The Subconscious Mind Doesn't Take Control From You
Misunderstandings about how the subconscious mind really works have empowered a new generation of hacks and conmen.
Ever heard that hanging a poster with a message related to money on the wall would boost a worker’s productivity by such and such percentage? It’s not true, but the idea floats around pop business circles every once in a while.
Advice like that is one of the many ways the unconscious mind has been hijacked for fraudulent claims. Two psychologists, Ben Newell and David Shanks, wrote a short book called Open Minded, which breaks down myths about the unconscious mind and explains the science of what we really know about the way the brain works.
What is the Unconscious Mind?
For the purposes of the book, the authors define consciousness as mental “states that can be reported” and “unconscious means ones that cannot be.”
The authors question whether unconscious states exist in the brain at all. One of the first fallacies they debunk is the idea of “an overly bottom-up view of brain processes.” The brain is often compared to a pipeline through which information flows and the meaning of an idea is eventually created. We see an image, process it, then understand what we’re seeing. However, humans are also capable of powerful top-down influences on the brain.
“For example, recent neuroscience experiments on individuals with electrodes implanted in their brains (for the assessment of epilepsy) have shown that we can exert conscious, volitional control of single neurons. We can consciously decide to make individual neurons in our own brains fire in both sensory and higher-level brain regions.”
That may not sound like common sense, but consider the last time you caught yourself thinking worse of someone than they deserved because you were in a bad mood. None of your automatic thoughts were inaccessible to you, nor did you cede control of your behavior to an unseen force.
What About Intuition? Isn’t that Subconscious?
About halfway through the book, the authors anticipate an obvious challenge. Isn’t intuition a subconscious process? The authors argue no, it isn’t. Rather “choices made intuitively and ones accompanied by an analysis of reasons are…accompanied by awareness of the proximal basis for that choice.”
They offer the example of whether to choose a certain dish on a date. Picking a garlic dish may be “driven by the proximal belief that it is healthy” or “your mother told you it’s a good source of antioxidants when you were a kid.” Whatever reason you’re reaching for to justify your current choice, you’re still making it independent of these previous justifications. You’re also aware of the reasons you’re using to justify your current choice — no childhood garlic traumas are influencing you like evil spirits in your ear.
A more direct refutation of intuition comes from Nobel Prize-winner Herbert Simon, who wrote that intuition is “nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” Albert Einstein echoed that sentiment, and the authors confirmed it:
“Some decisions may appear subjectivley fast and effortless because they are made on the basis of recognition: the situation provides a cue (for example, no clouds in the sky), the cue gives us access to information stored in memory (rain is unlikely), and the information provides an answer (don’t take an umbrella).”
One of the points of this chapter was to disprove the idea that sleeping on an idea could conjure the answer to a difficult problem. (It’s also the excerpt Steven Pinker posted on X, which led me to this book in the first place.)
Sleep may bring a renewed focus, but the hard work of thinking must have been done before an epiphany occurred. It took Einstein about 10 years to work out the theory of relativity, and Paul McCartney didn’t record Yellow Submarine until 18 months after the song supposedly came to him in his sleep.
There’s no shortcut through a hard problem, and there’s no mythical force controlling us from outside our conscious minds. For better and for worse, we are wholly responsible for our best and worst ideas, behaviors, actions, and words.
Open Minded is a brilliant and accessible book, but the clarity of its ideas and writing set it apart from many books that attempt to tackle consciousness.