Subliminal

except fMRI maps the activity of the brain’s different structures by detecting the blood flow that waxes and wanes, just slightly, as that activity varies. In this way fMRI offers three-dimensional pictures of the working brain, inside and out, mapping, to a resolution of about a millimeter, the level of activity throughout the organ. To get an idea of what fMRI can do, consider this: scientists can now use data collected from your brain to reconstruct an image of what you are looking at.⁶

Have a look at the pictures below. In each case, the image on the left is the actual image a subject was gazing at, and the image on the right is the computer’s reconstruction. The reconstruction was created from the fMRI’s electromagnetic readings of the subject’s brain activity, without any reference to the actual image. It was accomplished by combining data from areas of the brain that respond to particular regions in a person’s field of vision together with data from other parts of the brain that respond to different themes. A computer then sorted through a database of six million images and picked the one that best corresponded to those readings.

^{Courtesy of Jack Gallant}

The result of applications like this has been an upheaval as radical as that of the quantum revolution: a new understanding of how the brain operates, and who we are as human beings. This revolution has a name, or at least the new field that it spawned has one. It is called social neuroscience. The first official meeting ever devoted to that field took place in April 2001.⁷

CARL JUNG BELIEVED that to learn about the human experience, it was important to study dreams and mythology. History is the story of events that played out in civilization, but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart. The themes and archetypes of our dreams and myths, Jung pointed out, transcend time and culture. They arise from unconscious instincts that governed our behavior long before civilization papered over and obscured them, and they therefore teach us about what it means to be human on the deepest level. Today, as we piece together how the brain works, we are able to study human instincts directly, to see their physiological origins within the brain. It is by uncovering the workings of the unconscious that we can best understand both how we are related to other species and what makes us uniquely human.

The upcoming chapters are an exploration of our evolutionary heritage, of the surprising and exotic forces at play beneath the surface of our own minds, and of the impact of those unconscious instincts on what is usually considered willed, rational behavior—an impact that is much more powerful than we have previously believed it to be. If you really want to understand the social world, if you really want to understand yourself and others, and, beyond that, if you really want to overcome many of the obstacles that prevent you from living your fullest, richest life, you need to understand the influence of the subliminal world that is hidden within each of us.

PART I The Two-Tiered Brain

CHAPTER 1 The New Unconscious The hidden role of our subliminal selves … what it means when you don’t call your mother

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

—BLAISE PASCAL

WHEN MY MOTHER was eighty-five she inherited, from my son, a pet Russian tortoise named Miss Dinnerman. It lived in her yard, in a large pen enclosing both shrubs and lawn, delineated by chicken wire. My mother’s knees were starting to go, so she’d had to curtail her traditional two-hour walks around the neighborhood. She was looking for a new friend, one she could easily access, and the tortoise got the job. She decorated the pen with rocks and pieces of wood and visited the animal every day, just like she used to visit the bank teller and the cashiers at Big Lots. On occasion she even brought Miss Dinnerman flowers, which she thought made the pen look pretty, but which the tortoise treated like a delivery from the local Pizza Hut.

My mother didn’t mind when the tortoise ate her bouquets. She thought it was cute. “Look how she enjoys it,” she’d say. But despite the cushy existence, the free room and board, and the freshly cut flowers, Miss Dinnerman’s main goal in life seemed to be escape. Whenever she wasn’t eating or sleeping, Miss Dinnerman would walk the perimeter, poking around for a hole in the chicken wire. She would even try to climb it, as awkward as a skateboarder trying to scale a spiral staircase. My mother saw this behavior, too, in human terms. To her, it was a heroic effort, like POW Steve McQueen plotting his breakout from a Nazi camp in The Great Escape. “Every creature wants freedom,” my mother told me. “Even if she has it good here, she doesn’t like being confined.” My mother believed that Miss Dinnerman recognized her voice and responded to it. She believed that Miss Dinnerman understood her. “You’re reading too much into her behavior,” I told my mother. “Tortoises are primitive creatures.” I would even demonstrate my point, waving my hands and hollering like a crazy person, then pointing out how the tortoise just ignored me. “So what?” she’d say. “Your kids ignore you, and you don’t call them primitive creatures.”

It can be difficult to distinguish willed, conscious behavior from that which is habitual or automatic. Indeed, as humans, our tendency to believe in consciously motivated behavior is so powerful that we read consciousness into not only our own behaviors but those of the animal kingdom as well. We do this with our pets, of course. It’s called anthropomorphizing. The tortoise is as brave as a POW, the cat peed on the suitcase because it was mad at us for going away, the dog must hate the mailman for some good reason. Simpler organisms, too, can appear to behave with humanlike thoughtfulness and intentionality. The lowly fruit fly, for example, goes through an elaborate mating ritual, which the male initiates by tapping the female with his foreleg and vibrating his wing in order to play her a courtship song.¹ If the female accepts the advance, she will do nothing, and the male will take over from there. If she is not sexually receptive, she will either strike him with her wings or legs, or run away. Though I have elicited frighteningly similar responses from human females, this fruit fly mating ritual is completely programmed. Fruit flies don’t worry about issues such as where their relationship is headed; they simply exercise a routine that is hardwired within them. In fact, their actions are so directly related to their biological constitution that scientists have discovered a chemical that, when applied to a male of the species, will, within hours, convert a heterosexual fruit fly into one that is gay.² Even the roundworm called C. elegans—a creature made of only about a thousand cells—can appear to act with conscious intent. For instance, it may slither past a bit of perfectly digestible bacteria and toward another tidbit that awaits it elsewhere on the petri dish. One might be tempted to conclude that the roundworm is exercising its free will, as we ourselves might do when rejecting an unappealing vegetable or a high-calorie desert. But a roundworm does not think to itself, I’d better watch my diameter; it simply moves toward the nutrient it has been programmed to hunt down.³

Animals like fruit flies and tortoises are at the lower end on the brain-power scale, but the role of automatic processing is not limited to such primitive creatures. We humans also perform many automatic, unconscious behaviors. We tend to be unaware of them, however, because the interplay between our conscious and our unconscious minds is so complex. This complexity has its roots in the physiology of our brains. As mammals, we have new layers of cortex built upon the base of our more primitive reptilian brains; and as humans, we have yet more cerebral matter built upon those. We have an unconscious mind and, superimposed upon it, a conscious brain. How much of our feelings, judgments, and behavior is due to each can be very hard to say, as we are constantly shifting back and forth between them. For example, one morning we mean to stop at the post office on the way to work, but at the key intersection, we turn right, toward the office, because we are running on autopilot—that is, acting unconsciously. Then, when trying to explain to the police officer the reason for our subsequent illegal U-turn,