The book "Subconscious" will refresh your knowledge

The book "Subconscious", as its name suggests, talks about a lot of subconscious knowledge, which will refresh our cognition.

This book was written by Leonard Mlodinow. The author's name may be unfamiliar to you, but Stephen Hawking should be familiar to you. "A Brief History of Time" was co-authored by Mlodinow and Hawking.

The subconscious mind has a much greater impact on life than we imagine. About 95% of things in daily life are handled directly by the subconscious mind without conscious awareness, such as heartbeat, stomach motility, feeling pain, etc. The subconscious mind even automatically helps us handle more complex tasks, such as driving. We are often thinking about other things while driving, and by the time we realize our mind has wandered we have been driving safely on "autopilot" for a while.

The subconscious can process information at a speed of 11 million bits per second, while the conscious information processing speed is only 16 to 50 bits per second. The gap is quite huge! I personally guess that the subconscious's ability to process information is more than 11 million bits per second, because this data is the amount of data collected by each of the human senses per second, and it can only be so much. With such a powerful information processing ability, it is no wonder that 95% of the workload is handed over to the subconscious mind. This can be regarded as "the one who can do more work".

The magic of the subconscious mind is not only reflected in the speed of information processing. It is still silently affecting almost every decision we make, such as magical "brain filling", such as human beings' highly accurate "intuition ability", and even its presence in racial discrimination.

Let’s first look at an example of how the subconscious mind secretly affects our decision-making. The "Cola Paradox" is a perfect example. The “Cola Paradox” refers to the fact that Pepsi-Cola always wins in uninformed taste tests, but in real life people always choose Coca-Cola.

This phenomenon was once confusing. It was not until the discovery of VMPC in the early 21st century that there was a scientific explanation. The VMPC is an area of ??the brain called the median prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for warm, soft feelings, such as those we feel when we think of a familiar brand. Research shows that in people with damage to the VMPC but otherwise normal brains, the "Coke Paradox" disappears.

In other words, if a person lacks the ability to feel the brand, he will not prefer Coca-Cola when purchasing. This proves that the existence of the "Cola Paradox" is due to Coca-Cola's long-term and large-scale advertising, so we find that Pepsi-Cola's advertising has also increased.

Let’s take a look at the magical ability of the subconscious mind to “brain supplement”. I believe you must have heard that our memories are often unreliable, but you may not know why. When something happens, we are limited by the limited information processing ability of our consciousness. We tend to only focus on the whole, and automatically ignore the details that we pay less attention to. These details will be automatically filled in by the subconscious mind when we recall. Because it is made up, the details added are often inconsistent with the real situation. This is the truth about memory errors. If you don’t believe it, you can do an experiment on the spot. Find a few friends to watch a short film of a few minutes together (just choose any short film), and then each person will describe it. You will find that everyone’s description of the main plot is similar, but the description of details will be quite different. Many people will even say that some details do not exist in the short film.

The phenomenon of "brain filling" does not only appear in memory , it also exists in visual signal processing, but we are not aware of it. Normally, the image at the focal point is missing during retinal imaging, that is, there is a black spot in the middle of the image. The reason why we cannot feel it is because our subconscious mind automatically fills it in for us.

The subconscious can also give our eyes the ability to "anti-shake", which is also related to the subconscious's "brain supplement" ability. We all know that early cameras did not have anti-shake function. If the photographer shoots in motion, the final picture will be shaken. As far as the function of the eyeball is concerned, it is no different from a camera lens. It will also have the problem of jitter when imaging. It is also subconscious, helping us automatically deal with image defects caused by jitter, so that we can see a clear picture.

The phenomenon of "brain supplementation" also exists in hearing. To give a simple example, if you are talking to another person on the phone, and due to poor signal, a syllable is missing from a sentence the other person said, we can still understand what he said normally.

Let’s take a look at the subconscious mind and magical intuition. When girls reject a boy, they often say "I don't feel it." In fact, what she meant by "no feeling" was an intuition. If asked for specific reasons, she would often not be able to answer. Because intuition is a summary generated by the subconscious after processing a large amount of information, the girl's consciousness only reaches the conclusion, but does not know the reasons for reaching the conclusion.

When we communicate face-to-face with people, language content actually accounts for only a small part, and a considerable part of the communication information is conveyed through non-verbal channels. Such as clothing, expression, tone of voice, speaking speed, body movements, physical distance, etc. Nonverbal messages are sent automatically, and we are also automatically receiving and processing the nonverbal messages sent by the other party.

Why don't girls have feelings for a boy? Maybe the boy's clothes reveal to the girl that "this boy's aesthetics is inconsistent with his own", or the boy's restrained body movements reveal to the girl that "this boy lacks self-confidence" and so on. This communication process occurs at the subconscious level of both parties, without each other being aware of it. This is why many PUA courses teach about clothing, body movements, and other knowledge that seems to have nothing to do with chasing girls.

Finally, let’s look at the subconscious role in racial discrimination. The subconscious mind also has a magical ability, classification. Don't underestimate this ability. Classification is a very complicated process. Only in recent years have computer experts finally devised a sophisticated system for teaching computers how to tell the difference between a dog and a cat. The powerful ability of classification is something we are born with.

With the ability to classify, we can quickly identify both black and white cats as cats, and we can also quickly determine that plastic apples are not edible fruits. If your subconscious classification ability is broken, when your friend grins, you will judge him to be another person.

While classification ability brings us powerful abilities, it also brings troubles, which is racial discrimination. For some people, the category of black people comes with labels of "low quality", "barbaric" and "inferior". In fact not all black people are low quality, but white and yellow people also have low quality people. For another example, when we think of the elderly, our first reaction is "weak memory", "slow response", "lack of energy"... In fact, many elderly people are not bad in these aspects. This is the downside of categorization, the label we attach to a group remains with us as an individual.

So, the subconscious has a huge impact on our lives, far greater than we imagine. In our lives, the subconscious mind directly makes a large part of our decisions for us, and the rest of the decisions are also more or less influenced by the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind often acts according to habits, so "habits determine destiny" is very reasonable.