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The Hidden Brain Rating: 7 on a scale of 10 Review This is a fun well written book. Mr. Vedantam is a Washington Post columnist and writer. I would give him high praise for telling stories well. For me this was the most fun part of the book. This is a psychology/science based discussion put in terms and stories that anyone can comprehend. I believe his discussion on the creation of terrorists was very enlightening and should be read by everyone. He presents a point of view that there is an unconscious brain working off a sort of default set of properties designed by evolution to be protective for humans. Unfortunately, this sort of underlying autopilot mode can result in a variety of unsuspected conflicts with the conscious brain. It becomes important to work out the conflicts between these two modes of operation, one innate and the other learned through life experiences, training and education. He makes very limited references to any of the folks who studied the unconscious historically such as Freud or Jung. He seems to have no understanding or knowledge of their theories or ideas as they relate to the unconscious. He has chosen to focus on revealing a variety of recent science based experiments and their relationship to a variety of interesting issues regarding unconscious brain function. This is more of a collection of interesting ideas about the unconscious brain with little attempt to suggest any unifying theory of its function beyond its benefit to the organism for survival. He begins by talking about how the conscious and unconscious brain differ. The conscious brain excels at novelty and working through new situations, while the unconscious brain excels at heuristic processes, things that have been worked out through repetitious learning or experience. Sometimes the unconscious brain's rules get applied to situations to which the rules do not apply thus creating conflict. He suggests the hidden brain is more able to "jump" to conclusions, more capable of intuition, it sacrifices speed for accuracy compared to the conscious brain. He discusses our propensity to see things we are unaware that we see. He goes through experiments regarding how we are influenced by pictures and words without being aware of it consciously. The unconscious brain of one person can talk to the unconscious brain of another person and get a reply. He illustrate with a couple of type A researchers and discusses the need for complementarity in relationships. There is a chapter on fronto-temporal dementia he uses to describe what happens when people stop caring about their loss of various mental abilities. There is a chapter regarding our proclivity to assign positive attributes to white faces and negative attributes to non-white faces. This was a truly fascinating chapter with a good discussion of the research involved. He reinforces the idea that the unconscious brain likes to adapt to the world quickly and form simple rules for making decisions. The unconscious brain learns to make rapid associations. White people and faces seem to have the advantage in the language of the hidden brain. Children of color find the white faces seem more trustworthy than black faces. Gay people and straight people can harbor the same biases about gay people. While we are learning things with our conscious brain our unconscious brain learns some things very different. We believe our conscious brain is all that matters, but this is not the case, the unconscious brain is equally as important, but much more difficult to influence directly. The gradual ongoing process of identity formation in children leads naturally to outcomes we reject in our conscious minds. Racial, sexual, and cultural identities are just a short list of the ways we all begin to develop identities as we reach the teen years. He makes a bold hypothesis that there is "nothing to suggest that race has to be one of the dimensions children use to define themselves". He believes we may be able to "co-opt" the unconscious brain into serving tolerance, but he offers no data to support this. The whole point of the data he presents is that it is very hard to overcome the unconscious associations. I feel like he could benefit greatly from considering some Jungian ideas about the unconscious that might explain these issues more thoroughly. He spends a chapter on telling about wage discrimination and how we have unconscious stereotypes that experience conflict when women are in leadership roles. He talks about some folks who transition from being male to female and from female to male surgically and discusses the issues they experienced. This was all very interesting, but I found it lacking once again. He fails to consider personality type and its relationship to the mythic feminine and male personality characteristics. Since he seems to have no background in this realm he is missing a very robust way of understanding these situations more completely. He believes there are unconscious biases which influence us, but his explanations seem lacking in my experience. Transgendered folks can give us limited insight but not the depth we need to understand these experiences more completely. It is in the bringing together of masculine and feminine qualities that we will find our greatest benefit and strength, but he sort of misses all these possibilities. He spends a chapter on our unconscious responses to disaster. This is probably a chapter we should all read and consider. His key point to me seemed to be that being in a group diminishes autonomy, which can result in poor decision making to say the least. We easily give up our decision making to the power of the group. In a crisis, groups "impose conformity on individuals" as we assume a pack mentality. It is simply a defensive maneuver vital to us all when we face an overwhelming threat or force. When the lions are chasing us we really don't like to be eaten. Acting as a pack can be very helpful. Unfortunately, this can simply be a function of the unconscious brain and may lead to success or failure when you are consciously overwhelmed. The conscious brain must balance the unconscious brain. The unconscious brain must backup the conscious brain. In my experience, I am alive because of the incredible ability of my unconscious brain to take over in some rather frightening moments in my life. On the other hand I once made an incredible mistake in a training situation involving gun play because I trusted my instinct. Training can overcome instinct, but you need both. I very much enjoyed chapter 7 that deals with the creation of terrorists, another chapter we should all read and take to heart. He illustrates this using a story about folks from the "Jonestown massacre ". He characterizes the creation of suicide terrorists as the unconscious brain's "drive for approval and meaning", which is supported by the approval of a small group, often in isolation. They are supported by the drive to be part of something bigger than themselves. Once again, we hear the echoes of psychological type theory. About one third of the worlds people have a personality style that longs for just this state of affairs, to be part of something bigger than themselves. This very quality is part and parcel of who we are as Americans. It is common everywhere about us in this culture. We see it everyday on a thousand different TV ads. But, how does it play out in cultures where the social style of the culture is not masculine, but feminine? He never addresses such a question, but I wish he would. In cultures where the primary culture is more feminine in character the very masculine elements may have to go "underground", be hidden, to result in just what we see forming in the world. He talks about the tunnel, and I like the metaphor, but he does not take it far enough. He spends a chapter talking about injustice in our judicial system. This seems like a particularly pernicious area of unconscious effects. He spends a chapter talking about politics and the unconscious brain, another area of fascination to me. His review of the 2008 Obama campaign at critical moments seems very astute. He talks about how we make associations quickly with our unconscious brain that simply are incorrect. This can certainly be the case, but at times the unconscious brain makes these associations and allows us to act quickly when our conscious brain remains puzzled in a crisis. In the last chapter he discusses our response to the suffering of an individual verses the suffering of thousands and millions of people. Somehow we seem to be wired to care more for an individual than a population. This does not seem to surprising to me. Our immediate survival is much more likely to depend on what we do as a family than what happens to a vast area or country. He says our unconscious brain is not able to understand the difference between a single death and a million deaths. I understand what he saying, but I'm not sure I agree completely. I believe some of us actually can, but I will confess, I am probably not one of those people. This is a good book. It is a brief look at our unconscious side. It attempts to improve our consciousness regarding the unique character of the unconscious part of ourselves. It is certainly not a thorough review of our unconscious selves, but is a pleasing read that could lead to a lot of interesting discussions. All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2010 |
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