Tag: Unconsciousness

Unconscious Rules of Thumb

Unconscious Rules of Thumb

Posted on by jabittan
Some of the decisions that I make are based on thorough calculations, analysis, evaluation of available options, and deliberate considerations of costs and benefits. When I am planning my workout routine, I think hard about how my legs have been feeling and what distance, elevation, and pace is reasonable for my upcoming workouts. I think about how early I need to be out the door for a certain distance, and whether I can run someplace new to mix things up. I’ll map out routes, look at my training log for the last few weeks, and try putting together a plan that maximizes my enjoyment, physical health, and fitness given time constraints.

 

However, outside of running, most of my decisions are generally based on rules of thumb and don’t receive the same level of attention as my running plans. I budget every two weeks around payday, but even when budgeting, I mostly rely on rules of thumb. There is a certain amount I like to keep in my checking account just in case I forgot a bill or have something pop-up last minute. Its not a deliberate calculation, it is more of a gut feeling. The same goes for how much money I set aside for free spending or if I feel that it is finally time to get that thing I have had my eye on for a while. My budget is probably more important than my running routine, but I actually spend more time rationally developing a running plan than I spend budgeting. The same goes for house and vehicle maintenance, spending time with friends and family, and choosing what to eat on the days we plan to do take-out.

 

The budget example is interesting because I am consciously and deliberately using rules of thumb to determine how my wife and I will use our money. I set aside a certain amount for gas without going to each vehicle and checking whether we are going to need to fill up soon. I am aware of the rules of thumb, and they are literally built into my spreadsheet where I sometimes ask if I should deviate, but usually decide to stick to them.

 

I also recognize that I have many unconscious rules of thumb. In his book Risky Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer writes the following about unconscious rules of thumb:

 

“Every rule of thumb I am aware of can be used consciously and unconsciously. If it is used unconsciously, the resulting judgment is called intuitive. An intuition, or gut feeling, is a judgment:
  1. that appears quickly in consciousness,
  2. whose underlying reasons we are not fully aware of, yet
  3. is strong enough to act upon.”
I have lots of intuitive judgements that I often don’t think about in the moment, but only realize when I reflect back on how I do something. When I am driving down the freeway, cooking, or writing a blog post, many of my decisions flow naturally and quickly. In the moment the decisions seem obvious, and I don’t have to think too deliberately about my action and why I am making a specific decision. But if I were asked to explain why I made a decision, I would have a hard time finding exact reasons for my choices. I don’t know exactly how I know to change lanes at a certain point on the freeway, but I know I can often anticipate points where traffic will slow down, and where I might be better off in another lane. I can’t tell you why I chose to add the marsala wine to the mushrooms at the precise moment that I did. I also couldn’t explain why I chose to present a certain quote right at the beginning of a post rather than in the middle. My answer for all of these situations would simply be that it felt right.

 

We use unconscious rules of thumb like these all the time, but we don’t often notice when we do. When we are budgeting we might recognize our rules of thumb and be able to explain them, but our unconscious rules of thumb are harder to identify and explain. Nevertheless, they still have major impacts in our lives. Simply because we don’t notice them and can’t explain them doesn’t mean they don’t shape a lot of our decisions and don’t matter. The intuitions we have can be powerful and helpful, but they could also be wrong (maybe all this time I’ve been overcooking the mushrooms and should add the wine sooner!). Because these intuitions are unconscious, we don’t deliberately question them, unless something calls them up to the conscious level. The feedback we get is probably indirect, meaning that we won’t consciously tie our outcomes the to the unconscious rules of thumb that got us to them.

 

I am fascinated by things like unconscious rules of thumb because they reveal how little we actually control in our lives. We are the ones who act on these unconscious rules of thumb, but in a sense, we are not really doing anything at all. We are making decisions based on factors we don’t understand and might not be aware of. We have agency by being the one with the intuition, but we also lack agency by not being fully conscious of the how and why behind our own decisions. This should make us question ourselves and choices more than we typically do.
The Ideomotor Effect

Ideomotor Effect

Posted on by jabittan
I grew up playing basketball and one thing coaches always tell players is that they have to have confidence when they shoot the ball. If you shoot while thinking I hope I don’t miss, then you are going to miss. If you are worried about being yelled at for missing a shot and if you are afraid to miss, then your chances of actually making a shot are slim. At the same time, shooting with confidence, believing you are going to make the shot before you have even caught the ball, is going to make it more likely that you will score. Visualizing a perfect swish before you shoot, the wisdom of all my coaches said, and your swish will come true, but think about what might happen if you miss, and you are out of luck.

 

I don’t know how much I believed this during my playing days, but the idea was everywhere. There were certainly times I can still remember where I was afraid of missing a shot, only to miss the shot. I can remember a moment from my senior year, where I was wide open for a three on the left hand side. I knew I was going to shoot the ball before my teammate even passed it to me, and I knew I was going to make the shot. “Shoot it,” he said as he passed it to me – not that I needed any extra incentive – and of course, I swished the shot and nodded my head like I was LeBron James as I ran back down the court.

 

Research from Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow suggests that there really might be something to this shooting mindset. Kahneman writes about a study of college students who were asked to complete a word scramble and then walk down the hall to another room. When students were presented with words associated with the elderly, the average time it took them to get up from their chair and walk down the hallway to the next room was longer than it was for a control group who didn’t have word scrambles related to old people.

 

Kahneman writes, “The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

 

Simply thinking about old people made people move slower. Thoughts, even thoughts and ideas that people were not directly focused on, changed the way people behaved in the physical world. It is like listening to some pump-up music while pumping iron, but without deliberately setting up the environment to get you in the zone for the physical task. The ideomotor effect represents the connection between our mental state and our physical performance, and it appears that it can be conscious and intentional as well as subconscious and unknown.

 

So while it might seem like a bunch of superstition to believe that visualizing a swish versus fearing a missed basket will influence whether or not you make a shot, the ideomotor effect might actually make it a reality. My coaches probably hadn’t heard of the ideomotor effect or of a study of slow walking college students thinking about old people. Nevertheless, their intuition seems to have been correct, and my thoughts while shooting basketballs in high school may have played a big role in whether I made a shot or missed.
Unconscious Thought Theory

Unconscious Thought Theory

Posted on by jabittan
I like to think of myself as a pretty rational and empirical thinker. I try to understand points where my thoughts will be influenced by bias and my immediate reactions to situations. At these points, I try (not always successfully) to pause to be more reflective and considerate. I generally believe that striving for rationality and more evidence backed opinions is a good thing, but there is research which suggests that this strategy can lead to overthinking things and might involve parts of the brain which are not well suited for some decisions.

 

In Deep Work, author Cal Newport writes about Unconscious Thought Theory and research by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis (I have no pronunciation help here). Research from Dijksterhuis shows that our unconscious brains are good at handling situations with complex, ambiguous information and no clear path forward. Newport describes it by writing, “if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, perhaps even conflicting constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.”

 

The reason Newport brings this into his book Deep Work is because in addition to strict focus work, he also advocates for time away from work. “your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited,” Newport explains, “If you’re careful about your schedule … you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday.”

 

The implication is that we should step away from our work to give our conscious minds a break when we max out on our deep work capacity. Some tasks are not well suited for the hyper-analytic conscious mind, and some of these tasks can be worked through by the unconscious mind at a time when the brain doesn’t have to marshal all resources for deep analytical thinking. By stepping away from work, closing out of our work email, and engaging with other life hobbies and our families, we can allow our unconscious brain to sort through the challenging ambiguities of the problems that had previously stymied our work. Unconscious Thought Theory suggests that our unconscious brain can work on these problems if given space, but continuing to check work emails after hours or logging back in here and there to check on our work prevents the unconscious brain from having the space it needs to do the background sorting that makes it a valuable tool.

 

In the end, it is turning off our rational brain for a little while, allowing ourselves to engage with something or focus on something that doesn’t require such heightened focus, and knowing when to stop our deep work that helps us perform at our best. The answer is not to continuously chug through all the analytic work we can force onto our brain in a day, but to maximize the time we can spend in deep work, and turn ourselves off when we have hit our cognitive limit.

Nature Walks

Posted on by jabittan
Quite a while back, I wrote about a study that Richard Wiseman shared in his book 59 Seconds. Our minds are greatly shaped by cues in our environment, even if we are not consciously aware of any cues. In the example that Wiseman shares, people are shown to be more greedy and less friendly when sitting in front of a computer with a dollar sign as the wall paper, and are more likely to be cleaner and more orderly when there is a slight scent of cleaning fluid in the air. Our environment can shape how we think and what we do, to the point where we pick up on seemingly meaningless details around us that we don’t consciously pay attention to.

 

In the book When Dan Pink shares another example of this. Pink is all for breaks due to their restorative power. They help us by allowing our brains to pause, to focus on something different for a moment, and to get out of any mental ruts into which which we have settled. Even tiny breaks where you close your eyes for a few beats while sitting at your computer can be helpful, but in the words of Pink, “Outside beats inside.”

 

Pink references academic work showing the benefits of getting outside during the workday for quick breaks, “Nature breaks may replenish us the most. Being close to trees, plants, rivers, and streams is a powerful mental restorative, one whose potency most of us don’t appreciate. For example, people who take short walks outdoors return with better moods and greater replenishment than people who walk indoors.”

 

Being around living green life helps get us away from the selfish, unfriendly, competitiveness that our dollar-sign-focused work environments often foster. Walks might seem like they are just an excuse to get away from work for a little bit, but they can actually be a tool to do better work. Nature breaks provide our mind with new cues, possibly reminding us that we live in a vast interconnected world with more important things to consider than just our salary and whether we make more money than Sally. Incorporating more breaks that harness the power of nature to restore ourselves is something we should build into our schedules. Companies and organizations should think about the ways they can create a work space that encourages green breaks, and should consider the parts of town where their offices are located, to try to allow employees to get outside on breaks, and to be able to walk in more nature connected places than just parking lots. Our brains notice more than we sometimes realize, and we can use that reality to make ourselves feel better.

The Undisguised Consciousness

Posted on by jabittan
“The unreal disguise of consciousness serves only to emphasize to me the existence of the undisguised unconsciousness.” Fernando Pessoa wrote this in The Book of Disquiet as he reflected on the way that people thought about and moved through the world around him. What Pessoa noted is that we act and behave as though we are consciously making decisions and guiding our lives while in reality we are often driven by unconscious forces that we are not aware of. For Pessoa, life was an every day struggle. He did not live in desolate poverty or have anything particular terrible happening in his life, but was cognizant of the stories people told about their lives and existence, and he could not bring himself to believe any particular story.

 

It seems like most people, most of the time, are not actually that considerate of the world around them. If we all were more considerate, capitalism would not be elevated in the United States to a quasi-religious stance. We would be able to take action on climate change. We probably would spend less time watching what celebrities were doing, and more time participating in a sport rather than watching and talking about other people playing a sport.

 

“Occasional hints that they might be deluding themselves–that and only that is what most men experience.”

 

I have been thinking about consciousness and our experiences quite a bit lately. In Considerations, Colin Wright encouraged us to think more deeply about world, and to see things beyond our initial reaction. Rob Reid has talked to guests in his podcast After On about the reality that our brains don’t sense the world as fully as they potentially could. There are senses we just don’t have that we observe in other living creatures. And in The Elephant in the Brain Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson discuss ways in which being deluded about reality can be an evolutionary advantage for us.

 

Most people that I meet don’t seem to be interested in thinking beyond their initial reaction to the world. Most people don’t really seem to consider the fact that they have a narrow band of senses through which they can experience the world. And most people don’t seem to be interested in the idea that we evolved to have an inaccurate picture of the universe because it helped us be socially deceptive. But I think it is powerful and important that we recognize how much is going on beyond the recognition of our conscious self. We should strive to have a full existence that helps encourage flourishing for others as well as for ourselves. We should strive to see reality for what it is, and cut through the stories we tell ourselves or that others tell for us. The more considerate we are, the more we can open others to the same reality, and hopefully start to counteract the unconscious immediacy of our reactions to the world which is encouraged by social media and indeed by our brains’ very nature.

Building Habits

Posted on by jabittan
In my last post, I described the ways in which much of our life happens on auto-pilot in habitual decisions and actions that often don’t register with our conscious mind. Not everything we do needs to be a conscious action (think about how tired your brain would become if you had to focus on every step you took and how annoyed you would be if you had to think about every blink), but becoming more aware of our unconscious decisions is incredibly valuable for making changes in life. Michael Bungay Stanier looks at the ways we can actually change our habits in his book The Coaching Habit and he identifies five specific components to changing behavior. He writes, “To build an effective new habit, you need five essential components: a reason, a trigger, a micro-habit, effective practice, and a plan.”

 

If we think about our habitual actions that we barely notice, we can see that we will never actually change those habits if we don’t first build self-awareness around our actions and behaviors. It is not enough to just think to ourselves that we want to write more, exercise more, or have a more tidy home. We have to actually recognize what habits are shaping the end state that we want to change. We have to have awareness of a problem, issue, or what could be different, and then we have to dive deeper to understand what it is that causes to the thing we want to change. It all begins and is shaped by a self-awareness that is like pancake batter poured in a single spot. You focus on one thing but your awareness and recognition slowly spreads outward around that one thing.

 

Changing a habitual action requires a reason to change. You may recognize that your house is messy and that it stresses you out. From there you have to recognize something that leads you into the original habit that you want to change. Do you automatically roll out of bed and grab your phone as a flashlight and then find yourself checking emails or Facebook for 30 minutes instead of making your coffee? What can you do to prevent yourself from grabbing your phone? For me, purchasing a flashlight allows me to leave my phone in another room, helping me keep away from habitual morning distraction. This solution is somewhere between a micro-habit and an environmental modification to try to replace the trigger (my phone) that lads to the habit I want to avoid (wasting time online). An important step toward change might be small and may not even seem related to your original habit, but can still shape your behavior in a powerful way. Thinking through these changes and building this awareness is what allows you to create a plan to actually make the changes you want to make.

 

This is a very quick and simplified version of changing a habit, but throughout, you can see the importance of self-awareness in making changes in your life. Habits stick because they go unnoticed. We don’t recognize what it is that drives our unconscious habitual decisions, so we end up with the same habits shaping our same behaviors and actions. We must be aware enough to recognize the change we want, what leads to the behaviors we want to avoid, and think through our actions to plan ahead.

Reacting to Invisible Forces

Posted on by jabittan
In a letter written to James Harmon to be published in his book, Take My Advice, writer John Shirley writes, “What if we’re a lot more unconscious than we know?  What if, even when we think we’ve got everything worked out and planned out, we’re actually, in certain ways, just reacting to things?”  In this quote Shirley hits on the idea of being present in the moment without directly stating it.  His quote talks about how much of the world is hidden from us and impacting our decisions, and how much is influencing us without our knowledge.  When we begin to work on being present in the moment, we become more aware of what shapes the decisions we make.
I recently read Grant Korgan’s book, Two Feet Back, in which he describes his recovery following a spinal cord injury.  What Korgan explains is that his injury gave him the chance to pause his goals, plans, and desires while he worked towards regaining feeling in the lower half of his body.  He explained that he went from being someone who tried to plan every part of his day and life, to someone who had to enjoy the simplicity and spontaneity of each moment.  His injury taught him the importance of being present in all that you do.
I think that Shirley’s quote speaks to the same understanding of presence that Korgan came to understand.  When we focus and plan each detail of our lives, we spend a huge amount of energy and effort in a single direction, and we are then not aware of the little things that sway and move us away from that direction.  When we focus on presence, we begin to understand what forces are trying to shape our coarse, and we can be more responsive to those events.  These forces that we may not be consciously aware of may push us towards our goal, though possibly towards our goal in what seems like a less direct path, or they may push us to new goals that ultimately align better with who we are.  Gaining presence helps us identify our emotions and reactions, and helps us understand our place relative to others.