Book Report: The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedadtam (C)2010

The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam (C)2010

Background Information: From his Wiki page: "Vedantam was a participant in the 2002–2003 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, the 2003–2004 World Health Organization Journalism Fellowship, and the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion. He was a 2009–2010 Nieman Fellow. He worked at The Washington Post from 2001 to 2011, writing its "Department of Human Behavior" column from 2007 to 2009. He then wrote an occasional column called "Hidden Brain" for Slate. Vedantam published The Ghosts of Kashmir in 2005, a collection of short stories discussing the divide between Indians and Pakistani.
In 2010, Vedantam published the book entitled The Hidden Brain. The Edward R. Murrow Award winner focuses on how people become influenced by their unconscious biases. The book incorporates his experiences working as a reporter at the Washington Post. This nonfiction book showcases a range of real life examples on how their biases affect their mental health, including nine chapters discussing situations that affect unconscious biases.
Vedantam hosts the social sciences podcast also called Hidden Brain, where he "reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, the biases that shape our choices, and the triggers that direct the course of our relationships."  You can read the whole thing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankar_Vedantam 

You may wonder why a mainstream, Edwin R. Murrow Award winning book is being included in my series of book reports on esoteric and nearly forgotten works of mind science and mumbo jumbo. Simple, it's a really good book, and if you like the other stuff, you'll probably love this book too!
It's a very readable, fast paced book all about cognitive biases and the subconscious mind and how these things influence what we think are our conscious decisions. 

For Vedantam, the hidden brain is the subconscious mind, and one of it's main purposes is to jump to conclusions, and to do it based on heuristics, a sort of simple, logical formula for making decisions. Trouble is, while practical, those decisions are not always right and we're left wondering "why did I do that?"

 All his discussions are backed by well described scientific research and he illuminates how things like familiarity and similarity can cloud our decision making process, He explores racial and gender biases, group psychology, 

Much of the book explores how these unconscious processes are involved in issues that concern us in big ways. Sexism and racism, of course, but also the processes by which some people become extremists or terrorists, and mob mentality, and what does and doesn't work in combating that. 

There's a lot more in the book, and it's all thought provoking and practical to know, since it happens to big populations and also to us one-on-one. A lot of it can also bee seen in current events today, so this book can help make sense of it. 

I can't help but not that this book makes a great companion to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which also explores the science and psychology of unconscious decisions.

If you like mind science you can use, be sure to check out Vedantam's podcast: https://hiddenbrain.org/

Intuition-- Intelligence, or Lucky Guessing?

I wrote this to someone in response to a great little article in Forbes recently. The author discussed his experience with utilizing intuition in a field he's an expert in. What I liked so much about the article is that he describes his experience first hand. The article is called "Intuition is the Highest Form of Intelligence", by Bruce Kasanoff. You should definitely give it a read, and you can find it here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2017/02/21/intuition-is-the-highest-form-of-intelligence/#405ad7ff3860

I don't think he's saying intuitive people have more intelligence, but rather, when you're very well versed in your area, you will also develop an intuitive ability that can be relied upon, and that is certainly verifiable in a number of areas.
 
Lets talk about sports, say basketball, though any sport will do. A novice or occasional player will either have to go out and guess what to do without any understanding, or, if he knows a little more, but not much more, he'll have to play "by the numbers" following well established formulae that are taught to all players about what shots to take in which places on the court, what you're "supposed to do" when playing offense of defense, etc. And the guy following those rules will play better than the guy who's just out there flailing around. 
BUT, a professional player, one with thousands of hours on the court will have internalized all those "standard formula" but he'll also have an additional understanding based on his own experience. Those "rules" will have become internalized to the point they become INTUITIVE, and they will free up his conscious understanding to perceive possibilities and options that he can take advantage of that the "play by the numbers" players cannot.

Abraham Maslow identified this in his "Four Phases of Learning." To paraphrase, the first phase is not knowing anything ("unconscious incompetence") The second phase is knowing you have to learn ("conscious incompetence"). The third phase is learning and understanding, but only at a conscious, academic level ("conscious competence"). The fourth stage, which is where you've internalized the understanding to the point of intuitive understanding is called "unconscious competence." 

Unconscious competence can be as exotic as an athlete pulling an impossible play to win a big game or as ordinary as pulling into a busy traffic lane while talking to the kids in the back seat. Unconscious competence is writing out words without thinking of how to spell them, etc.

I occasionally teach drawing, and this is something I actually talk about a lot in my art classes. When an artist is trying to learn to draw a human figure in proportion and get the arms and the legs all the right size, it takes a certain amount of deliberate study, since there are all kinds of things working against him (for example, psychologically, we give more importance to heads and hands, so we tend to make them bigger; foreshortening in a lot of poses gives artists false cues about how limbs relate to each other). So there's a phases where a developing artist might spend a lot of time deliberately measuring out everything in the drawing to get it just right. 

But all of that academic study may still not give the artist sufficient grasp of proportions so that they won't still be a stumbling block. 

So I encourage artists to work a lot from FAST poses, usually 30 second poses, and to do a lot of them. Why? Because in 30 seconds, there's simply NO TIME to think about what you see and transfer that into something you're drawing on the page. Drawing fast COMPELS you to develop an intuitive understanding of the figure and it's parts as a single whole thing. With practice, it compacts that "conscious competence" into the subconscious part of the brain where it becomes a reliable, intuitive function. Not guessing.