DESARROLLO DE LA PROPUESTA

On this much the old Freudians and new cognitive scientists agree: the mind is buzzing with influential happenings that are not reportably conscious. ‘‘Deep cognitive activation’’ is how psychol- ogists Daniel Wegner and Laura Smart describe this subterranean world. The presumption of an unconscious mind has long had a cred- ibility problem, however. How can we provide evidence for what we cannot report?

Freud’s after-the-fact explanations of how unconscious dynamics explain one person’s smoking, another’s fear of horses, and another’s sexual orientation fail to satisfy. If you feel angry over your mother’s death, you illustrate the theory because ‘‘your unresolved childhood dependency needs are threatened.’’ If you do not feel angry, you again illustrate the theory because ‘‘you are repressing your anger.’’ As C. S. Lewis observed, ‘‘We are arguing like a man who should say, ‘If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.’ ’’ After-the-fact interpretation is appropriate for some histor- ical and literary scholars, which helps explain Freud’s lingering influ- ence on literary criticism. But in science as in horse racing, bets must be placed before the race is run.

Might our dreams, or how we project ourselves into Rorschach inkblots, provide a sort of psychological X-ray, a view beneath our mind’s surface? (Freud called dreams ‘‘the royal road to the uncon- scious.’’) Critics say that it is time to wake up from Freud’s dream theory, which he regarded as the most valuable of his discoveries but which actually is one of his greatest failures, with no proof that dreams express discernible unconscious wishes. Dream interpreta- tion, the critics say, is a nightmare. Even Freud allegedly granted that ‘‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’’

The much-cherished and oft-reviled Rorschach aims to reveal our unconscious feelings and conflicts. But researcher Lee Sechrest and

his colleagues offer the ‘‘almost universal agreement among the sci- entific community’’ that the test lacks validity (and is ‘‘not empirically supported,’’ as another set of experts recently concluded). Carnegie- Mellon University psychologist Robyn Dawes is blunter: ‘‘If a profes- sional psychologist is ‘evaluating’ you in a situation in which you are at risk and asks you for responses to ink blots . . . walk out of that psychologist’s office.’’

If the old psychoanalytic methods don’t reliably reveal the uncon- scious mind’s workings, the new cognitive science does. Consider, first, our capacity for divided attention. You surely are aware that your conscious attention is selective. It’s in but one place at a time. If you doubt this, try (assuming you are right-handed) moving your right foot in a smooth counterclockwise circle while writing the num- ber 3 repeatedly with your right hand. You can easily do either—but not at the same time. Or if you are musically trained, try tapping a steady three beats to the measure with your left hand while tapping four times with your right hand. Unless they become automatic with practice, such tasks require conscious attention, which can be in only one place at a time. Consciousness focuses us. If time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, then consciousness is nature’s way of keeping us from thinking everything at once.

Perceptions, too, come to us moment by moment, one perception being lifted from our mind’s magic slate as the next appears. Because conscious attention is selective, we see the familiar reversible figure only one way at a time, before the perception flits away and the alternate replaces it.

Likewise, while reading this sentence you have been unaware of the pressure of the seat below, of your shoes pressing against your feet, or of your nose in your line of vision. But there they are (where did that nose come from?). At a cocktail party (or in a ‘‘dichotic listening’’ experiment in which headphones play separate messages to each ear) you can attend to one conversation or another. You can even bounce between two. But if you’re paying attention to one, you won’t perceive what is said in the other. Whatever has your attention has your undivided attention (which is why, for most of us, driving in Manhattan is best not done while talking on a cell phone).

But now things get really interesting, for it turns out that we can, nevertheless, process and be influenced by unattended information. Let someone from that hubbub of unattended party noise speak your name and instantly your attention shifts. You weren’t listening to that speaker, but the downstairs laborers watching the radar screens no- ticed the blip—a signal amid the noise—and instantly alerted your mental CEO. In a dichotic listening experiment they will do the same when detecting an emotion-arousing word, such as one previously associated with electric shock. Likewise, in a ‘‘dichoptic viewing’’ experiment—with differing images seen by the two eyes—only one will be visible to you, though your brain’s radar technicians will do a rudimentary scan of the other for any important information. Ergo, you are, right now, processing much information outside your aware- ness.

Or imagine yourself in this experiment, by social psychologist William Wilson. Through headphones, you listen to a prose passage played in one ear and repeat its words to check them against a written transcript. Because the task requires total attention, you pay no atten- tion to some simple, novel tunes played in your other ear. The tunes are not subliminal. You could hear them, much as you can feel your shoes. But you are so unnoticing that when the experimenter later intersperses these tunes among new ones, you do not remember hav- ing heard them before. Although moments before you had been an earwitness, you cannot pick them out of the musical lineup. Never- theless, when asked to rate how much you like each tune, you find yourself preferring the ones previously played. Your preferences re- veal what your conscious memory cannot.

One clever experiment by Larry Jacoby and his colleagues piped unfamiliar names such as Adrian Marr and Sebastian Weisdorf into the unattended ear while people monitored strings of numbers piped into the attended ear. Afterward, the participants usually couldn’t pick these names out of a lineup of unheard names. Yet they more often rated them as famous! By dividing attention and ‘‘making names famous without their being recognized,’’ the researchers suc- cessfully demonstrated unconscious memory.

Or imagine, in another experiment, hearing in one ear an ambig- uous statement such as ‘‘We stood by the bank.’’ When a pertinent word (river or money) is simultaneously sent to your unattended ear, you don’t consciously hear it. Yet the word ‘‘primes’’ your interpreta- tion of the sentence. Priming experiments reveal how one thought, even outside of awareness, influences another thought or action. Priming is the awakening of associations. In yet another experiment, people asked to complete a sentence containing words like old, wise, and retired afterward walked more slowly to the elevator than those not primed—and without any awareness of walking slowly or of the high frequency of words related to aging.

The experiments have their counterparts in everyday life: ≤ Watching a scary movie alone at home can prime our thinking,

activating emotions that cause us to interpret furnace noises as those of an intruder.

≤ For many psychology students, reading about psychological disorders primes how they interpret their own anxieties and gloomy moods. Reading about disease symptoms similarly primes medical students to worry about their congestion, fever, or headache.

≤ Ask people to pronounce the word spelled by S-H-O-P and then ask them (or ask yourself) what they do when they come to a green light. Many will answer ‘‘stop,’’ and then will sheepishly grin when realizing their priming-induced error.

The take-home lesson: Although perception requires attention, unat- tended stimuli can subtly affect us. Moreover, implanted ideas and images can automatically—unintentionally, effortlessly, and without awareness—prime how we interpret and recall events.

In a host of new studies, the effects of priming surface even when the stimuli are presented subliminally—too briefly to be perceived. What’s out of sight need not be out of mind. An electric shock, too slight to be felt, increases the perceived intensity of a later shock. An imperceptibly flashed word, bread, primes people to detect a related word, such as butter, more quickly than bottle or bubble. A subliminal color name facilitates speedier identification when the color itself appears on a computer screen, while an unseen wrong name delays color identification. In each case, an invisible image or word primes a response to a later question.

Picture yourself in yet another experiment, by Moshe Bar and Irv- ing Biederman. If you are like their University of Southern California students, the chances are less than 1 in 7 that you could name a simple image (such as a hammer) after its presentation for 47 milliseconds. But what if you witness the image again in the same position as much as 15 minutes later and after intervening presentations of other im- ages? The chances of your naming the hammer would now be better than 1 in 3. It is as if the second presentation, combined with the first presentation, sufficiently awakens the brain for some awareness.

The variety and subtlety of unnoticed influences is impressive:

≤ One experiment subliminally flashed emotionally positive scenes (such as kittens or a romantic couple) or negative scenes (such as a werewolf or a dead body) an instant before partici- pants viewed slides of people. Although the participants con- sciously perceived only a flash of light, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been associated with the positive scenes. People somehow looked nicer if their photo im- mediately followed unperceived kittens rather than an unper- ceived werewolf.

≤ Chinese characters, too, seem to imply something nicer if pre- ceded by a flashed but unperceived smiling face rather than a scowling face.

≤ Graduate students evaluate their research ideas more nega- tively shortly after viewing the unperceived scowling face of their adviser—as if a sense of the adviser’s disapproval was lurk- ing in the unconscious mind.

≤ When shown subliminal pictures of spiders and then subjected to electric shocks, some students—those good at guessing their heart rates—could predict the impending shock. Although they never consciously saw the spider, these in-tune-with-their-body students had a gut feeling.

The striking and unavoidable conclusion: Sometimes we intuitively

feel what we do not know we know.

The subliminal influence experiments further support the reality of unconscious information processing. Do the experiments also sup- port the entrepreneurial claims of subliminal advertising and self- improvement tapes? Can ‘‘hidden persuasion’’ trespass on our minds? The research consensus is no. Although the hucksters claim that sub- liminal messages have a powerful, enduring effect on behavior, lab studies reveal but a subtle, fleeting effect on thinking and feeling. Moreover, experiments show that commercial subliminal tapes have no effect beyond that of a placebo—the effect of one’s belief in them. Anthony Greenwald, a University of Washington psychologist who has conducted many studies of subliminal priming, conducted six- teen experiments with self-help tapes. His results were uniform: not one had any therapeutic effect. For example, students given a tape with subliminal messages aimed at improving their memory felt as though their memory was improving. But so did students who

thought they were listening to the memory tape but who actually

were given a self-esteem boosting tape. Likewise, students who thought they were getting subliminal self-esteem boosting messages perceived themselves receiving the benefits they expected. But tests administered before and after the therapy revealed that neither tape had any effect on self-esteem or memory.

As we will see again and again, such experiments are the scientific tool for sifting reality from fantasy, the facts of life from wishful thinking, bizarre ideas from those bizarre-sounding but true. Who would have guessed how the brain separates and then integrates the subroutines of vision. ‘‘Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent,’’ Sherlock Holmes rightly said in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet. To winnow the strange but

true ideas from the make-believe, science offers a simple procedure: test them.