Self Comes to Mind

similar to the varied big-ticket items in the experiment. The nonconscious space is wide open and suitable for this covert manipulation, but it works to one’s advantage largely because certain options are nonconsciously marked by a bias connected to previously learned emotional-feeling factors. I believe that the conclusions on the merits of un- consciousness are correct, but our notion of what goes on beneath the glassy surface of consciousness is much enriched when we factor emotion and feeling into the nonconscious processes.
    The Dijksterhuis experiment illustrates the combination of unconscious and conscious powers. Unconscious processing alone could not do the job. In these experiments, unconscious processes do a lot of work, but the subjects have benefited from years of conscious deliberation during which their nonconscious processes have been repeatedly trained. Moreover, while nonconscious processes do their due diligence, the subjects remain fully conscious. Unconscious patients under anesthesia or in coma do not make decisions about the real world any more than they enjoy sex. Again, it is the felicitous synergy of the covert and overt levels that carries the day. We feed on the cognitive unconscious quite regularly, throughout the day, and discreetly outsource a number of jobs, including the execution of responses, to its expertise.
    Outsourcing expertise to the nonconscious space is what we do when we hone a skill so finely that we are no longer aware of the technical steps needed to be skillful. We develop skills in the clear light of consciousness, but then we let them go underground, into the roomy basement of our minds, where they do not clutter the exiguous square footage of conscious reflection space.
    The Dijksterhuis experiment adds a flourish to an ongoing research effort regarding the role of nonconscious influences in decision tasks. Early in that effort, our research group had presented decisive evidence in this regard. 5 For example, we showed that when normal subjects are playing a card game that involves both gains and losses under conditions of risk and uncertainty, the players begin to adopt a winning strategy slightly ahead of being able to articulate why they are doing so. For some minutes preceding their adoption of the advantageous strategy, the subjects’ brains produce differential psychophysiological responses whenever they ponder taking a card from one of the bad decks, those that promote losses, while the prospect of lifting a card from a good deck generates no such response. The beauty of the result resides with the fact that the psychophysiological responses, which, in the original study were measured with skin conductance, are not perceivable by either the subject or the naked eyes of an observer. They occur under the radar of the subject’s consciousness, just as stealthily as the behavioral drift toward the winning strategy. 6
    What exactly is going on is not entirely clear yet, but whatever it is, in-the-moment consciousness is not a requirement. It may be that the nonconscious equivalent of a conscious gut feeling “jolts” the decision-making process, as it were, biasing the nonconscious computation and preventing the selection of the wrong item. In all likelihood, there is an important reasoning process going on nonconsciously, in the subterranean mind, and the reasoning produces results without the intervening steps ever being known. Whatever the process is, it produces the equivalent of an intuition without the “aha” acknowledgment that the solution has arrived, just a quiet delivery of the solution.
    The evidence for nonconscious processing has increased unabated. Our economic decisions are not guided by pure rationality and are significantly influenced by powerful biases such as the aversion to losses and the delight in gains. 7 The way we interact with others is influenced by a large array of biases having to do with gender, race, manners, accents, and attire. The setting of the interaction brings its own set of biases, linked to familiarity and design. The concerns and emotions we were experiencing prior to the interaction play an important role too, as does the hour of the day: Are we hungry? Are we sated? We express or give indirect signs of preferences for human faces at lightning speed without having had time to process consciously the data that would have backed up a corresponding reasoned inference, which is all the more reason to be extra careful