Hack81.Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind


Hack 81. Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind

Just because you're not thinking of something doesn't mean it isn't there just waiting to pop into your mind. How recently you last thought of it, and whether you've thought of anything related to it, affects how close to the surface an idea is.

Things aren't just in your thoughts or out of them. It seems as if some things are nearer the surface while others are completely in the dark, tucked deep down in your mind.

The things near the surface jump out into the light without much prompting; they connect to other things you're thinking about, volunteer themselves for active duty in your cognitive processes, so to speak. This isn't always a good thing, as anyone who has tried to put an upcoming exam or interview out of mind will attest.

So what affects how deeply submerged mental items are? It probably wouldn't surprise you to hear that how recently something was last used is one of the key variables. Association is another factor: activating a mental item brings related items closer to the surface. Not always right to the surface, into conscious awareness, but closer at least, so that if you later reach for the general concept of the related item, the specific one will be more easily at hand. Psychologists use measures of the pre-preparedness of mental items to get a handle on the limitations of perception and on the associations between different concepts that your mind has absorbed.

9.2.1. In Action

We found this amusing when we were at school, so maybe you'll get the best results if you pick one of your more childish friends to try it out. For dramatic effect, claim beforehandas we used tothat you can read your friend's mind. Then, ask her the following questions in quick succession:

  1. What is 5 + 1?

  2. What is 3 + 3?

  3. What is 2 + 4?

  4. What is 1 + 5?

  5. What is 4 + 2?

  6. What is the first vegetable you can think of?

Most people, most of the time, say "carrot."1

Here's something similar. Like the carrot game, it works best if you can get the person answering the question to hurry.

Tell her to say "milk" 20 times as quickly as she can, and then, just as she finishes, snap the question, "What do cows drink?" at her. If you've caught her off guard, she'll say "milk," even though the answer is truly "water."2

9.2.2. How It Works

Both of these examples take advantage of the principle that thingswords, in this caseare not all equally accessible to consciousness. Some throw themselves into the limelight of awareness, while others are more reluctant to step forward.

Carrot is pretty much at the front of our minds when the topic is vegetables (especially after a bunch of arithmetic questions have flushed out other thoughts). With the cow question, saying "milk" 20 times puts that word right at the front of our mind, so much so that it gets out before we correctly parse the question.

This is all well and good if you want to know that a carrot is most people's prototypical vegetable or that they can be easily flustered if you get them to do something ridiculous like say "milk" 20 times.

But there is a valuable tool here for experimental psychologists as well. Encountering a word brings it forward in your mind. If you've heard a word a short while before, you are quicker to recognize it, quicker to make decisions about it, and more likely to volunteer it as an answer. You don't have to use just wordspictures and sounds too are more easily recognized after prior exposure.

The interesting thing is that these effectscalled primingpersist after people have consciously forgotten that they have seen the item or even if they weren't aware of seeing the word at all [Hack #82] . The automatic nature of this effect allows cognitive psychologists to use it in a variety of tests to check whether people have been able to perceive material that they either weren't aware of at the time or have forgotten seeing. Psychologists call this kind of memory, which is revealed by performance rather than by explicit recall, implicit memory.

It has also become clear that things that are linked in your mind are primed by exposure to related things. So if you show someone the word "doctor," he finds it easier to subsequently detect the word "nurse" if the word appears covered by TV snow (the visual equivalent of white noise). Or if you show someone the word "red," he is more likely to complete a word stem like gr___ with the word "green." If you show him the word "wine," he is more likely to complete with the word "grape." Both are valid answers, but the likelihood of one or the other being the first that comes to mind is affected by what other items have been primed in the mind.

We can think of all mental items being connected in a web of semantic units. When you see an item, it becomes activated, so that for a short while it is easier for it to reach a threshold of activity that pushes it into consciousness or allows you to recognize it. Activity can spread between related items in the web; sometimes this activity can influence your behavior in interesting ways [Hack #100] .

9.2.3. In Real Life

Primed concepts hover just below conscious thought, ready to pop out at a moment's notice. It is probably this priming that underlies the phenomenon in which, having learned a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The word is near the front of your mind and so all the times you would have otherwise ignored it become times when you now notice it. And when you're hungry, everything reminds you of food.

My friend Jon used to play a trick on his girlfriend that uses priming and the fact that if you say something to a sleeping person she registers it without noticing that she has. He'd wait until she was asleep and then say a single word to her, like "kangaroo" or "tofu." A minute later, he'd wake her up and ask her what she was dreaming about. Often the word, or something related, would be incorporated into whatever she was dreaming about.

T.S.

Priming happens all the time; we're constantly noticing new things, bringing stuff to mind, and making associations. The interesting thing is that it is a two-way process, and one we underestimate. No one is surprised that the things we notice affect what we think of. Less often people account for the things we're thinking of affecting what we notice. More subtly, that which we noticed, even briefly and then forgot, influences both what we think and what we notice in the future. It feels like the same "you" who walks down the street every day, but what catches your eye and what occupies your mind are going to be different, in part, based on your TV viewing the night before, whether you're thinking about TV or not. It's not an intuitive thing to be able to account for, but it's part of the constant sifting and sorting of mental items that makes up our mental life.

9.2.4. End Notes

  1. New Scientist's "Last Word" column on "Carrot Brains" (http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw613).

  2. Apart from baby cows, which might actually get milk, and cows in factory farms that probably drink some sort of antibiotically-enhanced nutrient-rich steroid-laden power juice.



    Mind Hacks. Tips and Tools for Using Your Brain
    Mind Hacks. Tips and Tools for Using Your Brain
    ISBN: 596007795
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2004
    Pages: 159

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