This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  The idea of the rational unconscious has also transformed our scientific understanding of creatures whose rationality has traditionally been denied, such as young children and animals. It should transform our everyday understanding, too. The Freudian picture identifies infants with that fantasizing, irrational unconscious; even in the classic Piagetian view, young children are profoundly illogical. But contemporary research shows the enormous gap between what young children say—and, presumably, what they experience—and their spectacularly accurate if unconscious feats of learning, induction, and reasoning. The rational unconscious gives us a way of understanding how babies can learn so much, when they seem to consciously understand so little.

  Another way the rational unconscious could inform everyday thinking is by acting as a bridge between conscious experience and the few pounds of gray goo in our skulls. The gap between our experience and our brains is so great that people ping-pong between amazement and incredulity at every study showing that knowledge or love or goodness is “really in the brain” (though where else would it be?). There is important work linking the rational unconscious to both conscious experience and neurology.

  Intuitively, we feel that we know our own minds—that our conscious experience is a direct reflection of what goes on underneath. But much of the most interesting work in social and cognitive psychology demonstrates the gulf between our rationally unconscious minds and our conscious experience. Our conscious understanding of probability, for example, is truly awful, in spite of the fact that we unconsciously make subtle probabilistic judgments all the time. The scientific study of consciousness has made us realize just how complex, unpredictable, and subtle the relation is between our minds and our experience.

  At the same time, to be genuinely explanatory, neuroscience has to go beyond “the new phrenology” of simply locating psychological functions in particular brain regions. The rational unconscious lets us understand the how and why of the brain and not just the where. Again, vision science has led the way, with elegant empirical studies showing just how specific networks of neurons can act as computers rationally solving the problem of vision.

  Of course, the rational unconscious has its limits. Visual illusions demonstrate that our brilliantly accurate visual system does sometimes get it wrong. Conscious reflection may be misleading sometimes, but it can also provide cognitive prostheses, the intellectual equivalent of glasses with corrective lenses, to help compensate for the limitations of the rational unconscious. The institutions of science do just that.

  The greatest advantage of understanding the rational unconscious would be to demonstrate that rational discovery isn’t a specialized abstruse privilege of the few we call scientists but is instead the evolutionary birthright of us all. Really tapping into our inner vision and inner child might not make us happier or better adjusted, but it might make us appreciate just how smart we really are.

  We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life

  Adam Alter

  Psychologist; assistant professor of marketing, Stern School of Business; affiliated appointment, Department of Psychology, New York University

  The human brain is an inconceivably complex tool. While we’re focusing on the business of daily life, our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness; meanwhile this peripheral information subtly shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions and crafts some of our most critical life outcomes. I’ll illustrate with three brief examples from a larger set that comprise a forthcoming book I’ll be publishing with Penguin Press:

  1. Color

  Color is a ubiquitous feature of the environment, though we rarely notice colors unless they’re particularly bright or deviate dramatically from our expectations. Nonetheless, they can shape a range of outcomes: A recent study conducted by University of Rochester psychologists Andrew Elliott and Daniela Niesta, for example, showed that men are slightly more attractive to women when they wear red shirts rather than shirts of another color. The same effect applies to women, who seem more attractive to men when their pictures are bordered in red. Red signals both romantic intent and dominance among lower-order species, and this same signal applies to men and women. This relationship between red and dominance explains findings by the evolutionary anthropologists Russell Hill and Robert Barton of the University of Durham (2005) that, “across a range of sports,” contestants who wear red tend to outperform those wearing other colors. But red isn’t always beneficial: We’ve come to associate it with errors and caution, so although it makes us more vigilant, it can also dampen our creativity (see, for instance, “Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances,” by Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu, in the February 27, 2009, issue of Science.)

  All these effects have sound bases in biology and human psychology, but that doesn’t make them any less remarkable or surprising.

  2. Weather and ambient temperature

  No one is surprised that the sunny warmth of summer makes people happy, but weather conditions and ambient temperature have other, more unexpected effects on our mental lives. Rainy weather makes us introspective and thoughtful, which in turn improves our memory [Forgas et al., 2009, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol.] In the Forgas study, people more accurately remembered the features of a store on rainy days than on sunny days. The stock market tends to rise on fine, sunny days, while cooler, rainy days prompt sluggishness and brief downturns (e.g., Hirshleifer & Shumway, 2001, J. Finance; Saunders, 1993, Am. Econ. Rev.). More surprising still is the relationship between changes in weather and suicide, depression, irritability, and various kinds of accidents—all of which are said to be responsive to changes in the electrical state of the atmosphere [Charry & Hawkinshire, 1981, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.].

  The association between warmth and human kindness is more than a metaphor; recent studies have shown that people find strangers more likable when they form their first impressions while holding a cup of hot coffee [Williams & Bargh, 2008, Science]. The warmth-kindness metaphor extends to social exclusion: People literally feel colder when they’ve been socially excluded.

  3. Symbols and images

  Urban landscapes are populated by thousands of symbols and images that unwittingly influence how we think and behave. My colleagues and I have found that self-identified Christians tend to behave more honestly when they’re exposed to an image of the crucifix, even when they have no conscious memory of having seen it. A 1989 experiment conducted by psychologist Mark Baldwin of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan, showed that Christians felt less virtuous after subliminal exposure to an image of Pope John Paul II, as they were reminded of the impossibly high standards of virtue demanded by religious authority.

  On a brighter note, people tend to think more creatively when exposed to the Apple Computer logo [Fitzsimons et al., 2008, J. Consumer Res.], or when an incandescent light bulb is turned on [Slepian et al., 2010, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol.]; both the Apple logo and the illuminated light bulb are popularly associated with creativity, and deeply ingrained symbols, once activated, can shape how we think.

  Similar associative logic suggests that national flags prompt unity; and, indeed, a sample of left- and right-wing Israelis were more accommodating of opposing political views when they were subliminally exposed to an image of the Israeli flag [Hassin et al., 2007, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA]. Likewise, a sample of Americans, when seated in front of a large U.S. flag, reported holding more positive attitudes toward Muslims [Butz et al., 2007, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull.].

  These three cues—colors, weather conditions, and symbols and images—are joined by dozens of others that have a surprising ability to influence how we think, feel, behave, and decide. Once we understand what those cues are and how they shape our mental lives, we’re better equipped to harness or discount them.

  An Instinct to Learn

  W. Tecumseh Fitch

  Evolutio
nary biologist; professor of cognitive biology, University of Vienna; author, The Evolution of Language

  One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture. Many psychologists, linguists, and social scientists, along with the popular press, continue to treat nature and nurture as combating ideologies rather than complementary perspectives. For such people, the idea that something is both “innate” and “learned,” or both “biological” and “cultural,” is an absurdity. Yet most biologists today recognize that understanding behavior requires that we understand the interaction between inborn cognitive processes (e.g., learning and memory) and individual experience. This is particularly true in human behavior, since the capacities for language and culture are some of the key adaptations of our species and involve irreducible elements of both biology and environment, of both nature and nurture.

  The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn.” This phrase was introduced by Peter Marler, one of the fathers of birdsong research. A young songbird, while still in the nest, eagerly listens to adults of its own species sing. Months later, having fledged, it begins singing itself, and shapes its own initial sonic gropings to the template provided by those stored memories. During this period of “subsong,” the bird gradually refines and perfects its own song, until by adulthood it is ready to defend a territory and attract mates with its own, perhaps unique, species-typical song.

  Songbird vocal learning is the classic example of an instinct to learn. The songbird’s drive to listen, and to sing, and to shape its song to that which it heard, is all instinctive. The bird needs no tutelage or feedback from its parents to go through these stages. Nonetheless, the actual song it sings is learned, passed culturally from generation to generation. Birds have local dialects, varying randomly from region to region. If the young bird hears no song, it will produce only an impoverished squawking, not a typical song.

  Importantly, this capacity for vocal learning is true only of some birds, like songbirds and parrots. Other bird species—seagulls, chickens, owls—do not learn their vocalizations; rather, their calls develop reliably in the absence of any acoustic input. The calls of such birds are truly instinctive rather than learned. But for those birds capable of vocal learning, the song an adult bird sings is the result of a complex interplay between instinct (to listen, to rehearse, and to perfect) and learning (matching the songs of adults of its species).

  It is interesting and perhaps surprising to realize that most mammals lack a capacity for complex vocal learning of this sort. Current research suggests that aside from humans, only marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals), bats, and elephants have it. Among primates, humans appear to be the only species that can hear new sounds in the environment and then reproduce them. Our ability to do this seems to depend on a babbling stage during infancy, a period of vocal playfulness as instinctual as the young bird’s subsong. During this stage, we appear to fine-tune our vocal control so that, as children, we can hear and reproduce the words and phrases of our adult caregivers.

  So is human language an instinct or learned? The question, presupposing a dichotomy, is intrinsically misleading. Every word that any human speaks, in any of our species’ six thousand languages, has been learned. And yet the capacity for learning that language is a human instinct, something that every normal human child is born with and that no chimpanzee or gorilla possesses.

  The instinct to learn language is, indeed, innate (meaning simply that it reliably develops in our species), even though every language is learned. As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man, “language is an art, like brewing or baking; but . . . certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; whilst no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write.”

  And what of culture? For many, human culture seems the very antithesis of “instinct.” And yet it must be true that language plays a key role in every human culture. Language is the primary medium for the passing on of historically accumulated knowledge, tastes, biases, and styles that makes each of our human tribes and nations its own unique and precious entity. And if human language is best conceived of as an instinct to learn, why not culture itself?

  The past decade has seen a remarkable unveiling of our human genetic and neural makeup, and the coming decade promises even more remarkable breakthroughs. Each of us 6 billion humans is genetically unique (with the fascinating exception of identical twins). For each of us, our unique genetic makeup influences, but does not determine, what we are.

  If we are to grapple earnestly and effectively with the reality of human biology and genetics, we will need to jettison outmoded dichotomies like the traditional distinction between nature and nurture. In their place, we will need to embrace the reality of the many instincts to learn (language, music, dance, culture) that make us human.

  I conclude that the dichotomy-denying phrase “instinct to learn” deserves a place in the cognitive toolkit of everybody who hopes, in the coming age of individual genomes, to understand human culture and human nature in the context of human biology. Human language, and human culture, are not instincts—but they are instincts to learn.

  Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down

  Michael Shermer

  Publisher of Skeptic magazine; adjunct professor, Claremont Graduate University; author, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

  One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energy into the system of Earth’s early environment. The complex eukaryotic cells of which we are made are themselves the product of much simpler prokaryotic cells that merged together from the bottom up, in a process of symbiosis that happens naturally when genomes are merged between two organisms. Evolution itself is a bottom-up process of organisms just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation; out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of complex life we see today.

  Analogously, an economy is a self-organized bottom-up emergent process of people just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation, and out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of products and services available to us today. Likewise, democracy is a bottom-up emergent political system specifically designed to displace top-down kingdoms, theocracies, and dictatorships. Economic and political systems are the result of human action, not human design.

  Most people, however, see the world from the top down instead of the bottom up. The reason is that our brains evolved to find design in the world, and our experience with designed objects is that they have a designer (us), whom we consider to be intelligent. So most people intuitively sense that anything in nature that looks designed must be so from the top down, not the bottom up. Bottom-up reasoning is counterintuitive. This is why so many people believe that life was designed from the top down, and why so many think that economies must be designed and that countries should be ruled from the top down.

  One way to get people to adopt the bottom-up shorthand abstraction as a cognitive tool is to find examples that we know evolved from the bottom up and were not designed from the top down. Language is an example. No one designed English to look and sound like it does today (in which teenagers use the word “like” in every sentence). From Chaucer’s time forward, our language has evolved from the bottom u
p by native speakers adopting their own nuanced styles to fit their unique lives and cultures. Likewise, the history of knowledge production has been one long trajectory from top down to bottom up. From ancient priests and medieval scholars to academic professors and university publishers, the democratization of knowledge has struggled alongside the democratization of societies to free itself from the bondage of top-down control. Compare the magisterial multivolume encyclopedias of centuries past that held sway as the final authority for reliable knowledge, now displaced by individual encyclopedists employing wiki tools and making everyone his own expert.

  Which is why the Internet is the ultimate bottom-up self-organized emergent property of millions of computer users exchanging data across servers, and although there are some top-down controls involved—just as there are some in mostly bottom-up economic and political systems—the strength of digital freedom derives from the fact that no one is in charge. For the past five hundred years, humanity has gradually but ineluctably transitioned from top-down to bottom-up systems, for the simple reason that both information and people want to be free.

  Fixed-Action Patterns

  Irene Pepperberg

  Research associate, Harvard University; adjunct associate professor in psychology, Brandeis University; author, Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process