Pleiades's blog

If I showed you a picture of a beautiful person what would you think about their ability to fly a plane? You may think this question is absurd, how could someone’s looks tell if they would be a good pilot or not? Well, believe it or not, odds are higher that you will think that they are a better pilot than you think an average looking person would be. In fact, you will probably assume that they are also nicer, more generous, more intelligent in general and more sensitive (the list goes on) (1). Why do we generalize like this, and are there any facts to support this seemingly incredible bias?

It is one thing to be told that much of behavior reflects unconscious processing -it is another to actually have that message proven with an actual experience. The breadth and power of the unconscious eluded me until I saw how this level of processing relates to my life. It was demonstration in class involving a checkerboard where differing levels of gray created the illusion of different colors (1) that convinced me unconscious processing affects the way we process the world.
    We had been discussing visual processing for more than a week in the class and thought I understood. I knew that the brain could only interpret certain signals and filled in the rest, I was conscious of it. However during that demonstration, my Unconscious finally kicked in as well and I really understood. The conscious (me knowing what was going on ‘up there’ was working without the unconscious (me actually seeing the effect of the way visual processing works). In my case it took the activation of my unconscious to complete my experience. Although I was not fully convinced of this phenomenon until recently, others have been exploiting it for years, whether consciously or not.

We would all like to believe we have control over our own bodies. We can talk, and walk, and think and daydream. But what happens when our bodies start doing things we have no control over? In times of stress and extreme emotions, some part of our brain takes over and interferes with our body’s natural functions. Why don’t we have control over our body in these circumstances? We control our brain don’t we? Even if we agree that there is a particular part of the brain that is causing these external reactions to internal stimuli (the I box), where is it and what determines the response?