1
>> Jen Haas: I think we're ready to begin and we've worked out all of our
technical difficulties. So my name is jen Haas, and I have the pleasure of
introducing today's guest author, Leonard Mlodinow. Leonard received his Ph.D.
in theoretical physics from the University of California Berkeley, and was an
Alexander Vaughn Humboldt Fellow at the Max Plank Institute and currently
teaches at the California Institute of Technology.
He is also the author of "The Drunkard's Wife" and co author with Stephen
hawking of "A Brief History of Time and Grand Design."
I'm going to now turn it over to Leonard, and he can probably correct the
pronounce nation of his name. Thanks.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Thank you. Thanks for waiting so patiently. Sorry about
that. All right. Well, now I'm going to ask you so do some work. So first
you're waiting and now you're working. It's all voluntary. So feel free not
to do it. It's also anonymous, so don't worry about -- you will be graded, but
no one's going to know who they're grading.
Oh, we never, with all this, we never had that talk about what to do with -all right. We're going to have to figure that out, all right?
So let's just start by dividing you
experiments. We'll divide you into
half. And I guess if you guys call
say from here. So if you look down
arm, you're group one. If you feel
group two, all right?
into two groups, okay. It be two
two groups. It so it should be roughly
yourself -- you guys be group one. Let's
and you see that you're on this side of my
like you're on this side of my arm, you're
And also, if people are watching online, you can just pick a group one or two
and if you want to participate in the experiment, you can. When I say look
away, close your eyes, don't look at the screen. And then you can also
participate and see how this works on you.
So all right, let's go. So the first thing is group two, turn away from the
screen or, if you're online, don't look at the screen if you want to be in
group two. If you want to be in group two, right. Now, group one, please read
this silently and write down your answer. I'm not going to give you as much
time as I usually do, because we're so late starting.
2
Okay. Now, please read this question and write down your answer. Okay. Write
down your answer. Okay. Now, group one, please turn away from the screen or,
if you're online and you call yourself group one, don't look at the screen.
Group two, you can turn forward. Group two online, you can look at the screen.
Okay. Now, please read this silently and record your answer. Okay. Now,
please read this silently and record your answer. Okay. Now, you can all look
at the screen again. Thank you. And we'll do one more experiment.
I'd like you to study these words, and I'm going to read them to you as well.
I'll give you a second to study them. Verbally and then I'm going to read them
to you. Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste, tooth, nice, honey, soda,
chocolate, heart, cake, eat, pie. All right. So another test coming. Yes,
there is. So ready, here we go. But this isn't the test so don't do anything
yet. I just want you to think of the words that you can recall from the list.
Don't write anything.
Okay. Now, here are three words. Somewhere between zero and all three of
these were on the list. Okay. I want you to write down, I want you to think
back and I want only if you have a very concrete memory of me reading it and/or
seeing it on the screen and you're confident of that memory, then write down
the words if they were on the list. It might be that, as I said, maybe none of
them, maybe two of them, maybe one of them, whichever of these three words were
on the list and you have a concrete memory of it, please write it down now.
Okay. Write down your last entries, and okay. Now, if you were in group one,
please put a one on the top of your paper and circle it so we know it's not any
data. And group two, put a 2 and circle it in case these get a little shuffled
and I would ask group one to pass your papers to this aisle, to your left and
group two, also pass to your left, to the center aisle here and we'll collect
them.
So normally, I give the instructions to the collectors in secret so you don't
know what they're going to be doing with these things. But given the commotion
that we had, I guess I'd better just tell them now. But actually they're not
listening.
Okay. Tell you collectors what to do. Okay. So I would like you to keep
group one and group two separate for the first thing. I want you to give me
3
the mean, the average of what group one said in their guess and what group two
said, but ignore the yes and the no from the first question. And also, then,
for the tallies, put them together and just tell me how many people said each
word. And I will call for that later, and it will be something that we'll talk
about.
All
the
400
you
you
right. Now, you know how the experiment is done, sort of. Okay. Oh, by
way, throw in any outliers, because I have people put a million or negative
or, you know, all kinds of nice jokes. But since you're taking the mean,
better don't count those, okay? I know, depends what kind of pranksters
guys are.
So I'm going to talk about subliminal, how your unconscious mind rules your
behavior, and I'll start by defining what I mean by unconscious behavior or
unconscious processes in your mind. And those are processes that occur
automatically with no effort on your part, and no awareness, intention, and
little or no control.
Now, it's not always a very sharp line. Sometimes there's a little bit of
awareness or a little bit of control. But generally, these are the
characteristics of what we call the unconscious. So it's automatic. Your
brain does it for you automatically. You don't have to work at it, at least
consciously. You're not aware of it. You don't will it, and you can't control
it. You can't turn it off. And I'll give you some examples of how that works.
And as a result of this, with he don't understand often what is influencing our
behavior, our social perceptions, our memories and so we can't avoid perceiving
the world the way we do. And finally, I want to remind you or I want to tell
you that this is not the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, very
emotional unconscious, very emotional picture of the unconscious, and it was
hidden from people in Freud's theory due to motivational reasons and could be
revealed through therapy, through introspection. And this new unconscious that
we're talking about is not that way at all. It's outside your awareness
because of the parts of the brain that it operates in and these are outside of
your awareness for anatomical, structural reasons of your brain.
So it's not the unconscious that Freud popularized but something really very,
very different.
And the study of it is called social neuroscience.
Social neuroscience evolved
4
in the early 2000s. So it's a very new science and it's a menage-a-trois or
household of three, represented by these pairs of feet here, and these feet on
your left represent social psychology. Social psychology is the study of how
we interact as human beings. And our social interactions are important to our
species.
And these feet on the right represent cognitive psychology, which is a
psychology of how we think and how we deliberate. And they're tied together in
social neuro science by neuroscience, and especially a technology that
developed that was made, became widely available in the mid 1990s called
functional magnetic resonance imaging or FMRI, and that is just like the MRI
your doctor does, except has an added element.
So when you go in and have an MRI of your brain, the doctor can get a 3D
picture of your brain, rotate it, fly in and out, look at different parts.
Because with FMRI, it always tells you what part of your brain is functioning
at any given time, which shows the activation inside your brain. So we can now
watch people as they're perceiving visual information, as they're feeling
emotions, as they're thinking.
And so what this has allowed scientists to do is to connect these behavioral
studies that were done in psychology that maybe was kind of a soft science and
make it more of a hard science by connecting it to the functional anatomy of
your brain and seeing how the effects arise in different parts of your brain
and learn more of the mechanics of what's going on.
And my favorite illustrative study of the power of FMRI was this done at
Berkeley by Jacques Gallant, and he showed his subjects a series of slides,
like these, and he took -- while they were in an FMRI machine, so you can wear
these goggles that project slides for you, project images and also they do the
test with sounds.
So you lay in an FMRI machine, and they can show you all kinds of things. And
while they were, his subjects were looking at these slides, he was taking
readings with their brain, these electromagnetic readings of FMRI. And he had
a computer use those readings to try to reconstruct what the people were
seeing. So a kind of mind reading.
And he had a database of 6 million pictures that his computer could choose
from, and the computer made guesses based -- with no data from what the
students were actually -- subjects, sorry, at university too long. Subjects
5
were actually seeing and but busied purely on the FMRI.
So let's see how close the computer guesses were. So I guess that's quite
dramatic. I would be afraid to be in one of these machines. But fortunately,
they can't do this to you as you're walking by. You have to be in the machine
so you don't have to worry yet about people, scientists reading what you're
thinking.
So I'm going to talk about two main things in the rest of the lecture. The two
illustrations of the unconscious. And I divided them this way, because this
unconscious in vision and hearing is a great way to illustrate conscious
processes. It's not as relevant to our social lives as the second, which is a
social unconscious, but it's very, it's something that's very easy to
illustrate in a talk like this.
And the main point is that the same kind of processes that operate here, in the
vision and hearing, also operate in the social unconscious.
And the points are that our perceptions both our visual perceptions, our social
perceptions, our perceptions as consumers, and our perceptions of memory are
all constructed by our unconscious mind from limited data. So what you see is
not really what's there. It's a construction that your mind creates by taking
limited data and filling it in. And the same is true of your judgments of
people, judgments of stocks, and all the other judgments we make in our
everyday social life.
And our unconscious does that using things like context, expectation, even your
desires. Even what you want to see. And the other point is that this, the way
we experience the world is largely driven by these unconscious processes,
rather than by your conscious processes, or at least that there's no such thing
as a purely conscious, objective perception of the world. It's all fed into by
your unconscious.
So let me show you, illustrate some of this in vision and hearing. Look at
this picture, especially the guys in the room. This depends a lot on the
projector, but I want you to see if you can find something very unusual, even
bizarre in this picture. So in the fore ground is what psychologists call a
high interest image. And somewhere else is something that's different.
So how many, now I'm not talking about the ladder, okay.
How many of you saw
6
something very unusual or bizarre in that picture, raise your hand. How many
of you didn't? So it's about three quarters of those who vote the didn't, and
a quarter of you do. That's pretty typical. Okay. So when you see something,
when light hits your retina, that image does not get transmitted directly to
your conscious mind. This is a good illustration of that. There's something
called attention that has to be focused on different elements of the picture
before you can consciously perceive it. And with this high interest image in
the fore ground did, at least for the guys in the room, was it distracted your
attention. Even when you consciously decide to overcome that, when I said look
for something unusual, it's hard to do.
Let's go back and let's look at it again. King Kong. The face of King Kong is
in this picture. Look by the ladder. Okay. So right there is the face of
King Kong. This projector's pretty good. You can see it. You can see it
pretty clearly if you're in the center of the room. But it's hard to see
because your mind -- your unconscious mind keeps you looking at this part
instead. Actually, at this part.
So the question is, what do you consciously experience versus what is coming
into your eye. So let me start at the beginning. And show you what you
actually see. This is what you perceive at a typical road side. You see some
brush on the side of the road, the trees, the sign, the road, okay. You
perceive that as being a very clear and real image. Let me show you now what
data looks like as it actually hits your eye. If you did no unconscious
processing, this is what you would see, okay.
So all except for this yellow dot in the center, which is put there just to
show the fixation point. So this is a person's right eye, fixating right here.
As you can see, only for a small area around that is it clear. Otherwise, it's
very fuzzy, and there's a black spot here, called the blind spot, where the
optic nerve attaches to the retina, and, of course, it's two-dimensional data,
it's not three-dimensional.
And if you have to go through the world every time you saw a frame of the outer
world and it looked like this, and you had to process it consciously to look
like this, you'd get eaten by lions, Tigers, bears, whatever was out there to
eat us back then, or you'd never catch the rabbit you're trying to get for
dinner. So our unconscious mind developed to take data like this and turn it
into data like that. We do it automatically. We don't have to stop and think.
And happens very quickly. And we have no control over it.
7
So try and look at me or look at some part of the room or look at these
pictures and try to see the fuzziness and not do the processing. Okay. You
really can't do that.
Let me just give you an example of one way your mind, one trick your mind does
to fill in the data. And it also will illustrate again the lack of control you
have over it. This is a picture of a checkerboard, and you'll see two squares,
two rectangles outlined, one labeled A and one labeled B. You'll see that B is
a white square and A is a black square. The square B looks to you to be
lighter than the square A. Your mind is telling you that. But in reality, A
and B are identical. So the rectangle A and rectangle B are identical from a
physics point of view, but they're not identical from the perception point of
view. So the light that hits your eyes from A and B is identical. The color
is identical.
But your mind, in its processing, without telling you, without asking you,
makes them look different, because of the context. That's very useful to you,
because if you have to figure out, if you -- if this looked the same as this
and you had to reason, however, by counting the pattern out to say oh, I guess
it's a white square, that would slow you down. Instead, you automatically see
it as a white square.
Let me help you not see it that way. Look at it. I'm going to take the
context away, and look what happens to A and B when I take the context away.
So now, A and B, you can see them realistically, out of context, that they are
the same. But if you look at the A and B over here, they still look different.
And you can't look at these and have them look different, nor can you look at
these and have them look the same, because this is outside of your conscious
control.
So you probably recognize this fellow, though you probably rarely see him
upside down. And if you look at these -- because we're such a social species,
one of the modules in our unconscious is tuned particularly to the human face.
So the human face is very important to us as we go through the world. We try
to predict people's intentions, their emotions, what they're thinking. This is
a natural thing that we do in order to have social interactions that work
smoothly and it's very important to humans. And so with he do special
unconscious processing of human faces. We have to be able to recognize our
friends from our enemies and so on.
8
The thing is that this unconscious processing, this unconscious module of our
brain does not often see people upside down. And so this is a very dramatic
illustration of how specialized our brain is, our unconscious processing is to
our social life. Let me show you this picture, I'm going to flip it over for
you. It probably looks pretty normal, both of them probably look pretty normal
to you up side down, because the unconscious part of your brain has not really
kicked in yet in terms of identifying this face.
But when I turn it right side up, one of them looks horribly disfigured. So if
you met this guy in the street, you'd go whoa, what's wrong with him. This guy
is normal. But when they're upside down, that hardly matters to you. So this
big difference, this unconscious processing that's going on in your mind to
identify the human face. Watch it one more time. I'll turn it over. Watch as
it turns into a grotesque distortion as it turns over.
This is simply made, you can do this to anybody. Just take the eyes and the
mouth and flip them upside down. But if you ran into someone on the street,
you'd go oh, whoa. Unless you're standing on your head and you go, hey, looks
like a normal guy.
Let me give you one example of hearing. I hope this works because we had our
technical difficulties. We'll see if this works. Remember, I'm saying this
unconscious processing has similar, has similar functions across different
modalities. So I want to illustrate one in hearing. This is a song by Led
Zeppelin called "stairway to heaven." Let me see if it plays.
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now. It's just a spring
clean for the may queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the
long run, there's still time to change the road you're on. All right, very
nice. Now the question is, was Led Zeppelin, were they clever enough to design
a song that makes sense if you play it forwards and also if you play it
backwards. I don't think this song makes much sense played forwards. The
question is, if you play it backwards, does it make sense? I'm going to play
it backwards for you. There are like eight or nine lines.
I'll give a big prize to anyone who can read it back, the eight or nine lines
of the backwards song so let's try that.
9
[Playing song backwards].
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Can you recite the words? Did you get the message? Did
you hear the eight or nine lines or four lines or does it sound like gibberish?
It sounds a lot like gibberish, right? Okay. So that's one perception of the
world. Now I'm going to play it for you again, but provide a context, just
like the checkerboard, provide a context for those squares and you saw them
differently. I'm going to play this song for you again with the words so look
at the words and listen to the song and see if your perception of the same
audio file changes now.
Oh. Here so my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad whose
power is Satan. He'll give you, give you 666. There pass a tool shed where he
made us suffer, sad Satan. So with a little help, it makes sense to you now,
huh? All right.
So now I've given you the context and the same physical phenomenon is perceived
completely differently. So let me play it for you again, and I want you to
look at the words. The question is which is realty, right? Gibberish or this.
I'm going to play it for you again with the words. Don't close your eyes or
look away. Watch the words, listen to it. I want you to go back, though. I
want you to consciously override this, watch the words but hear it as
gibberish. Watch the words but pay no attention to them. Or as the judges
say, please disregard this testimony, okay? Let's see if that works.
Oh here so my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad whose
power is Satan. He'll give you, give you 666. There was a little toolshed
where he made us suffer, sad Satan.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: So were you successful, or did you hear the -because you can't really do it. You can't override it just like you
override when the guy goes up and talks about -- or when you read in
if you're a juror, about how this guy's guilty or an asshole. Can I
asshole at micro -- I don't know. Cut that out, okay? Or bad guy.
you go on trial. Oh, yeah, I heard that, but I can disregard that.
can't. So that's part of the unconscious data that ->>:
no. Oh,
can't
the paper,
say
And then
But you
Are you saying it's impossible or it's almost --
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
It's between impossible and almost impossible.
So in
10
this case, I don't know. They do study it,
they have things called bistable images and
like a vase or a face, and you're trying to
generally have little control or usually no
for instance, in different, when
people try something that can look
change it back and forth. You
control.
So anyway, but it depends on each phenomena has to be analyzed individually.
Okay. So I had another, but I won't do that. I took that slide out because I
was trying to go faster, but I was going to play it for you without the word at
all and let me just tell you, like I'm a veteran of hearing this now. First of
all, the backward words, as presented here, make more sense to me than the
forward words. And it sounds just as real when I play it now, because I've
heard it so many times.
So in our social perception, the same things happen to build our picture of the
world. I have a picture here of a few bus drivers. But just to illustrate the
point when you see a bus driver, you don't stop and puzzle out what is his job
using the data that you have. You automatically know it's a bus driver. If
you see a woman racing or a bus, you know what she feels. You don't have to
think about what is this animal using my logic and the data. What is she
thinking, what is she feeling? It's all automatic to us and it helps us in our
social interactions.
If you see a guy in the street or a woman in a blue suit with a gun, you know
what their job is. You know how to act toward them. And if you see captains
of industry or politicians and you've heard something about them in the news or
a defendant that you're hearing about in a trial, you get limited data on the
person, but your mind does some filling in to make a much clearer picture than
you actually have just as it does in physical perception and the audio
perception. And the same thing with all sorts of people that you meet in your
daily interactions, unless you know them intimately.
So the point of this is that our social perception is also constructed by our
minds employing the same tricks. Context, prior knowledge, belief, and even
desire.
Let me give you an example. Since it's an election year. There was a study
done where subjects were brought in to a laboratory and shown a lot of women's
faces, and they were asked to judge the competence of the women's faces, and
the scientists studied what makes a woman look more competent. Then they
11
brought a few more hundred subjects into their experiment, and they gave them
flyers for political candidates. They each got two flyers. One for a
Democratic candidate and one for a Republican candidate. I know, I shouldn't
put this slide up so soon, because you're all staring at it.
I'll get to this part in a minute. One for a Democratic candidate, one for a
Republican candidate. And they had, they listed the party, some of their
views, their qualifications and a picture. And they were asked to judge who
would you vote for. The Republican or the Democrat? The trick is that half of
them saw -- the researchers had hired a Hollywood makeup artist and a
photographer to create two versions of each candidate based on their earlier
research of what makes a woman look competent.
One version was a more competent looking one. And one was a less competent
looking one, which I've illustrated here, but these aren't the actual pictures
from the paper, because the research paper didn't include the pictures.
But so in one case, half the people saw the Republican in her more competent
image against a Democrat in her less competent looking one and half saw the
Democrat in her more competent against the Republican in her less competent.
And then they just had them vote.
The question is what kind of vote swing do you get? And they got a vote swing
of 14 percent. So she won, the Republican won 58 percent when she had her good
picture. But with only 44 percent when she had her less good picture. So this
shows that at least the swing voters, who aren't staunch Democrats or
Republicans, as they're looking at the flyer, and taking in all this
information about the views on the issues and their experience, they're also
taking in the face and making a judgment based on how competent looking the
person is. And this is, again, an automatic, effortless, a judgment that
they're unaware of. They don't know that they're judging based on looks. They
think they're looking at the data.
Well, this is, of course, just in a laboratory. So if you're skeptical, you
may say surely it doesn't affect real elections, right? Could our real
elections be so fragile and decided by such a factor? Well, a psychologist
named Alexander Todorov at Princeton decided to find out. In 2006, he gathered
pairs of photos. These here, I don't know if you guys, anyone recognize these?
This is the 2006 Wisconsin senatorial election. Russ Feingold against the
loser, who we forget the loser's name. So just like in sports. He came in
12
second.
So we remember this one.
But they showed them pairs of -- he gathered pairs of photos like this on
hundreds of gubernatorial, Congressional and senatorial elections. And showed
them to subjects, asked them one question. Who looks more competent. Nothing
to do about politics. Who looks more competent. Maybe you'd say this guy.
Next, this guy. Next. They'd all get rated.
He gathered statistics on who looked more competent, and he said let me predict
the outcome of the 2006 elections without using any political science, no
polling data, just look. I'm going to predict in every case that the more
competent looking one won. Okay. So how successful do you think this guy
could have been based purely on that? 70 percent. So he got 70 percent of the
elections right by ignoring all politics and picking the person who looks more
competent. So this does seem to be an effect that happens in the real world.
One other kind of data that your unconscious mind takes in is tough. This
slide illustrates four different kinds of primates engaged in grooming
behavior. And these, all except for these primates in the center, these other
three spend an hour or two a day doing it, much more than they actually need to
do, because it's a way of creating bonds and sense of cooperation and trust
among the individuals. Even in forming alliances.
These primates also have that tendency. We have nerves built into our,
especially into our face and our forearms that sense a certain kind of touch,
transmit that to the pleasure centers of your brain that have nothing to do
with deciding, feeling what you're touched, but just the emotional, pleasant
feeling of being touched. That's because our evolutionary history, touch has
always been a way we communicate.
And this still affects us today in our everyday social life, in our financial
life and all the decisions that we make. And it's very interesting study's
been done to see how strong this effect is. My favorite study was done in
France, where a three handsome Frenchmen, represented by this guy, were asked
to stand on a sunny street corner in northern France and proposition single
young women who walked by.
And they were given the script, which is a translation of the script, and they
all read exactly the same script. Hi, my name is Antoine. Can I have your
phone number, basically. And I'll call you later. And the question was, the
13
difference was half of the women, these young Frenchmen, gave them a very
light, half second or less touch on the shoulder or the forearm as they talked
to them. And in half, they didn't.
The question was, how would this affect their success rate. And the answer to
the question is it doubled it. They went from ten percent to 20 percent. So
this, of course, this is a situation of where touch is more directly related to
the possible sexual experience they might have later. So you might ask, what
about in very non-sexual situations. And this has been replicated in many
other different contexts.
For instance, waiters and waitresses, they did a similar experiment where they
gave a light and subtle touch to their customers versus no touch, and they
watch what happened to the tips. The tips went up from 14.5% to 17%. By the
way, in all these studies more of the of these studies, people are debriefed
afterwards, the subjects are debriefed, and they don't remember or didn't even
register having been touched. So this is a very subtle effect.
Also, when the waiters and waitresses were asked to give a touch as they were
recommending the special, they got people's acceptance to go up from 40 percent
to 60 percent, which this little subliminal persuasion. Finally, one more
study here. People were asked in a mall if they would take five minutes out to
do a survey. And they raised the number of people who agreed to cooperate from
about half to about three quarters.
Finally, before we get to the studies on you guy, I want to talk a little bit
about self. This is Salvador Dali, who famously said, every morning upon
awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure, that of being Salvador Dali. And I
ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador
Dali? And he kind of sounds like a pompous jerk, but I like this quote, but
this is what our unconscious mind is helping us, telling us every day.
Our unconscious mind, one of its roles is to give us the courage to face the
world, to face in the old days, I suppose, extreme cold or heat with no
shelter, to another day of finding food when it's scarce, of running from
predators and whatever else people used to do. Or today, to start a business,
spent hundred hour weeks for five years trying to get your business off the
ground, to face six months of chemotherapy or go into medical school or
whatever project you're working on now that probably, if you looked at
realistically, you'd feel daunted. But it helps us to overcome these things
14
and it often is a self-fulfilling prophecy, that with this courage, we can do
it.
I'll tell you in a minute about how we do it, but let me give you some
indications of exactly how strong the effect is. Let's start with high school
kids. If you have a high school kid at home, you probably know if you say are
you above average, the kid will say yes. Well, there was a survey of 3 million
high school kids that asked them many, many questions. One of them was that.
Guess what percent of them said that they're above average? 100 percent. All
right.
What about, well, okay, so I'm sure they rounded. It was probably 99.99
percent. But what about their professors? Here's a college professor. They
should know better so they were asked, is your work above average and what
percentage of them said that their work was above average? 94 percent.
How about your doctors? So they did a study of doctors who had diagnosed
pneumonia, and they asked them, what's your confidence level in the pneumonia
diagnosis? And on average, they said 80 percent. They were 80 percent certain
it was pneumonia. In reality, follow-up studies showed that only 20 percent of
the patients had pneumonia.
And this affects us in business as well. CEOs who acquire firms typically
overpay and part of their reasoning is thinking that they are better than the
CEO who is currently running the firm and that will make a difference that's
worth over paying for. Again, I'm showing you, these are the cognitive
illusions that are kind of like the optical illusions or the hearing illusion I
showed you earlier. I don't mean for the message to be that your conscious
mind is steering you wrong. In 95 percent of your interactions, it's steering
you right. Or 99 percent. It's what you really need. But then there's these
equivalents or analogies of optical illusions that happen where it leads you
astray.
One of the ways it does that is through memory. It tweaks your memory. You
remember the good things more than the bad things. In this study, students who
were four years out of college were asked about their grades, but they had
signed over their transcripts so they knew the researchers had the transcripts
so they had no reason to lie and the researchers could compare their answers to
the actual grades.
15
The point is this he remembered their As very well, I think 86 percent or 89
percent. Their Bs less well, their Cs less well. They hardly remembered their
Ds at all. Only 29 percent.
So I always tell my students, if your grades aren't as good as you like them to
be, just wait. They'll get better.
So finally, final study I want to talk about is just in another way that your
mind helps you get a rosy picture of the world to confirm that you can
accomplish what you need to, also to confirm your political world view. So
when we analyze political data, we tend to look at it this way. And tend to
confirm that we want to believe by the way we look at the data, whether it's
about ourselves or about the world around us.
And the point that is we use this thing called motivated reasoning. Motivated
reasoning is to look at the world like a lawyer. If you're a lawyer, you want
to show that your client is either guilty or not guilty, or if it's your
client, I guess you want to show that the client is not guilty. Or if you're
the prosecutor, guilty or whatever you want to prove.
You have your conclusion first and now you're looking for evidence for it. And
you tend to pooh-pooh evidence that goes against your conclusion. You either
think it doesn't carry much weight, it's not important evidence, or the
methodology is bad, or you're trying to poke holes in it. And you tend to over
value evidence that's supportive.
That's the same thing we do with ourselves and our beliefs when we're looking
at data about ourselves or about things that we believe in. Or that we want to
believe in. But it's very important to realize, we do that unconsciously. So
if we would have just told ourselves I'm going to ignore this very convincing
evidence because I want to believe this, you're not really going to believe
this. You're going to accept the evidence.
It's your unconscious mind doing it. You're not aware of it. You don't have
control over it. That's what this study shows. They had people, they took
subjects into the lab and gave them data and transcripts from a real civil
court case in Texas where a motorcyclists was suing a car driver. And they had
all the facts of the case and the transcripts, and they told half of them that
they would be representing the motorcyclist, trying to get money. And half
were going to represent the car driver, trying to pay as little as possible and
they were going pair up and have to negotiate their own version of the
16
settlement and that the real settlement was somewhere between zero and
$100,000.
So they all digested this information with this advocate's had on, wanting to
go in and represent one side or the other, and then just before they went in to
do that, the researchers said wait a minute, wait a minute. One other thing.
Take your advocate's hat off now. Of course, doesn't really mean anything to
you. You were just assigned to represent someone in this game. So it's just a
game. Shouldn't be hard to take that hat off. Think back about all this stuff
you digested. Think about it objectively, forget any conflict of interest.
I'm going to give you a cash bonus if you can tell me what the real judge
awarded, based on whatever the fairness, whatever the thought process of
fairness was of the real judge. Try and be fair, analyze the data fairly and
tell me what the real judge awarded. If you're within $5,000, you get a cash
bonus.
So the question is, could they do this? Could they, now that their unconscious
has employed motivated reasoning to analyze the data, could they go back and
look at the data and overcome it, like I asked you to listen to the song with
the words or not pay attention or look at the checkerboard and not notice that
the squares -- and not think that the squares are different.
Well, when they were asked to do that, the motorcyclist's, people who were
going to defend the motorcyclist said $40,000 and the people were going to
defend the driver of the car said, on average, $20,000. So it was a factor of
two in their, quote, objective reasoning abilities based on what they had been
assigned to do earlier.
Let's see if this affects you. So can I have the data? In the first question
I gave you, okay. So no one said point, huh? So I asked you to analyze this
room and I gave you some limited data. I gave you these three pictures of the
room and the surroundings, and I gave you, I said it was in Tahiti, a one
bedroom bungalow, and blah, blah, blah. And then I asked you what would you
pay for this room? Now I'm asking you in this picture, a very limited picture
of what the room is, but I want you now to, in your mind, you're forming some
conception of what the room is and how much it's worth. I wanted you to guess
how much it's worth.
Group one guessed on average, $909. At this point, I get gasps usually from
group two. No, nothing? Are you still awake. I know it was a long time
17
before we got started. The reason I get gasps is because group two guessed on
average $247. So I got a factor of four through my subliminal mind control on
you guys. So the question is how did I do that?
I've had up to a factor of, I think, 20. I think I had $200 versus 2500 or
something once when I tried this. The question is what's the difference
between you guys? The difference was question number one, okay? Question
number one, group one said is this hotel room more than $5500 a night. In
group two, the question was, is it more than $55 a night. I think it's an
absurd question, at least to me. I haven't traveled that much, but I know the
room is obviously more than 55 a night and it's not going to be 5500 a night.
So probably in your yeses and nos, it's pretty unanimous that the answer to the
first question is. And the second question is yes.
But even though it's a silly question, it influenced your thought greatly. So
if you're going to a website and they managed to say would you expect to pay
$5500 for this room, and you're saying, what kind of an idiot question is that,
and you say how much do you want to pay, there they go, they just jacked up
what you're offering by a factor of four. So that's how your unconscious feeds
into your social perception in your consumer behavior in this case.
>>:
How much was the room?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: The room was 550. So being mathematically inclined, I
just took the geometric mean. I pumped it up by a factor of ten, pumped it
down by a factor of ten and see what happens.
Okay. So what about your memory? So I was telling you how everything is
constructed, your visual perception, your hearing, your social perception. I
want to see if your memory, I want to illustrate how your memory is also
constructed from limited data, from context and the gist and played back to
you.
So just when you're looking at the side of the road, you're seeing something
fuzzy and you think you're seeing something clear, your memory is based on
something very fuzzy, just a few little pieces of data and the gist of what
actually happened and when you call on your memory to replay it, you're hearing
something clear and concrete.
So because of that, when I asked you, when I showed you these words and I asked
18
you which of these three are on there, you're playing back in your memory. I
hope that you listened to me and didn't write it down unless you could really
hear me saying it, picture on the screen and you're really confident.
So because of that nice instruction, nobody said point, which was on the list,
and how many of you remembered taste? I have 21 people remembered taste. And
that was on the list. But what about sweet? So sweet is something that you
could typically reconstruct in your mind, because a lot of these words have to
do with sweet. Cake, pie, chocolate. And so this was called false memory,
because your brain has recorded some data, some kind of descriptor saying sweet
word and then when you call them back, of course, sweet is the epitome of sweet
words. So even though, for taste, I got 21 of you remembering it, for sweet, I
also got 21 of you remembering it. So you remembered equally the word that
wasn't on the list as the word that was on the list.
So I'm just going to end with a quote from Carl Jung, who I don't subscribe to
a lot of what he said, but I love this quote, I think encapsulates this very
well. The subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play
very little part of in our daily lives, but they are the almost invisible roots
of our conscious thoughts. Thank you.
>> Jen Haas:
So are there any questions?
>>: With this song thing, does that depend on time, like if I've heard it once
and go and don't hear it again for a year, will that still ->> Leonard Mlodinow: So the backwards song, yeah. If you forget the words, or
they fade from your memory, then you start to hear it more at gibberish. I
know from personal experience, having heard that over some time. If you keep
reinforcing it, then it sounds more and more real. And by the way, that
happens in courtrooms all the time with memories. People thinking they
remember something, reconstructing it like you did here from the gist, and then
getting asked about it repeatedly, recalling it repeatedly, and it becomes more
and more real, even if it's not.
>>: The second thing I was curious what surprised you the most when you wrote
the book?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Almost every chapter. I mean, it was amazing. It was
fun writing the book. It was fun doing the research for the book, because, you
19
know, in memory and perception, and in the way we categorize people and
prejudice, our non-verbal communication, our feeling of self, our emotions.
Everywhere, there were these great surprising studies. I went whoa, I learned
so much about me, which I hope I digested for you.
But it took me four years to learn it all. So it was a huge volume of
literature out there. But I can't even say. I think maybe the most outrageous
things I learned had to do with some of the memory stuff and how the courts
don't recognize it at all and maybe some of the political stuff and how we are
influenced in ways we don't realize. You know if you buy the wrong wine
because German music is playing in the background, this is one study people
bought German and French music, playing on alternate days, and they got people
to buy two-thirds German wine on the German wine and two-third French wine on
the French days.
And if you get home and go why did I buy this wine? I don't like German wine.
Big deal, all right. But if the wrong guy gets elected because he looks good,
then that's a bigger deal.
>>:
So realizing how limited we are, what's more useful, hubris or humility?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I think humility is much more useful. And I guess
hubris, if you take it in the charitable sense of confidence is good, but over
confidence is bad, or that's why you end up paying more for the company that
you're going to buy than you should pay.
>>: Does the concept of micro expressions, it's been glorified with some
Hollywood kind of things in the series called [indiscernible]. Just curious if
there's any ->> Leonard Mlodinow: So that's Paul Eckman's work, and he did a lot of very
good work on lying. Remember, I talked about how we read each other's emotions
from our faces, and also our posture. And he did some, decided to apply that
to whether you can tell if people are lying. And but then what's happened over
the last 10 or 20 years with his work, he formed a company. It's very hard to
say what is, you know, true and false in that, because they don't really
publish their work. And there hasn't been a lot of definitive work published
on whether you can really tell whether someone's lying by their facial
expressions or by these micro expressions, which are very short facial
expressions.
20
There has been some, but not lot of it.
jury is still out on that.
It's more proprietary.
So I think the
But I tend to be a little bit skeptical, because if there were something -- I'm
sure people are looking into it. I would think if there was something dramatic
there, researchers outside of the proprietary circles would have published more
on it.
>>:
The question was does your subconscious then show up on your micro --
>> Leonard Mlodinow: That's the claim, but we don't know. It seems to some
extent in these micro expressions when you're lying, but how accurate you can
be, I don't know.
>>: How do you use this, or do you use this to help yourself be more objective
and to help yourself from being manipulated?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Well, I do. I mean, a very simple maybe banal example is
you go into a grocery store and you want to buy whatever beer, some fancy beer,
and it's $5.99. The bottle is $5.99. Because it sounds like less to you than
6 dollars, and it sound like less, and it automatically sounds like less,
because of the 5. You hear the 5 and not the 6.
And I don't -- I know intellectually that it's the same, but it's hard to
overcome the feeling that it's less. So when I see the $5.99, I automatically
look away and go six dollars. This is a six dollar bottle or whatever. I talk
to a friend who has seminars and he charges 1995 for the week end. 1,995
dollars. And I remember telling one of his assistants, you mean, my God, he
gets $2,000 for those? She says no, 1995.
If I was thinking about buying it, I would say to myself, oh, is it worth
$2,000, because it sounds like what it is. So in that sense, you can use -once you're aware of these effects, you can use your conscious mind to try to
overrule them in various ways.
Another thing is with credit cards, people spend a lot more on credit cards
because it's abstract and the process of handing over the money inhibits you
from handing over the money.
So if you think you're overspending on a credit card, you have to catch
21
yourself and realize and try and think, let me pretend I'm paying cash for
this. And would I really pay that, or is it just too easy with the credit
card?
>>: What interest distortions to our social perception of other people?
there something that we can do to [indiscernible] that?
Is
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Again, get more data on people. Get to know them and try
and keep an open mind. But the unconscious influences are still going to be
there. So in each individual case, you can try and focus on learning more
about them, but they've found that in terms of categorization and prejudice,
there are things that you can do if you're really serious about it, which is
mainly if you have a prejudice against some group that you don't have a lot of
contact with, is to seek contact with people in that group, especially common
goals that you can strive for together. And that's -- and in studies, that
seems to help you override your unconscious prejudice.
And by the way, if you guys are a little bit techie, go to the site called IAT,
the implicit associations test. If you type in IAT and Harvard, you can get to
the website. You can take a test that can test your unconscious prejudices
against black people, gay people, I think obese people, and you'll find that
even if you're very fair-minded or even if you are in an ethnic group, you
often, even perhaps usually have unconscious prejudices against that group
based on being inundated and these messages through television and film.
If you have a minute, it takes five minutes to take the test.
score, compares you to other people and it's kind of cool.
It gives you a
>>: Did you research any people with photographic memory and how that would
affect?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I talk in the book about a guy named Sharashefsky who
never forgot anything, and it was bad because your mind gets cluttered. He had
trouble even following. He could remember what you said 30 years ago word for
word, but he had trouble following the opposite, following the gist of what
people were saying.
Or if he saw your face. If I see your face now, I make a gist of your face. I
might mistake your face. I don't know you very well. If I see someone else.
If you commit a crime, I might identify the wrong person if he looks like you.
22
And the context is that the police grab them so I'm thinking must be one of
these guys and it looks like you.
But he was so accurate or so specific in his memory that he would remember your
face like this, if you turn a little bit, he'd have another picture of your
face like this. If it's a different lighting, he had another picture of your
face. So he had trouble even identifying faces. Because can you imagine going
through a catalog of all these faces when you have a picture from every angle?
So it caused him a lot of problems. So it's kind of, he did make a living
remembering things as a Newmanist, they called it, but he had social issues.
>>: Any comment on social media, where you've got basically a lot of people
self-publishing snippets of their personality. Is the gap between their actual
personality and perceived widening or shrinking?
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
Sorry?
I didn't --
>>: People are publishing things about themselves on Facebook, things like
that.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Oh, I don't know of any study of that. Because based on
the other studies of how people perceive themselves, yeah, there would be. Of
course, you know, there's also conscious motivation there. You're trying to
present yourself on Facebook or make a certain image for yourself, right. So
there are also conscious things going on.
How long do you guys have?
>>:
I could take a few more questions.
How many more?
Maybe two more questions.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: Okay. You didn't ask a question before? Okay. I'm
trying to get to this side of the room because I know I've been focusing.
There's a right/left favoritism thing in your unconscious. So if you give
people equal products and you say which one do you want, they'll like the one
on the right more, so I'm trying to counteract that and go to the left.
>>: So the experiment with FMRI, you saw that people saw different things than
what was projected to them. Do we know why?
23
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
>>:
They saw different things than --
Than what was shown to them?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: No, no, that wasn't what it showed at all. What it
showed was what they're looking at and what the computer guessed they were
looking at. So the other thing was not something that they were perceiving.
It was what the computer guessed that they were looking at.
>>:
Is FMRI accurate enough to make any judgments based on those?
>> Leonard Mlodinow: I thought those were extremely impressive, that you could
take electromagnetic readings of the brain and say they're looking at a snake
and you don't get the details of the snake right. But, yeah, I mean, what they
use it for is to see what parts of your brain are functioning.
Like when you're afraid, it's your amygdala is functioning. And they do
behavioral studies to check that out. So they work hand in hand. So they do
studies on people with amygdala damage. They'll let a scorpion crawl up their
arm. They'll good to a haunted house and go this is what's going on here.
They'll, I forgot, they put them all kinds of dangerous situations and they
have no fear at all.
So you correlate what's going on in the brain and then you do behavioral
studies and then you really learn a lot more. Okay. Last question. Who's
closest to where I'm pointing there? I'll take two more. You and then you.
>>: I'm curious why the visual example where you had the rectangles, we can't
change what we're seeing there. But then on the sound example, by having the
words helped us learn.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: You weren't learning but the words weren't really there.
So think of the sound as -- so first imagine the visual example, I showed you
the two squares outside of the checkerboard. And you said oh, they're the
same. That's like, I'm playing you the music and it's all gibberish. Then I
bring the context in, and now you can't help but seeing them as different, the
checkerboard. And I bring the context in, which is the words, and now you
can't help but using that information to interpret the words.
>>:
Right, but you said after a while, you could actually hear the words
24
without seeing them, because you'd heard it so many times.
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
>>:
Right.
So that almost seems like --
>> Leonard Mlodinow: It's not that I'm seeing the words that influences me.
It's knowing that those are the words. So my unconscious mind hears the music,
knows the words and goes this is the words to the music. And I can't not do
that. I can't stop it.
>>: So that seems like your unconscious was being trained. I'm looking for a
word there. And you were remembering what the words were. But visually, you
can't put the ->> Leonard Mlodinow: The context is still there, whether I'm looking at it -so with the checkerboard, I'm removing the visual context and it's not working
quite the same way, because you're not remembering the context, right? But
with the music, I am remembering the context. My audio memory or my memory of
the words is better than my ability to -- when I see the squares outside of the
checkerboard, I can see them outside of the checkerboard. Checkerboard doesn't
stay there for me.
But with the words, when you play the music, the words are still there for me.
So, I mean, the analogy isn't perfect between the two, but ->>: Like in the brain, if there's a difference in the structure between the
parts.
>> Leonard Mlodinow: It's totally because one's the audio perception. So it's
not a perfect analogy, and one is seeing something and you're actually, they're
both to do with vision. The square and I'm taking away the context is visual.
In the other one, the context is more abstract, it's language, and the effect
is audio. And one more was?
>>: So given what I've learned over the last hour here, I would suspect you
overemphasizing some of those many studies that happen to be more controversial
or fascinating in your book and in your work. How do you work to avoid that?
>> Leonard Mlodinow:
I probably talked -- I definitely talk in more details
25
about the more interesting studies, but I try to avoid any studies, you know,
that were more controversial, that aren't that accepted. Like most of the
priming studies. I don't know if you've heard of priming, but that are hard to
replicate. So the idea was to find the headlines of what's going on and then
to illustrate it with studies.
If a study was boring, I might just mention it or I might say something based
on it. But if the study itself was interesting, then I'll go into more detail.
So like the Texas study of the lawsuit, study was kind of interesting to
explain. I'll go into more detail. If it was a boring study, I would have
studied it real quickly, like studies show that people taking one side or
another in a criminal case can't ignore the data or something like that.
So it's more of a question of how much space do I give it, but I weren't you to
have fun reading the book and not just learn something. So thank you.