Subliminal

our conscious mind calculates the optimal excuse, while our autopilot unconscious handles the proper use of gerunds, subjunctive verbs, and indefinite articles so that our plea is expressed in fine grammatical form. If asked to step out of the car, we will consciously obey, then instinctively stand about four feet from the officer, although when talking to friends we automatically adjust that separation to about two and a half feet. (Most of us follow these unspoken rules of interpersonal distance without ever thinking about them and can’t help feeling uncomfortable when they are violated.)

Once attention is called to them, it is easy to accept many of our simple behaviors (like making that right turn) as being automatic. The real issue is the extent to which more complex and substantive behaviors, with the potential to have a much greater impact on our lives, are also automatic—even though we may feel sure that they are carefully thought through and totally rational. How does our unconscious affect our attitude about questions like Which house should I buy? Which stock should I sell? Should I hire that person to take care of my child? Or: Are bright blue eyes into which I can’t stop staring a sufficient basis for a long- term loving relationship?

If it is difficult to recognize automatic behavior in animals, it is even more difficult to recognize habitual behavior in ourselves. When I was in graduate school, long before my mother’s tortoise stage, I used to phone her around eight every Thursday night. Then, one Thursday, I didn’t. Most parents would have concluded that I forgot, or maybe that I finally “got a life” and was out for the evening. But my mother had a different interpretation. Starting around nine she began to call my apartment, asking for me. My roommate apparently didn’t mind the first four or five calls, but after that, as I discovered the next morning, her reservoir of good will had dried up. Especially when my mother started accusing her of hiding the fact that I had been severely injured and hence was not calling because I was under sedation in the local hospital. By midnight, my mother’s imagination had goosed that scenario up a couple notches—she was now accusing my roommate of covering up my recent death. “Why lie about it?” my mother asked. “I am going to find out.”

Most children would be embarrassed to learn that their mother, a person who has known them intimately their whole life, would think it more plausible that they had been killed than that they had been out on a date. But I had seen my mother exhibit such behavior before. To outsiders, she appeared to be a perfectly normal individual, except for a few quirks, like believing in evil spirits and enjoying accordion music. Those were to be expected, remnants of the culture she grew up with in the old country, Poland. But my mother’s mind worked differently from that of anyone else I knew. Today I understand why, even though my mother herself does not recognize it: decades earlier, her psyche had been restructured to view situations within a context that most of us could never imagine. It all started in 1939, when my mother was sixteen. Her own mother had died from abdominal cancer after suffering at home in excruciating pain for an entire year. Then, a short while later, my mother came home from school one day and found that her father had been taken by the Nazis. My mother and her sister, Sabina, were soon also taken away, to a forced labor camp, which her sister did not survive. Virtually overnight, my mother’s life had been transformed from that of a well-loved and well-cared-for teenager in a well-to-do family to that of an orphaned, hated, and starving slave laborer. After her liberation my mother emigrated, married, settled in a peaceful neighborhood in Chicago, and had a stable and safe lower-middle-class family existence. She no longer had any rational reason to fear the sudden loss of everything dear to her, and yet that fear has driven her interpretation of everyday events for the rest of her life.

My mother interpreted the meanings of actions through a dictionary that was different from the one most of us use, and via her own unique rules of grammar. Her interpretations had become automatic to her, not consciously arrived at. Just as we all understand spoken language without any conscious application of linguistic rules, so too did she understand the world’s message to her without any awareness that her early experiences had forever reshaped her expectations. My mother never recognized that her perceptions were skewed by the ever-present fear that at any moment justice, probability, and logic could cease to have force or meaning. Whenever I’d suggest it to her, she’d scoff at the idea of seeing a psychologist and deny that her past had had any negative effect on her view of the present. “Oh no?” I’d reply. “How come none of my friends’ parents accuse their roommates of conspiring to cover up their death?”

We all have implicit frames of reference—with luck, less extreme—that produce habitual thinking and behavior. Our experiences and actions always seem to be rooted in conscious thought, and like my mother, we can find it difficult to accept that there are hidden forces at work behind the scenes. But though those forces may be invisible, they still exert a powerful pull. In the past there was a lot of speculation about the unconscious mind, but the brain was like a black box, its workings inaccessible to our understanding. The current revolution in thinking about the unconscious came about because, with modern instruments, we can watch as different structures and substructures in the brain generate feelings and emotions. We can measure the electrical output of individual neurons. We can map the neural activity that forms a person’s thoughts. Today scientists can go beyond talking to my mother and guessing how her experiences affected her; today they can actually pinpoint the brain alterations that result from traumatic early experiences like hers and understand how such experiences cause physical changes in stress-sensitive brain regions.⁴

The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the “new unconscious,” to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned- clinician named Sigmund Freud. Early on, Freud made several notable contributions to the fields of neurology, neuropathology, and anesthesia.⁵ For example, he introduced the use of gold chloride to stain nerve tissue and used the technique to study the neural interconnections between the medulla oblongata, in the brain stem, and the cerebellum. In that, Freud was far ahead of his time, because it would be many decades before scientists understood the importance of brain connectivity and developed the tools needed to study it in any depth. But Freud himself did not pursue that study for long. Instead, he became interested in clinical practice. In treating his patients, Freud came to the correct conclusion that much of their behavior was governed by mental processes of which they were unaware. Lacking the technical tools with which to explore that idea in any scientific way, however, he simply talked to his patients, tried to draw them out about what was going on in the furthest recesses of their minds, observed them, and made whatever inferences he deemed valid. As we’ll see, however, such methods are unreliable, and many unconscious processes can never be directly revealed through the kind of self-reflection encouraged by therapy, because they transpire in areas of the brain not open to the conscious mind. As a result, Freud was mainly off the mark.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels. The idea that we are not aware of the cause of much of our behavior can be difficult to accept. Although Freud and his followers believed in it, among research psychologists—the scientists within the field—the idea that the unconscious is important to our behavior was, until recent years, shunned as pop psychology. As one researcher wrote, “Many psychologists were reluctant to use the word ‘unconscious’ out of fear that their colleagues would think they had gone soft in the head.”⁶ John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale, recounts that when he started as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in the late 1970s, it was almost universally assumed that not only our social perceptions and our judgments but also our behaviors were conscious and deliberate.⁷ Anything that threatened that assumption was greeted with derision, as when Bargh told a close relative, a successful professional, about some of the early studies showing that people did things for reasons they were unaware of. Using his own experience as evidence that the studies were wrong, Bargh’s relative insisted that he was unaware of even a single instance in which he’d done something for reasons he wasn’t aware of.⁸ Says Bargh, “We all hold dear the idea that we’re the captain of our own soul, and we’re in charge, and it’s a very scary feeling when we’re not. In fact, that’s what psychosis is—the feeling of detachment from reality and that you’re not in control, and that’s a very frightening feeling for anyone.”

Though psychological science has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father in order to marry his mom, or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ.⁹ We should certainly credit Freud with understanding the immense power of the unconscious—this was an important achievement—but we also have to recognize that science has cast serious doubt on the existence of many of the specific unconscious emotional and motivational factors he identified as molding the conscious mind.¹⁰ As the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote, the “supernatural flavor of Freud’s Unbewusst [unconscious] made the concept generally unpalatable.”¹¹

The unconscious envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; it