Slaves to our own Minds

Slaves to our own Minds

By: Jacob Love

Imagine a world where nearly every choice is made for you, before you even have a real concept of what you are deciding. You are almost like a puppet on strings, and the only time you get to make a decision is when the strings malfunction. It turns out this might be the world we live in, with the unconscious mind as the puppeteer.

An article that ran late last year in Scientific American claimed that not only does the unconscious mind play an enormous role in everyday life, it is the brains controller. The article by Steve Ayan (2018) entitled “The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness,” argues that the brain’s default state is autopilot, requiring no input from consciousness to run at all and avoiding conscious decision making whenever possible. The theory is called “The Predictive Mind,” and essentially says that the subconscious predicts and executes virtually every task, with the conscious mind intervening only when the predictions do not pan out. Ayan explains: “if someone throws you a ball you do not have to be consciously aware of the ball's trajectory in order to catch it... Conscious processing would become engaged, however, if the ball took a sudden right-angle turn.” Consciousness is really only necessary to explain the unexpected.

While it may be unsettling to think that we are but puppets subject to the whim of our subconscious processes, it is not hard to imagine useful examples of this in everyday life: if you make any regular commute you may often find yourself at your destination without having any knowledge of the journey. All the decisions to turn at the right places and stopping to avoid collisions is handled seamlessly without any conscious decision making, which is great so long as consciousness doesn’t interfere. This is where Dr. Brian Sweis comes in.

Dr. Sweis’s (et. al. 2018) article “Sensitivity to ‘sunkcosts’ in mice, rats, and humans” in the journal Science demonstrates that across species animals consider invested time in decision making. For example, if you go to a restaurant and are waiting to be seated after half an hour you are less likely to leave then if you had waited only ten minutes. This valuing of spent time is part of the “sunk cost fallacy,” and it may not be intrinsically surprising, but Sweis also found that this happens almost exclusively after the initial decision is made. In the restaurant example, if you spent an hour deciding if you want to go to a restaurant or not you are no more likely to go there then if you decided right away.

So, what does this have to do with consciousness? I would argue that the initial decision is generally unconscious. The outcomes are predicted based on known information and an initial decision is made without regard to investment, which aligns it with the tasks handled unconsciously; however, after the decision has been made and some time has been invested without an apparent reward consciousness kicks in trying to explain why the reward has yet to be presented despite the investment. In a somewhat circular logic, we often convince ourselves that the reward is better because of the investment; which, in terms of the current model, seems to be an attribute of the conscious mind.

The purpose of the conscious mind seems to be to explain the unexpected; but just as Ayan argues, it does not seem to be particularly efficient. Indeed, it is possible conscious thought is actively disrupting our abilities to make informed decisions. So, despite the disturbing imagery, having your own puppet-master might not be such a bad thing after all.