How our "Hidden Brain" thinks for us

Morning Edition (NPR.org, 1/25/10); Wisdom Quarterly

After making a silly mistake, it's not uncommon for a person to say, "Oops -- I was on autopilot." In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there's actually a lot of truth to that.

Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR's Steve Inkseep -- conscious and unconscious, pilot and autopilot -- and we are constantly switching back and forth between the two.

Hidden Brain (Read excerpt)

"The problem arises when we [switch] without our awareness," Vedantam says, "and the autopilot ends up flying the plane, when we should be flying the plane."

The autopilot mode can be useful when we're multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us. Vedantam says that when we interact with people from different backgrounds in high-pressure situations, it's easy to rely -- unconsciously -- on heuristics....

"Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures."

- Shankar Vedantam

Take Back The Controls

Racism can end (anothervoice-greenleaf.org)

In American society, [social] colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality.
  
"Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways."
    

Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode -- as long as you are aware of when it is on. The Hidden Brain is about how to "take back the controls."
  
So if the human psyche is just a big constellation of conscious and unconscious cognition -- which thoughts represent the real you? More (LISTEN)