Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow, 2012 – The subject straddles neuroscience, anthropology, psychology and behavioral economics but all those made-up boundaries dissolve when good writers like this effortless move between them. Bought this immediately after reading ‘The Drunkard’s Walk’ couple of years back which I loved and I was not let down.

My notes –

• We all possess a rich and active unconscious life that influences our conscious thoughts and feelings

• The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing – Blaise Pascal

• Our conscious mind is superimposed onto the unconscious and how much of a decision can be attributed to each is hard to discern

• Therapy focuses on self-reflection and it can never reveal the parts of the brain not open to the conscious mind

• The idea that we are not aware of a lot of our decisions can be hard to digest

• When it comes to understanding our feelings we have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence

• We are good at rationalizing unconscious decisions with good justifications (job taken for the prestige of position, but justified as done for greater challenge)

• When given good/bad popcorn in large/small size combinations, people consumed based on container size and not just taste (the woody allen joke of elderly women in a restaurant – one says “food at this place is terrible” and another adds “yes, and its such small portions” makes sense now)

• Package design, portion size and menu descriptions (lyrical description of same food got higher ratings) unconsciously influence us

• Fluency effect – If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, it affects the judgements about the substance (All form of writing is thinking – simpler forms work)

• We judge books by their covers, products by their boxes and corp. by the glossiness of their ARs subconsciously (Dress up well, if you have something to sell)

• Wine shopping – what was chosen between french (77%) and german (73%) wine was decided by the music playing in the shop (yet only 1 in 7 thought the music influenced them)

• Wine tasting – blind tasting shows no correlation between cost and taste while knowing brand/vintage has high correlation (you are tasting the price!)

• VMPC – ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is the seat for warm, fuzzy feelings (also brain’s brand appreciation module). Our brains are not recording taste or experience, they are creating it

• Smallest difference you’d be able to detect is proportional to reference weight – when comparing 6grams and 5 grams, you can make out diff of 1 gram but if ref is 10x greater, your min. detection also goes up 10x. (Happens in information too – high contrast vs low contrast changes)

• Unconscious and conscious railways of the mind are densely interconnected and path a thought to took, hard to decipher

• Blindsight – visual cortex destroyed but intact optical system – individual can see without seeing (can navigate room filled with obstacles unconsciously)

• Binocular rivalry – If two diff images are presented to our eyes separately, it sees only one of the two. When one changes and another doesn’t, it sees the changing one only

• Unconscious mind is actively involved in shaping our memory (not just our perception)

• When expectations, beliefs and prior knowledge are odds with actual events, our brains can be fooled

• People have good memory for general gist of things but a poor one for details. When pressed though, their brain will make up missing details (and they will end up believing their unconscious lies)

• We have traded perfect recall for an ability to process vast quantities of information (People with great memories can be poor synthesizers)

• False memories are easy to plant. Our brain over time can misinterpret imagined situations as actual memories, having forgotten the source

• Humans place high value on kindness. Being nice can be its own reward. We are naturally attracted to the kind and repelled by the unkind

• Pain of social rejection can be as “painful” as physical pain. Fact that Tylenol works on both shows psychological pain and physiological one are related

• Within a span of just few millennia people starting fishing, hunting large animals – this must have evolved with a mutation that allowed for social interactions

• Theory of mind – Our remarkable ability to predict future behavior of people based on their past actions (theorizing unconsciously)

• First order intentional – Capability to reflect on own state of mind, own beliefs and desires. Second-order intentional – A form of belief about someone else’s state of mind (I believe my son wants to play). Both are very essential for human-beings

• Third-order intentional – Reasoning about what a person thinks a second-person thinks (I believe my father thinks his son wants to play)

• Fourth-order intentionality is required to create literature (The cues in this scene will signal the reader that Horace thinks that Mary intends to dump him). Most essential for politicians and businessmen who can be outmaneuvered without this skill

• Human normally engage in 3rd (empathy for eg.) and 4th order intentionality (narrating) and are said to be capable of sixth-order

• Theory of mind (ToM) is essential for social connection and requires extraordinary brain power – hence social group sizes correlate with brain sizes (gorillas with groups of 10, spider monkeys 20, macaques 40 – reflects neocortex-to-whole-brain ratio)

• Humans relate to one another in many different types of groups, with different sizes, different levels of mutual understanding and different degrees of bonding

• Oxytocin and Vasopressin – modulation of social and reproductive behavior in mammals including us. Oxytocin is even released during hugs, especially in women where even casual touch leads to feelings of emotional closeness. Oxytocin promotes trust and positive social contact between people (There are oxytocin sprays available on the internet :-))

• Men with fewer Vasopressin receptors are twice as likely to have experienced marital problems or threat of divorce (Promiscuity)

• Many of our daily actions proceed according to predefined mental “scripts” that they are in fact mindless

• We communicate our expectations to others (whether or not we wish to) and they often respond by fulfilling those expectations. Teachers expectations greatly affect their students academic performance. Labeling children as gifted or as a poor-learner proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (As parents, its important to give our children the gift of positive affirmation as they tend to start believing it)

• Wearing a rolex or driving a lamborghini are modern signaling versions of the chest-thumping baboon. Wearing a non-designer shirt and jeans can also be a show of affluence (by declining to show it)

• Visual dominance ratio – Percentage of time spent looking into someone’s eyes while you are speaking divided by percent spent looking at the same person’s eyes while you are listening. Near 1.0 for people with higher social dominance. Around 0.6 – you are being bossed

• Non-verbal communication – body movements (facial expression, gestures, posture and eye movements), paralanguage (number of duration of pauses, quality of voice and pitch, cadence in speech) and proxemics (use of personal space) decide how convincing you are

• Non-verbal ability plays a significant role in perception of a person’s warmth, credibility and persuasive power. A little speedup makes you sound smarter and more convincing (salesmen do this)

• Faster and louder speech with fewer pauses and great variation in volume, that speaker will be judged to be more energetic, knowledgeable and intelligent

• Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume with minimum noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances impression of intelligence (Margaret Thatcher did this, as did Elizabeth Holmes who successfully scammed a lot of people)

• There’s a road from the eye to the heart and it does not go through the intellect – Chesterton

• Though we may pack out heads full of 21st century knowledge, what’s inside our skulls still belongs to the stone age

• Categorization is a strategy our brains use to improve processing efficiency. Downside – We may perceive those within the same group to be more similar than they are. Merely placing an object in a group can affect our judgement of it

• Putting ourselves in in-groups and out-groups affects our perception of our place in the world and how we view others. We put ourselves in lot of in-groups based on occupation, education, gender etc. and it decides who we are and what we do (hence i’ve consciously dissociated any and all identify last few years)

• If you ask people to estimate temperature between June 1 and June 30, they will underestimate it but June 15 and July 15, they will overestimate it

• Messages that condemn you from doing something invites counterproductive results. (”If you don’t study, you will become an idiot” might be taken as “You are an idiot” subconsciously)

• Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us – Oliver Sacks

• We don’t tremble because we’re angry or cry because we feel sad – we are aware of feeling angry because we tremble and we feel sad because we cry (smiling can make us happy)

• “must seek meaning, must make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness” – Oliver Sacks

• Confabulation – Replace of a gap in one’s memory with a falsification one believes to be true

• Scientists looks for evidence and form theories. Attorneys look for evidence that fit theories. Human mind is designed to be both (Brain is a decent scientist but an outstanding lawyer)

• We choose our friends, lovers and spouses not just by the way we perceive them but by the way they perceive us

• It is rational to bet on a horse you believe is fastest but it doesn’t make sense to believe a horse is fastest because you bet on it

• You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards, so you have trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future – Steve Jobs (Belief or holding positive illusions about ourselves to veer off the beaten path needs confidence to follow your heart believing the dots will connect)

Some books are so good at delivery that we mistake simplicity for them being trite. This is one such, that until I sat down to summarize I felt I hadn’t picked much new from the book but that’s because what I had picked were already such an integral part of me and there in lies the magic of a great book. 10/10