The Subconscious

Some of my favorite college memories are of a professor asking the class a question that everyone in the room should easily answer, waiting for an answer, and getting nothing but dead silence. Rather than speaking up in these instances, which presumably are uncomfortable for students and professor alike, I soak up the moment.

One memory of such an episode, however, put me more in an angry mood than in one of soaking up the moment. It was a meeting for a psychology course led by a T.A. The idea of the subconscious arose, and someone in the front row — I knew him from the atheist society on campus — declared that, “The idea of the subconscious has been proven false!”

He said it indignantly, but I was indignant that a one of my fellow atheists and seniors majoring in psychology would make such a proclamation! I spoke up at this point, “What?! The subconscious isn’t real? What about priming effects?” 

I’ve written elsewhere about priming, so I won’t say much about it here except to give an example of a priming effect I’ve noticed in my personal life as of late. A woman with whom I’d been talking on the phone told me that her tight pants gave her a muffin top. I’d never heard of a “muffin top”, at least not that I could recall. Ever since then, it seems that I hear about muffin tops all the time!

The T.A. asked, “Who can tell me what priming is?” Silence. The T.A. was visibly uncomfortable, and after a few uneasy moments, moved us along on with her much too detailed PowerPoint slides. (I thought that PowerPoint was supposed to be used for notes or bullet points, not for verbatim scripts.)

Don’t think that priming effects are the only evidence of a subconscious mind. Another well known example is the Harvard Implicit Association Test (which you can take here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/). 

Bubbling up from my subconscious right now is some repressed anger that I have toward a high school science teacher. Don’t get me wrong: He was my second favorite high school teacher. But I do have some beef with him that’s relevant (though only tangentially) to this piece of writing. He would admonish us before the science fair, “Don’t do any taste tests! They’re not scientific!” Taste tests can certainly be scientific!

The “Pepsi challenge” was scientific beyond what PepsiCo intended. A significant difference was found in the taste test. However, when the test was replicated with more rigor, it was found that the brand of soda was not the crucial independent variable; the significant difference was caused instead by customers subconsciously showing preference for a certain label on the cups!

We do a lot of mental calculus below the level of consciousness. You’d be overwhelmed if you had to perform the physics algorithms necessary to, say, shoot a basketball through a hoop, or to tell whether a person is lying or being truthful.

In the latter example, being too cerebral can hinder your performance. There’s a popular neuro-programming theory that says that if the person you’re talking to looks a certain direction, or if she makes certain hand gestures, then she is lying — her subconscious motor movements belie her deceitfulness!

Ah, but that’s bunk, and you’re better of relying on your gut feeling. Funny that we call intuition a “gut feeling”, huh? You, dear reader, may be quite glad to hear that there’s a satisfying explanation for that: the same areas of the brain involved in intuiting quite literally are involved in gut reactions of the gastrointestinal system.

I suppose that the atheist in my psychology course was quick to point out the alleged debunking of the subconscious because it’s an idea associated with Sigmund Freud, whose theories generally don’t hold up today. With that in mind, I close with some humor. It’s an exchange of text messages between my brother and I:

Andy: Why do i sometimes feel like im waiting for someone else to arrive? Like, i know it’s just me and kristin but i feel like im waiting for someone

Me: Because dad moved out before you resolved your oedipal complex.Mom was cold,distanced.U r waiting for dad to come be killed. Mom to come be loving.

Andy: Freud, huh?

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“You Read These Books In Order to Do What?”

All desirable things are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“Remember that education doesn’t have to be practical; learning is its own reward.” Those words, or some close approximation thereof, are what I wrote at a friend’s high school graduation party, on a papered wall for inspirational and congratulatory quotes. 

At least one person scratched his or her head upon reading my words, which didn’t exactly surprise me. No, I expected my statement, simple though it was, to jar someone’s view of education. To understand why, you must understand how the folks of Lenox, in general, think of education.

Here in this small town in the southwest corner of Iowa, most of us are employed in manufacturing and agriculture. Therefore, we (again, in general) think that education has to be applied to “moving dirt” in some way. Put another way, the liberal arts and abstract concepts aren’t highly esteemed in these parts.

To borrow a phrase that entitles one of the iconic and incomparable Richard Feynman’s books, I’m afraid that a lot of us are deprived of the “Pleasure of Finding Things Out.” Finding things out is not only useful for building tractors or tilling the land with a tractor, but it’s just plain pleasurable. 

Richard Dawkins famously stated that there are infinitely more ways that wouldn’t be conducive to life than there are viable life forms. He’s undoubtedly right, and that statement can be taken further by stating that of that subset (i.e., the relatively few viable life forms) the subsubset of reflective, conscious, intelligent life forms is many magnitudes less likely. That is, we are very lucky to be so intelligently endowed!

Why then, not take a few moments to be contemplative? A thought experiment a day is good exercise.

That’s my opinion, so I was struck to hear a psychiatric nurse ask me recently (I’m eccentric not crazy, OK? Yes, I get put in mental hospitals rather frequently these days, but that’s beside the point!):

“You read all of these books in order to do what? What use are they?” She asked me that because I’d brought along some physics books and had been vociferous in voicing my concern that I wouldn’t read as much as I’d like to.

I confabulated some explanation in an attempt to say something that didn’t make me sound too crazy in front of this nurse who had earlier explained electroconvulsive therapy (shock therapy in popular parlance) nonchalantly. I failed to sound sane, apparently, because the nurse indicated that I clearly wasn’t thinking straight. But how was I to persuade her to my true sentiments? 

I read about physics and everything else under and beyond the sun because it’s pleasurable. Sure, reasons can be expounded for why it’s pleasurable, but whatever happened to valuing pleasurable activities for their own sake?

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Egoism & Altruism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

“Don’t get too philosophical with me.”

That’s what my psychiatrist at the time, Dr. Corcoran, said to with a smile and a slight chuckle, as was his style, after an exchange that went something like this:

“I’m terribly selfish, Dr. Corcoran. I only care about how I feel and what makes me happy, and it seems to upset others.” I confessed.

“But you care about your mom, don’t you?” the doctor inquired, knowing part of the answer.

I replied, “Yes, I care about how Mom feels, but only because I feel good when she feels good, and I feel bad if she feels bad.”

That’s when he said, “Don’t get too philosophical with me.”

The philosophy, as you can see, is a question of whether I do bad or nice things in consideration of others (my mother in particular, in this case) out of psychological egoism or altruism. 

Though my philosophical outlook has changed to something a bit less solipsistic since then (I was about 16 or 17 at the time), I still think that everything I do is, ultimately, selfish. 

Do I do things out of egoism or out of altruism? It’s a false dichotomy: like electricity and magnetism; social conflict and functionalism; or energy and mass; egoism and altruism are two sides of the same coin, different manifestation of the same thing.

I do action A because it benefits me. But I’m a large-brained, social primate, so I can see that action A also benefits, for instance, my mother. It’s not a zero-sum game, this social life — I can be egoistic and altruistic at the same time.

I should take a more specific example. As is my style, I’ll use one that’s goofy and involves food.

I’ve ordered a large pizza. I can’t eat all of it. I offer 1/3 of it to my mother. It’s in my benefit to get rid of the pizza, because I can’t eat all of it, and it’s further to my benefit because my mother will be pleased that I offered her my food. It’ll also have some other benefits for me; say, she’ll have more energy to do me a favor, and she’ll be more willing to reciprocate my altruism because I did something for her, so she kind of “owes” me, at least on a psychological level.

But it’s to her benefit, too, if she’s had nothing else to eat for supper. And it benefits her to have a son who is not grumpy from having a tummy ache or some such thing. And her fridge won’t have my leftover pizza taking up valuable space in it. And it feels good to her for someone to do something nice for her.

Two paragraphs above describe how my giving Mom some of my pizza is an egoistic act; the next paragraph describes it as an altruistic act. Taken together, you can see that the act is both egoistic and altruistic.

You Love Faces

I wrote something similar in one of my early Tumblr posts (http://dustinhartley.tumblr.com/post/8707804695/ghosts-gunmen-and-grizzlies), but you love faces. You see them everywhere, even when they’re not there. Rather than tell you, I’ll mostly show you.

All you need to see a face is a couple of dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. For example, this emoticon :)

Or, this image:

You can even see a face on a crab’s back, as in the Samurai crab:

From the sea to the sky, look to Mars for a face:

Heck, even motorcycle parts can be a whole human(oid):