Who’s Minding the Mind?

Surfing the net I stumbled upon a nicely written article about how the subconscious mind works and to what effect.  Thanks Benedict for writing this!

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm.

“When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, ‘What to do next?’ ” said John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and a co-author, with Lawrence Williams, of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. “Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness.”

Dr. Bargh added: “Sometimes those goals are in line with our conscious intentions and purposes, and sometimes they’re not.”

Priming the Unconscious

The idea of subliminal influence has a mixed reputation among scientists because of a history of advertising hype and apparent fraud. In 1957, an ad man named James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn at a movie theater in Fort Lee, N.J., by secretly flashing the words “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coke” during the film, too quickly to be consciously noticed. But advertisers and regulators doubted his story from the beginning, and in a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary acknowledged that he had trumped up the findings to gain attention for his business.

Later studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect.

Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research “doesn’t prove that consciousness never does anything,” wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. “It’s rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. That’s important and potentially useful information, but it doesn’t prove that keys don’t exist or that keys are useless.”

Yet he and most in the field now agree that the evidence for psychological hot-wiring has become overwhelming. In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.

Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.

In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.

The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent. “That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it,” said Henk Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.

The Same Brain Circuits

The real-world evidence for these unconscious effects is clear to anyone who has ever run out to the car to avoid the rain and ended up driving too fast, or rushed off to pick up dry cleaning and returned with wine and cigarettes — but no pressed slacks.

The brain appears to use the very same neural circuits to execute an unconscious act as it does a conscious one. In a study that appeared in the journal Science in May, a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money. The players held a handgrip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep.

As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did — regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded.

“This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain,” said the study’s senior author, Chris Frith, a professor in neuropsychology at University College London who wrote the book “Making Up The Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.”

The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said.

Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, so far in vain. But there’s little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of brain tissue behind the forehead, and experiments like this one show that it can be one of the last neural areas to know when a decision is made.

This bottom-up order makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly human layers were added later in evolutionary history. In this sense, Dr. Bargh argues, unconscious goals can be seen as open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims — automatic survival systems.

In several studies, researchers have also shown that, once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits. Study participants primed to be cooperative are assiduous in their teamwork, for instance, helping others and sharing resources in games that last 20 minutes or longer. Ditto for those set up to be aggressive.

This may help explain how someone can show up at a party in good spirits and then for some unknown reason — the host’s loafers? the family portrait on the wall? some political comment? — turn a little sour, without realizing the change until later, when a friend remarks on it. “I was rude? Really? When?”

Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has done research showing that when self-protective instincts are primed — simply by turning down the lights in a room, for instance — white people who are normally tolerant become unconsciously more likely to detect hostility in the faces of black men with neutral expressions.

“Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones,” Dr. Schaller said, “because we can’t moderate stuff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.”

Until it is satisfied, that is, when the program is subsequently suppressed, research suggests. In one 2006 study, for instance, researchers had Northwestern University undergraduates recall an unethical deed from their past, like betraying a friend, or a virtuous one, like returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically “cleanse” their consciences.

Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.

What You Don’t Know

Using subtle cues for self-improvement is something like trying to tickle yourself, Dr. Bargh said: priming doesn’t work if you’re aware of it. Manipulating others, while possible, is dicey. “We know that as soon as people feel they’re being manipulated, they do the opposite; it backfires,” he said.

And researchers do not yet know how or when, exactly, unconscious drives may suddenly become conscious; or under which circumstances people are able to override hidden urges by force of will. Millions have quit smoking, for instance, and uncounted numbers have resisted darker urges to misbehave that they don’t even fully understand.

Yet the new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our own consciousness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that don’t always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are at least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.

Written by Benedict Carey and published in a 2007 edition of the New York Times

What Type of Car Are You?

For those who have become familiar with the 6 Persona-types and who have begun to delve into Body-types or Biological Profiling related to these types, here is an analogy that may clarify things.

Imagine each Body-Type is a type of vehicle.

A Bilious body is much like a motorcycle, it goes fast, doesn’t need to stop for traffic jams and can be a little dangerous for those who haven’t learned to ride it well or choose to ride in risky ways. The motorcycle may very well be the first to reach the target but it may be a lonely ride and only a small amount of equipment can be carried along.

The Phlegmatic body is much like a truck. It’s slow, especially going uphill, but is capable of carrying very heavy loads for long rides. As long as it follows a certain structure, it will get to where it needs to go but if you leave it to its own schedule you’ll probably find it often at pit stops.

The Nervous body is much like a luxury car. It’s expensive, nice to look at, it travels with comfort but it has to adhere to the given routes and cannot go off-road since any damage to it would be extremely dear to fix. Basically it performs perfectly only a given set of tasks but without adaptability. Though it will be among the first to reach its destination, it does so with much more focus on style than on adaptability or practicality.

The Sanguine body is much like a 4×4. Most of the fun is straying off the road into the unknown only to come back messy and disoriented. Though it can very well get from point A to point B, its purpose it much more oriented toward non routine tasks, fun and adventure than to the goal in mind and certainly doesn’t want to stick to a boring route without having tried the various adventure tours first.

The Lymphatic body is much like a campervan. Never knowing what may lie ahead, all the resources are readily available for sleeping, eating, driving or camping. Because it weighs to carry all these resources, the campervan goes slow and steady along the road and must stay within regulated areas because of its size but will surely get to the destination with a certain degree of comfort while being ready to possible needs to camp out.

The Melancholic body is much like a bike. It would be the only mean of transportation (compared to the other 5) that has no power engine.  A trip might take a long time and result into a tiring experience but will give time to reflect, think and ponder on the surroundings. Also there will be no need for refueling.  It also means that the bike can be carried onto any other powered car and transported to another destination.  The biker will eventually reach its destination but will most likely do so very slowly and into a meditative state or with some kind of help from others.

Now that the body types have been illustrated, one can add the Persona types as drivers within the car. Imagine what a Bilious Persona would do with a Lymphatic Body? The Bilious driver would probably hate having to stay slowly on the road and follow the traffic laws and would tempt to speed, go off the road or in tight spaces only to have to stop to fix a broken engine or wheel.

What about a Sanguine Persona in a Nervous Body? The driver would most likely get easily distracted by social opportunities and would need to show off the car forgetting about the goal until the car gets aged and worn.

Once you get the hang of being able to identify Persona-types and Body-types, Profiling becomes a type of interweaved diagnosis. You can apply this to your self to understand what you natural abilities and limitations are or how you may optimize the use of the “mean of transportation” you were genetically given.

Understanding the Mind-Body Connection

For oriental medicines, organs are capable of responsiveness and the cells of which they are composed can be sensitive to specific emotional waves or states of being. Furthermore for traditional medicines all symptoms are a non-verbal communication expressed on the body in a specific area or system, in order to express an internal conflict or discomfort. In other words, everything we think and feel impacts our body in one way or another so that you can actually read the body to understand how a person thinks or feels. This is the origin of psycho-somatic disorders.

In traditional Chinese and oriental medicines organs are known to be associated to certain emotional conflicts. If a certain organ isn’t working properly, it may be an indication of a particular emotional state that should be addressed.

Though the science behind this can be quite complex, some simple examples include the following:

• The Kidneys can be affected by fear or shock
• The Spleen and Pancreas can be affected by worry or pensiveness
• The Liver can be affected by anger or frustration
• The Lungs can be affected by sadness or suppressed grief
• The Heart can be affected by excess excitement

Criticisms claim that because the brain is the main holder of short and long term memory, an extensive synaptic network would be required for other cells to tap into and preserve the same memories. However, Professor Wolfgand Prinz, of the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich Germany, believes that the digestive tract is an example of the body’s “second brain” capability. His research showed that the digestive tract is made up of about a 100 billion brain nerve cells. Similar findings have been found for the spinal cord. This research suggests that cells retain information on physical reactions to mental processes and release signals to influence later decisions. It may also explain how emotional reactions to events can be stored selectively in particular tissues or organs.

It appears clear that different states of mind and perspectives taken on different levels of consciousness affect our awareness, thoughts, feelings and actions. The human nervous system and neural networks have the capability to generate the phenomena of consciousness, the sense of ego and the capability to use complex symbolic communication. But neurons are not the only ones to communicate. All cells communicate in their way.

Applying the Holonomic Way

One of the sciences that can help us notice the effect of consciousness on matter is Quantum Physics . According to Quantum Physics the odd thing about quantum particles or entities is that they exist in waves of probability until we look at them. As soon as we make an observation of them, we can’t avoid affecting the system in such a way that their wave-forms collapse and they “choose” one state or another. It’s almost as if, as long as we’re not looking, everything is fluid and anything is possible. As soon as we decide to look, a probability is chosen as a fixed reality.

This fact is vital to comprehend because of the “co-creative” part we assume in the world we experience. This suggests that the state of the world is not independent of our observation, an idea that seems to defy modern mechanistic science at a very fundamental level.  Creation is imposed by our sheer presence even if it happens below our threshold of recognition.

From the point of view of a mental interaction with another human being, this point must be considered very carefully. For example a psychologist consulting a patient will partially influence the person he or she consults with the mere observation of the client or patient, especially if an opinion is formed.  The superimposition of one’s identity changes the existence of other people, even without our conscious will.

Just like energy can’t be seen but can be understood by its outcomes, the subconscious mind is essentially visible only through its effects. Electricity exists around us independently from the neural structures of the brain, and that quantum theory provides a sufficient explanation for the non-local yet powerful interaction of subatomic particles. Thought fields can function in a very similar way. Electrical phenomena exist in nature as well as in our neural networks and cells. Understanding their quality of this electrical pulse is the key to unlock the mysteries of the subconscious mind.

Thought fields provide “Gestalt” expressions (general ideas) of the subconscious in the form of simple events which are then rendered complex or “explained” through conscious brain activity. We might be inspired by an event in one second but we might need an entire book to explain that event. It is for this reason that we believe quantum collapse most likely generates consciousness but would add that the subconscious mind resonates sub-atomically with quantum probability. In other words, events within space and time create a response in our subconscious mind, but we are seldom aware (conscious) of it. The threshold of the conscious mind is much higher and needs much more than a flickering ephemeral moment to generate recognition.

Our “hidden” orientation is therefore produced subconsciously and it expresses through our attitude, feelings, desires and actions. Our subconscious Will communicates non-locally with the same language of “quantum probability” and influences the chance of events making certain outcomes more likely than others.

The subconscious mind is often basic in nature and processes data with relatively broad gestalts. It forms habitual thought tendencies like stereotypes and categories. Personal belief systems govern future experience because a belief works as a self-fulfilling prophecy and confirms expectations through our subjective observations of reality. On a quantum level, we therefore “promote” or co-create experiences that we accept as our models of belief. The subconscious output of energy stimulates the occurrence of events and therefore the input of confirming messages. When positive trends are present, enthusiasm or drive is generated; when negative trends are active, uncertainty causes bad feelings and hindrances are encountered. We therefore are left with a crucial choice: change our behaviour and occurrences to match our thoughts or change our thoughts to match our behaviour and occurrences.

The subconscious is rooted in cellular activity while the conscious neural network bases its functions on the notions acquired through one lifetime. A subconscious mind requires an orientation that is not necessarily based on our logic understanding. It is at this point that the concept of “Will” comes into play.

Using the reflections and accrued knowledge of the great philosophers, we can encompass a general understanding of the evolution of thought throughout recent history but it is indeed the understanding that we do create our recognition of the world and our belief that can push humanity forward in its achievement.

The real “contact” point between external reality and internal representation is the real aim of the Holonomics approach. Life as a reflection of what we are is the concept that should really be a portrait of magical thought at its pure form.