Incognito (10 page)

So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you
believe
something to be true, just because you
know
it’s true, that doesn’t mean it
is
true. The most important maxim for fighter pilots is “Trust your instruments.” This is because your senses will tell you the most inglorious lies, and if you trust them—instead of your cockpit dials—you’ll crash. So the next time someone says, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”, consider the question carefully.

After all, we are aware of very little of what is “out there.” The brain makes time-saving and resource-saving assumptions and tries to see the world only as well as it needs to. And as we realize that we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them, we have taken the first step in the journey of self-excavation. We see that what we perceive in the outside world is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access.

These principles of inaccessible machinery and rich illusion do not apply only to basic perceptions of vision and time. They also apply at higher levels—to what we think and feel and believe—as we shall see in the next chapter.

A hint allows the image to take on meaning as a bearded figure. The light patterns hitting your eyes are generally insufficient for vision in the absence of
expectations.

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. Try this: close your eyes, grip an imaginary steering wheel, and go through the motions of a lane change. Imagine that you are driving in the left lane and you would like to move over to the right lane. Before reading on, actually put down the book and try it. I’ll give you 100 points if you can do it correctly.

It’s a fairly easy task, right? I’m guessing that you held the steering wheel straight, then banked it over to the right for a moment, and then straightened it out again. No problem.

Like almost everyone else, you got it completely wrong.
¹
The motion of turning the wheel rightward for a bit, then straightening it out again would steer you off the road: you just piloted a course from the left lane onto the sidewalk. The correct motion for changing lanes is banking the wheel to the right, then back through the center, and continuing to turn the wheel
just as far to the left side
, and only then straightening out. Don’t believe it? Verify it for yourself when you’re next in the car. It’s such a simple motor task that you have no problem accomplishing it in your daily driving. But when forced to access it consciously, you’re flummoxed.

The lane-changing example is one of a thousand. You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities, and nor would you want to be—it would interfere with the brain’s well-oiled processes. The best way to mess up your piano piece is to concentrate on your fingers; the best way to get out of breath is to think about your breathing; the best way to miss the golf ball is to analyze your swing. This wisdom is apparent even to children, and we find it immortalized in poems such as “The Puzzled Centipede”:

The ability to remember motor acts like changing lanes is called
procedural memory, and it is a type of
implicit memory
—meaning that your brain holds knowledge of something that your mind cannot explicitly access.
²
Riding a bike, tying your shoes, typing on a keyboard, or steering your car into a parking space while speaking on your cell phone are examples of this. You execute these actions easily, but without knowing the details of how you do it. You would be totally unable to describe the perfectly timed choreography with which your muscles contract and relax as you navigate around other people in a cafeteria while holding a tray, yet you have no trouble doing it. This is the gap between what your brain can do and what you can tap into consciously.

The concept of implicit memory has a rich, if little known, tradition. By the early 1600s,
René Descartes had already begun to suspect that although experience with the world is stored in memory, not all memory is accessible. The concept was rekindled in the late 1800s by the psychologist
Hermann Ebbinghaus, who wrote that
“most of these experiences remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous experience.”
³

To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks. It’s easy to understand why you would not want to be consciously aware of the intricacies of your muscle movement, but this can be less intuitive when applied to your perceptions, thoughts and beliefs, which are also final products of the activity of billions of nerve cells. We turn to these now.

The best chicken sexers in the world hail from Japan. When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing the two genders is known as
chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, who will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, who are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which expert chicken sexers could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was
done.
⁴
It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to
know
the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The students would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback:
yes
or
no
. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained up to masterful—albeit unconscious—levels.

Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding oceans away. During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services. These spotters were so valuable that the government quickly tried to enlist more spotters—but they turned out to be rare and difficult to find. The government therefore tasked the spotters with training others. It was a grim attempt. The spotters tried to explain their strategies but failed. No one got it, not even the spotters themselves. Like the chicken sexers, the spotters had little idea how they did what they did—they simply saw the right answer.

With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by
trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and the expert would say
yes
or
no
. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise.
⁵

There can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. When we examine skills that are not amenable to introspection, the first surprise is that
implicit
memory is completely separable from
explicit memory: you can damage one without hurting the other. Consider patients with anterograde
amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an
afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they will tell you the next day that they have no recollection of the experience, that they have never seen this video game before, and, most likely, that they have no idea who you are, either. But if you look at their
performance
on the game the next day, you’ll find that they have improved exactly as much as nonamnesiacs.
⁶
Implicitly their brains have learned the game—the knowledge is simply not accessible to their consciousness. (Interestingly, if you wake up an amnesic patient during the night after they’ve played Tetris, they’ll report that they were dreaming of colorful falling blocks, but they have no idea why.)

Of course, it’s not just sexers and spotters and amnesiacs who enjoy unconscious learning: essentially everything about your interaction with the world rests on this process.
⁷
You may have a difficult time putting into words the characteristics of your father’s walk, or the shape of his nose, or the way he laughs—but when you see someone who walks, looks, or laughs like him, you know it immediately.

We often do not know what’s buried in the caverns of our unconscious. An example of this comes up, in its ugliest form, with racism.

Consider this situation: A white company owner refuses employment to a black applicant, and the case goes to court. The employer insists that he harbors no racism; the applicant insists otherwise. The judge is stuck: how can one ever know what sort of
biases may lurk in someone’s unconscious, modulating their decisions, even if they are not aware of it consciously? People don’t always speak their minds, in part because people don’t always
know
their minds. As
E. M. Forster quipped: “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”

But if someone is unwilling to
say
something, are there ways of
probing what is in the unconscious brain? Are there ways to ferret out subterranean beliefs by observing someone’s behavior?

Imagine that you sit down in front of two buttons, and you’re asked to hit the right button whenever a positive word flashes on the screen (
joy
,
love
,
happy
, and so on), and the left button whenever you see a negative word (
terrible
,
nasty
,
failure
). Pretty straightforward. Now the task changes a bit: hit the right button whenever you see a photo of an overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a photo of a thin person. Again, pretty easy. But for the next task, things are paired up: you’re asked to hit the right button when you see either a positive word
or
an overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a negative word
or
a thin person. In another group of trials, you do the same thing but with the pairings switched—so you now press the right button for a negative word
or
a thin person.

The results can be troubling. The reaction times of subjects are faster when the pairings have a strong association unconsciously.
⁸
For example, if overweight people are linked with a negative association in the subject’s unconscious, then the subject reacts faster to a photo of an overweight person when the response is linked to the same button as a negative word. During trials in which the opposite concepts are linked (thin with bad), subjects will take a longer time to respond, presumably because the pairing is more difficult. This experiment has been modified to measure implicit attitudes toward races, religions, homosexuality, skin tone, age, disabilities, and presidential candidates.
⁹