.
I don't know that I've ever convinced any students. For that term paper, first day of class,
tomorrow, start working on that term paper. I don't think they believe me. I don't
know if I've ever gotten it across.
I have a lot of examples now of this kind of thing that I think if you spend 20 or 30
minutes with people, they might really come to believe you and might be able to make much
more use of their brain than they are.