Subliminal

from a Disney movie. The film was an erotic French movie, The Girl on a Motorcycle, renamed, in America, Naked Under Leather. Both titles are descriptive. The French title relates to the plot: the film is a road movie about a newlywed who deserts her husband and takes off on her motorcycle to visit her lover in Heidelberg.¹⁷ That may sound like a compelling plot line to the French, but the American distributor apparently had a different idea about how to telegraph to an audience the nature of the film’s appeal. And it is indeed the “naked under leather” aspect of the movie that inspired the researchers’ choice of clips. On that score, however, the film did not seem to succeed. When asked to rate their degree of sexual arousal, the students in the control group gave the film a 31 on a scale of 100. The informed group agreed; its members rated their sexual stimulation at just 28. But the subjects in the ignorant group—who were aroused by their recent exercise but didn’t know it—apparently mistook their arousal as being of a sexual nature. They gave the film a 52.

An analogous result was obtained by another group of researchers, who arranged for an attractive female interviewer to ask male passersby to fill out a questionnaire for a school project. Some of the subjects were intercepted on a solid wood bridge only ten feet above a small rivulet. Others were queried on a wobbly five-foot- wide, 450-foot-long bridge of wooden boards with a 230-foot drop to rocks below. After the interaction, the interviewer gave out her contact information in case the subject “had any questions.” The subjects interviewed on the scary bridge presumably felt a quickened pulse and other effects of adrenaline. They must have been aware, to some extent, of their bodily reaction to the dangerous bridge. But would they mistake their reaction for sexual chemistry? Of those interviewed on the low, safe bridge, the woman’s appeal was apparently limited: only 2 of the 16 later called her. But of those on the high-anxiety bridge, 9 of the 18 phoned her.¹⁸ To a significant number of the male subjects, the prospect of falling hundreds of feet onto an assemblage of large boulders apparently had the same effect as a flirtatious smile and a black silk nightgown.

These experiments illustrate how our subliminal brain combines information about our physical state with other data arising from social and emotional contexts to determine what we are feeling. I think there’s a lesson here for everyday life. There is, of course, a direct analogue, the interesting corollary that walking up a few flights of stairs before evaluating a new business proposal may cause you to say, “Wow” when you would have normally said, “Hmm.” But think, too, about stress. We all know that mental stress leads to unwanted physical effects, but what is less discussed is the other half of the feedback loop: physical tension causing or perpetuating mental stress. Say you have a conflict with a friend or colleague that results in an agitated physical state. Your shoulders and your neck feel tight, you have a headache, your pulse is elevated. If that state persists, and you find yourself having a conversation with someone who had nothing to do with the conflict that precipitated those sensations, it could cause you to misjudge your feelings about that person. For example, a book editor friend of mine told me of an instance in which she had an unexpectedly acrimonious exchange with an agent and concluded that the agent was a particularly belligerent sort, someone she’d try to avoid working with in the future. But in the course of our discussion it became clear that the anger she felt toward the agent had not arisen from the issue at hand but had been baggage she had unconsciously carried over from an unrelated but upsetting incident that had immediately preceded her conflict with the agent.

For ages, yoga teachers have been saying, “Calm your body, calm your mind.” Social neuroscience now provides evidence to support that prescription. In fact, some studies go further and suggest that actively taking on the physical state of a happy person by, say, forcing a smile can cause you to actually feel happier.¹⁹ My young son Nicolai seemed to understand this intuitively: after breaking his hand in a freak accident while playing basketball, he suddenly stopped crying and started to laugh—and then explained that when he has pain laughing seems to make it feel better. The old “Fake it till you make it” idea, which Nicolai had rediscovered, is now also the subject of serious scientific research.

THE EXAMPLES I’VE talked about so far imply that we often don’t understand our feelings. Despite that, we usually think that we do. Moreover, when asked to explain why we feel a certain way, most of us, after giving it some thought, have no trouble supplying reasons. Where do we find those reasons, for feelings that may not even be what we think they are? We make them up.

In one interesting demonstration of that phenomenon, a researcher held out snapshots of two women’s faces, each about the size of a playing card, one in each hand. He asked his subject to choose the more attractive one.²⁰ He then flipped both photos facedown, and slid the selected picture over to the participant. He asked the participant to pick up the card and explain the choice he or she had made. Then the researcher went on to another pair of photos, for about a dozen pairs in all. The catch is that in a few cases the experimenter made a switch: through a sleight of hand, he actually slid to his subjects the photograph of the woman they had found less attractive. Only about one-quarter of the time did the subjects see through the ruse. But what is really interesting is what happened the 75 percent of the time they did not see through it: when asked why they preferred the face they really hadn’t preferred, they said things like “She’s radiant. I would rather have approached her in a bar than the other one” or “I like her earrings” or “She looks like an aunt of mine” or “I think she seems nicer than the other one.” Time after time, they confidently described their reasons for preferring the face that, in reality, they had not preferred.

The research was no fluke—the scientists pulled a similar trick in a supermarket, with regard to shoppers’ preferences in taste tests of jam and tea.²¹ In the jam test, shoppers were asked which of two jams they preferred and were then supposedly given a second spoonful of the one they said they liked better so that they could analyze the reasons for their preference. But the jam jars had a hidden internal divider and a lid on both ends, allowing the deft researchers to dip the spoon into the nonpreferred jam for the second taste. Again, only about a third of the participants noticed the switch, while two-thirds had no difficulty explaining the reasons for their “preference.” A similar ruse, with a similar outcome, occurred in an experiment involving tea.

Sounds like a market researcher’s nightmare: ask people their opinion about a product or packaging to pick up insights about their appeal, and you get wonderful explanations that are sincere, detailed, and emphatic but happen to bear little relation to the truth. That’s also a problem for political pollsters who routinely ask people why they voted the way they did or why they will vote the way they plan to. It’s one thing when people claim to have no opinion, but quite another when you can’t even trust them to know what they think. Research, however, suggests that you can’t.²²

The best hints as to what is going on come from research on people with brain abnormalities—for example, a series of famous studies on split-brain patients.²³ Recall that information presented to one side of such a patient’s brain is not available to the other hemisphere. When the patient sees something on the left side of his visual field, only the right hemisphere of his brain is aware of it, and vice versa. Similarly, it is the right hemisphere alone that controls the movement of the left hand, and the left hemisphere alone that controls the right hand. One exception to this symmetry is that (in most people) the speech centers are located in the left hemisphere, and so if the patient speaks, it is usually the left hemisphere talking.

Taking advantage of this lack of communication between brain hemispheres, researchers instructed split- brain patients, via their right hemisphere, to perform a task and then asked their left hemisphere to explain why they’d done it. For example, the researchers instructed a patient, via his right hemisphere, to wave. Then they asked the patient why he’d waved. The left hemisphere had observed the waving but was unaware of the instruction to wave. Nevertheless, the left hemisphere did not allow the patient to admit ignorance. Instead, the patient said he’d waved because he’d thought he’d seen someone he knew. Similarly, when researchers instructed the patient, through the right hemisphere, to laugh and then asked him why he was laughing, the patient said he’d laughed because the researchers were funny. Again and again, the left hemisphere responded as if it knew the answer. In these and similar studies, the left brain generated many false reports, but the right brain did not, leading the researchers to speculate that the left hemisphere of the brain has a role that goes beyond simply registering and identifying our emotional feelings, to trying to understand them. It’s as though the left hemisphere has mounted a search for a sense of order and reason in the world in general.

Oliver Sacks wrote about a patient with Korsakoff’s syndrome, a type of amnesia in which victims can lose the ability to form new memories.²⁴ Such patients may forget what is said within seconds, or what they see within minutes. Still, they often delude themselves into thinking that they know what is going on. When Sacks walked in to examine the patient, a Mr. Thompson, Thompson would not remember him from his previous encounters. But Thompson wouldn’t realize he didn’t know. He would always latch onto some available hint and convince himself that he did remember Sacks. On one occasion, since Sacks was wearing a white coat and