viernes, 28 de agosto de 2015

How Murray Rothbard Became a Libertarian

lunes, 24 de agosto de 2015

Rafael Santandreu: fortaleza emocional

La expedición recala en la ciudad natal del Nobel de Literatura, donde ideó Macondo y dio rienda suelta al «realismo mágico»

La expedición recala en la ciudad natal del Nobel de Literatura, donde ideó Macondo y dio rienda suelta al «realismo mágico»

La famosa Aracataca, cuna del escritor colombiano Gabriel García Marquez, se siente olvidada. AunqueSOLO vivió su infancia en la que desde hace cinco años es la Casa-Museo, principal centro de peregrinación para sus lectores, los cataqueros aspiran a que parte de las cenizas del premio Nobel de Literatura, fallecido en abril de 2014 en México, regresen al que fue su hogar.
El alcalde de la localidad anunció, tras recibir a los 174 jóvenes de laRuta BBVA, que se adelanta la búsqueda de un supuesto testamento de«Gabo» en el que señala que su última voluntad sería que sus restos descansen en el entorno que originó Macondo y el realismo mágico.
«Para nosotros sería un gran honor porque fue el lugar donde nació y que le sirvió de inspiración para la mayoría de sus obras, especialmente 'Cien años de soledad'», expresó el regidor, Hatum Arias, que ha enviado la petición a la familia nada más conocer la decisión de la viuda, Mercedes Barcha, y sus hijos de ceder a Cartagena de Indias los restos de Gabriel García Márquez.
Este hecho ha provocado «tristeza» en su pueblo natal porque consideran que, aunque estuvo ausente mucho tiempo, siempre se preocupó de ayudar a sus vecinos. «Este pueblo no sería lo mismo sin él. Estaría más atrasado. Le debemos mucho», asegura Rocío Castillo, mientras vende a unos expedicionarios de la Ruta BBVAlas emblemáticas mariposas amarillas queCITA en su obra maestra el escritor.
Este municipio de Magdalena, ubicado a 90 kilómetros al sur de Santa Marta, irrigado por los ríos de aguas heladas que descienden de la Sierra Nevada, vio nacer a su Premio Nobel el 6 de marzo de 1927. Allí vivió sus primeros 8 años de vida, retratados con toda fidelidad en ‘Vivir para contarla', el primer tomo de sus memorias. Pero fue en ‘Cien años de soledad’ donde dio a conocer al mundo el «realismo mágico» de su tierra natal y hasta le cambió el nombre, tanto que muchosextranjeros llegan al país preguntando por Macondo, en lugar de Aracataca.
La estación del tren, a la que Gabo llegó con su madre en 1952 en uno de los viajes más importantes de su vida; la casa del telegrafista, dondeTRABAJABA su padre, cerrada por restauración; y la escuelaMONTESSORI en la que la maestra Rosa Elena Fergusson le enseñó a escribir son algunos de los escenarios que los «ruteros» han podido disfrutar 'in situ'.
Todo ello formaría parte de una futura «ruta Macondo», como explica el alcalde cataquero, que considera que «Gabo dejó de ser de Aracataca y pasó a ser un personajeMUNDIAL». Aunque Macondo sea el «epicentro» de ese «tour», también se incluirían ciudades como Santa Marta y Cartagena. Y para reivindicar la importancia que su figura tiene en la ciudad, el día 18 tendrá lugar una reunión de las autoridades con gestores culturales y educativos para pedir públicamente la cesión de una parte de las cenizas.
Desde que García Márquez recibió el Premio Nobel, en 1982,SOLOregresó tres veces a Aracataca. La última vez fue en el 2007, después de 24 años ausente. Entonces fue recibido por miles de seguidores y una pancarta que rezaba «Bienvenido al mundo mágico de Macondo».
«Miren a toda esa gente... y después dicen que uno fue el que seINVENTÓ a Macondo», comentó Gabo mientras saludaba por la ventanilla del tren en el que llegó. En Aracataca estuvo durante una hora y media.
No obstante, muchas cosas han cambiado desde que «Gabo» correteara por las calles sin asfaltar de Aracataca. El primer edil reconoce que la población tenía graves problemas de canalización y abastecimiento de agua potable pero que, durante suGESTIÓN, la red ha llegado a un 64 % de cobertura.
«Tenemos que hervir el agua para consumirla. Hasta ahoraSOLÍAMOS bañanarnos con cántaros en el río. Con este calor se agradece mucho tener agua corriente», cuenta Bernarda, otra vendedora de bisutería de la plaza principal, que tiempo atrás fue un cementerio.
Otra ironía de Aracataca es que en la ciudad natal del Nobel de Literatura, aunque parezca mentira, es complicado comprar un libro del autor. No hay una solaLIBRERÍA en el pueblo. Sólo en unapequeña papelería venden algunas copias de susLIBROS más conocidos.

sábado, 22 de agosto de 2015

Pilar Sordo - Viva la diferencia

CRISTINA MILIÁN el Inconsciente

CRISTINA MILIÁN


He desarrollado la práctica deTRABAJO social en el ámbito de la salud, incidiendo en los aspectos bio-psico-sociales en un servicio especializado y complejo, las Urgencias médicas, es un lugar de paso para las personas donde viven episodios importantes de sus vidas.

Ves la vida en su forma más abrupta y cruda. A menudo, la ciencia no tiene explicación y poco o nada pueden ofrecer en aquellos casos de muertes súbitas, o accidentes o patologías súbitas que causan lesiones irreversibles.

Llevo años escuchando como las familias que se enfrentan a situaciones duras en sus vidas, verbalizan cosas como:
  • ‘en 1 año es el tercero de la familia que muere’
  • ‘he perdido a toda mi familia en 6 meses’
  • ‘ha muerto a la misma edad que sus hermanos’
  • ‘ha muerto como su padre’
  • ‘toda la vida dijo que no vivirá más que su padre’
  • ‘el mes pasado quiso celebrar su 50 cumpleaños por todo lo grande porque decía que era la última fiesta que montaba’
  • ‘un sobrino murió igual’
  • ‘ella sabía que iba a morir, la semana pasada dejo los papeles delSEGURO de entierro en la mesa porque me dijo que iba a morirse,  me reí y le dije que no dijera más tonterías’
etc... etc... etc...

He asistido a situaciones “curiosas”:
  • Un chico ingresa porACCIDENTE de moto y tras la visita es dado de alta, al cabo de 6 meses vuelve a ingresar por un accidente de moto que ha tenido en el mismo sitio que el anterior,  esta vez con resultado de muerte.
  • Personas que ingresan en la misma época del año (incluso el mismo día y mes) con el mismo diagnóstico.
  • Chica de 36 años que hace una parada cardíaca al lado del box de urgencias donde le acaban de comunicar el fallecimiento de su abuela.
  • Señor de 76 años que sufre un atropello por un autobús y las hijas me dicen ‘es la tercera vez que le atropella un autobús’ 
  • Señor de 78 años multifrecuentador del servicio de Urgencias que siempre decía lo mismo “yo señorita lo queQUIERO es morirme” y al cabo de pocos meses murió en urgencias. Y así sucesivamente un sinfin de “causalidades, curiosidades”. 

El colmo para mí fue cuando mi marido ingresó de forma súbita, en la UCI del hospital donde yo trabajo, muy grave. La ciencia no tenía respuesta del porqué se desencadenó ese cuadro clínico en menos de 12 horas y con tanta agresividad. Un cuadro clínico con un elevado índice de mortandad.


Urgencias ha sido y es para mí una gran escuela de aprendizaje donde trabajar con un abordaje bio-psico-social y ahora, también, con personas que vienen motivadas para adentrarse en su árbol genealógico, trabajo desde el lado no racional de la vida, el inconsciente transgeneracional, el inconsciente biológico, atendiendo y entendiendo que somos seres biológicos que formamos parte de un sistema familiar con el que establecemos vínculos a lo largo de nuestra vida, tanto uterina como terrestre.

CURRICULUM
Nací en 1967, estoy casada y soy madre de 3 hijos y madrina de Martina, una vaca

Diplomada en Trabajo Social por la Universidad de Barcelona.
Diplomada en Terapia Gestalt por el Instituto Gestalt 
de Barcelona.
Diplomada en Terapia de guión mental personal.
Diploma en Psicosomática Clínica y Humanista -Nivel 2- (2014-2016) 
por la Fundación Psicosomática Clínica Humanista de Barcelona.
Postgrado en catástrofes y emergencias en laCRUZ ROJA por la UAB.
Postgrado en ética en la Universdad de Barcelona.
Módulos formativos de Psicogeneaología con Evelyne Bissone Jeufroy.
Módulo de formación 'transgeneracional, sindrome de yaciente' delMASTER en psicosomática clínica y humanista del Dr. Salomón Sellam.

Co-autora delLIBRO Miradas hacia la vida, ganar al perder

Autora de artículos, ponencias y monográficos técnicos de los servicios de Urgencias médicas.

ImpartoCURSOS de Bio-Psicogenealogía, acompaño a personas en la lectura del árbol genealógico y trabajo en la unidad de trabajo social de Urgencias médicas de un hospital de Barcelona.

Cristina Milian el Inconsciente

EL INCONSCIENTE




En nuestra mente, que está distribuida por todo el cuerpo, residen dos secciones: la mente consciente y la mente inconsciente.

Nuestra mente consciente es:
  • Autónoma
  • Proactiva
  • Diferenciadora
  • Contiene memoria explícita (recuerda hechos, fechas, acontecimientos)
Algunas veces está anulada, ya sea por causas neurológicas, consumo de drogas legales o ilegales, o trastornos psiquiátricos.

Nuestra mente inconsciente es:
  • Automática
  • Reactiva
  • Igualadora
  • Está presente toda la vida
  • Contiene la memoria implícita: memoria celular, memoria corporal, memoria genealógica.
  • No reconoce al otro
Es información que aunque no esté disponible en la memoria consciente está presente toda la vida.
Es la base de sentimientos y comportamientos a lo largo de la vida de la persona.

Dado que en sesión trabajamos con la información que reside en el inconsciente de la persona, con la información que aparentemente la persona no ve o no sabe, es preciso saber algunas de las reglas del juego por las que se rige el inconsciente:
  1. Tiene la función de dar soluciones de supervivencia, cueste lo que cueste, nos lleve donde nos lleve.
  2. Es un ‘disco duro’ programable en el que se almacenan las experiencias de nuestra vida.
  3. Funciona por igualdades, toma y acepta el mensaje tal y como se le indique. También funciona con imágenes, nombres o incluso números.
  4. Es ingenua e inocente. Para el inconsciente el otro no existe. No identifica la negación y no diferencia entre lo real, lo simbólico o lo imaginario. Para el inconsciente es lo mismo hacer ver que me como un limón que comérmelo de verdad.
  5. Es atemporal. Funciona en el AHORA.
  6. No es analítica, una vez recibe el mensaje no interpretará ni racionalizará el contenido de éste.
  7. No tiene sentido del humor. En ocasiones los mensajes pueden ser resultado de bromas o momentos triviales y la mente inconsciente no lo distingue.
  8. No distingue al otro.

Los pensamientos, la energía de la mente, influyen de manera directa en el control que el cerebro físico ejerce sobre la fisiología corporal porque están físicamente ligados a nuestro cuerpo a través de los sistemas inmunitario, endocrino y nervioso central. Ahora bien, se necesita algo más que pensamientos para orientarse al bienestar.
La mente inconsciente es como una máquina: repite las mismas respuestas a señales vitales una y otra vez. Es posible, una vez se tiene conciencia del argumento de vida que actúa desde el inconsciente, reprogramarlo. El cerebro goza de plasticidad y adaptabilidad, y hace falta entrenar a nuestra mente consciente, que es la creativa, que es la que formula los pensamientos, aquéllos que escogemos tener porque son útiles y productivos y nos dirigen a la salud y el bienestar.

Nada Ayuda más que la Automotivación Patricia Ramirez

Y tú, ¿cómo te motivas?

La palabra motivación viene del latín “motivus” movimiento y del sufijo “ción” acción o efecto. Como cuenta el psicólogo deportivo Gary Mack, los deportistas pueden “moverse” buscando el placer o evitando el dolor y el castigo. Así que la motivación estaría basada en buscar el éxito o evitar el miedo de fallar.
"El sufrimiento genera estrés, miedo, ansiedad, frustración"
“El sufrimiento genera estrés, miedo, ansiedad, frustración”v
Los que evitan el dolor o el castigo, sufren más. Y el sufrimiento genera estrés, miedo, ansiedad, frustración…en definitiva, emociones que no ayudan a la hora de competir y entrenar. Muchos deportistas relacionan el castigo y el sufrimiento con la responsabilidad. “Una persona responsable debería estar preocupada por sus marcas, por los resultados, por no cometer errores y por no fallar”. Lo cierto es que la responsabilidad es hacer lo que tienes que hacer. No hay ninguna definición que contenga “y para hacerlo tendrás que sufrir”. Obsesionarte con no fallar solo te llevará a fallar más. Porque toda tu atención estará puesta en el error y eso impedirá que te concentres en cómo sentir y ejecutar de forma correcta.
Si eres un deportista popular y empiezas a obsesionarte con la ropa deportiva, el reloj, las marcas, las carreras, la alimentación y con querer controlarlo todo, acuérdate de esto: un día tu hobby dejará de ser un hobby. Se convertirá en una esclavitud más que en lugar de darte buenos ratos, te dará exigencias y sufrimiento. No olvides nunca el motivo por el que empezaste a hacer deporte y recuerda momentos en los que disfrutaras mucho.
Los deportistas de alto rendimiento que solo piensan en ganar, en la beca, en la mínima y olvidan lo que tienen que hacer para conseguir todo esto, tienen más probabilidad de cometer errores y que la ansiedad y el bloqueo los deje en el camino. Está más que demostrado que fluir y disfrutar te llevan al rendimiento. Créetelo. No es irresponsable reírte y pasarlo bien con tu profesión o afición. Es de lo más saludable y provechoso que puedes hacer.
"Está más que demostrado que fluir y disfrutar te llevan al rendimiento"
“Está más que demostrado que fluir y disfrutar te llevan al rendimiento”
En el otro grupo, tenemos a los que se motivan disfrutando. Un ejemplo de ellos serían aquellas personas que corren por sensaciones y que disfrutan del camino más que de la meta.Aquellos deportistas que tienen puesto su objetivo en las señales de bienestar, el solecito, la técnica de la zancada, sentir la respiración y cómo ésta oxigena los pulmones, los amigos con los que corren o montan en bici, y el propio placer de estar haciendo ejercicio y sentirse a gusto. Estas personas no salen pensando en lo que tienen que conseguir, porque el propio hecho de practicar su actividad ya es placentero en sí.
No se castigan si no consiguen un tiempo determinado porque no lo buscan. Su motivación está en disfrutar de lo que hacen. Y si un día no corren, no pasa nada.
Los deportistas de alto rendimiento orientados al placer buscan superarse, se concentran en lo que tienen que hacer en lugar de evitar el error. Conocen sus rutinas, sensaciones y todo lo que suma en su ejecución deportiva.
La motivación puede estar en pensar en tu familia, en recordar qué te llevó a practicar ese deporte, en el sentido por el que lo practicas, pero nunca en evitar sufrir y machacarte. Nada ayuda más que la automotivación. Las personas deseamos vivir una vida plena y esto se relaciona con el placer.
Perseguimos lo que nos hace sentir bien. Por eso es tan importante que tu motivación en el deporte, y en la vida, esté relacionada con la satisfacción.
"Nada ayuda más que la automotivación"
“Nada ayuda más que la automotivación”
Y tú, ¿tienes tu misión, sabes por lo que luchas, qué te atrae, que hace que palpite tu corazón?

miércoles, 19 de agosto de 2015

Leonard Mlodinow Born in 1954 in Chicago

LEONARD MLODINOW

SUBLIMINAL: HOW YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND RULES YOUR BEHAVIOUR


In Man and His Symbols Carl Jung wrote, “ThereARE certain events of which we have not consciously taken note; they have remained, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness. They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally.”
Jung, Freud and others introduced the West to the mysteries of the unconscious as best they could, but today new technologies are providing a much clearer view of the part of the brain that operates below the level of normal consciousness. These technologies, physicist Leonard Mlodinow says, “have made it possible, for the first time in human history, for there to be an actual science of the unconscious.” Just as quantum physics provided a much finer grained understanding of the universe than Newtonian physics, so our theories about how social relations work are undergoing a revolution. This is thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can detect activity in the brain’s different structures by seeing the smallCHANGES in blood flow in its parts. The technology has become so advanced that computers can use the data coming from our brain to reconstruct an image of what we are looking at. The link between how the brain operates, and how it creates our social relations and who we are, led to a new area called ‘social neuroscience’, which only began in 2001.
For Jung, the study of dreams, mythology, art and symbols were aWINDOW into the ‘collective unconscious’ of humankind. Subliminal (the word comes from the Latin for ‘below threshold’) charts the re-emergence of the unconscious mind as a serious area of study; for Mlodinow, the unconscious mind is not a spiritual reality but has a firm physiological basis, developed in the brain for survival long before civilization emerged. Here we look at a few of the findings he presents to support this view.
Unaccountable reactions
Have you ever thought how much your unconscious mind affects things like what house you should buy, who you should employ as your babysitter, or whether this person will make a good long term partner?
Mlodinow talks of his mother, who often had extreme reactions to things. When he was in college, Leonard would call his mother every Thursday at 8 pm, but one week he forgot to, and went on a date instead. After it got to 9 pm with no phone call, she began accusing his roommate of hiding the fact that had been taken to hospital, and as the evening went by, accused the roommate of covering up her son’s death.
Why this reaction? Mlodinow’s mother had been part of a loving middle class family in Poland, until things took a tragic turn. First, over the course of a year her mother died a painful death from abdominal cancer, then she came home one day to find her father had been taken by the Nazis. She and her sister were put on a train to a slaveLABOR camp, and her sister did not survive. After being liberated she emigrated to the United States and started again, creating a safe, middle class life in Chicago. But her early trauma would from time to time find expression. Mlodinow sometimes suggested she see a psychologist about it, because it had been shown that such ‘talking treatment’ had been useful in some trauma cases.
Some years later, Mlodinow reports on the evidence that traumaCHANGES the actual physiology of the brain. Experiences like those of his mother actually bring on alterations in parts of the brain thatARE stress sensitive (see Spinelli et al, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009). Even if her conscious mind hadWANTED to, Mlodinow’s mother could not avoid having the reactions she did; it was physiologically part of her.
The new unconscious
The common view is that Freud ‘invented’ the unconscious mind, but in fact the early psychology experimenters and thinkers including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Wilhelm Wundt and William Carpenter were the ones who began to develop a scientific methodology that could show how the unconscious mind worked. It became clear to them that there were two systems of brain operation. The unconscious had developed first in evolutionary terms, and for a very good reason: it keeps us alive. As well as regulating all the basic physical functions, it provides us with instant reactions to survive in the face of stimuli or threats. All vertebrateANIMALS of course have this level of brain functioning, but the conscious reasoning mind is very much an optional extra which evolved later.
Today, neurological researchers use the term the ‘new unconscious’ in place of the unconscious mind that Freud wrote about. Freud actually began as a brain scientist, but there was only so much you could find out about the physiology of the brain with the technology of his day, so he focused on clinical practice. Though he was absolutely right in asserting that much of the behavior of his patients was generated by mental processes they were not conscious of, simply talking with them was always going to yield subjective and unreliable information about what was actually going on. Freud was as a result, Mlodinow says, “mainly off the mark.”
Freud perceived many actions as being the result of fearful repression of some kind, but today’s researchers simply note that an action derives from the fact that some parts of the mind are inaccessible to the conscious brain. It is the architecture of the brain itself that is determining outcomes, not a repressed intention. This means that many actions and choices must be seen as a normal result of the brain’s functioning, developed over millennia to aid social functioning and physical survival. Indeed, Mlodinow sees the unconscious part of the mind as a gift of evolution. While the conscious mind might have enabled us to build civilizations, he says, “for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you.” For us to perform at our optimal and efficient best, a lot of functions relating to seeing, remembering, learning and judging need to be kept out of conscious awareness. Indeed, there is so much information coming to the brain every second that if the conscious mind had to deal with it all, “your brain would freeze like an overtaxed computer”, Mlodinow says. Instead, we are aware of only about five percent of our brain’s activity. Ninety-five percent happens outside our awareness.
Who or what makes our choices?
Why do we make the choices we do? Often the stated reason is not the real one. We tell people we took a job because of the challenge, when all along it was the prestige that attracted us. We choose a specialist for her skills and experience, when in reality we like the fact that she is a good listener. Mlodinow reminds us of John T Jones’ research from 2004 on how people with the same surnames tend to marry each other at 3-4 times the rate that they marry a person with a different surname. What can account for this? WeARE naturally biased towards traits that are like our own; the familiarity is comforting. This even extends to apparently meaningless traits such as a last name.
For a long time, economists have assumed people were rational actors that made deliberate decisions on how to allocate and spend resources based on their self-interest. But a new breed of economists such as Caltech’s Antonio Rangel have turned up some fascinating research. Rangel found that people would pay 40 to 60 per cent more for an item of junk food if they could see it in front of them, rather than seeing a picture of it on a screen. However, if the food is placed behind plexiglass, the price premium is lost. Does this sound rational? There is obviously a lot more going on with our buying decisions that make apparently irrelevant things highly important. What’s more, Mlodinow notes, “when quizzed about the reasons for their decisions, the subjects proved completely unaware that thoseFACTORS had influenced them.”
In another Rangel study, subjects were given three different bottles of detergent to take home and use, and then asked to come back and say which one worked best and why. When they returned, they reported the various merits of each bottle and ranked them. What they didn’t know was that in fact the detergent was the same in each; only the packaging was different. This didn’t stop the subjects ranking the bottle in blue plastic with splashes of yellow far above the bottles which were only blue or only yellow.
Mlodinow refers to some other interesting studies:
· People were found to purchase French or German wine depending on whether French or German music was playing in the background. But only one inSEVEN people admitted the music had influenced their choices.
· Customers were considerably more generous in their tips to waitresses at a Chicago restaurant when the sun was shining that day, compared to when it was not.
· Whether names of companiesARE easily pronounceable affects how they perform when initially listed onSTOCKexchanges. Companies or their ticker symbols that are easy to pronounce do better than those which are not, at least in the first year of flotation.
· A couple of studies of stock prices and Wall Street weather have found a definite correlation between sunny days and bullish activity. “According to their statistics”, Mlodinow notes, “if a year had included only perfectly sunny days, the market return of the New YorkSTOCK EXCHANGE would have averaged 24.8 percent, while if a year had been made up of completely overcast days, it would have averaged only 8.7 percent.”
We think that important financial decisions, particularly those we make on behalf of others, are arrived at after deliberate analysis. Studies such as these suggest that subjective factors are at least as important, sometimes to a shocking degree.
One more Rangel experiment is worth noting. He did a taste test with subjects involving wines of varying price, and people invariably preferred the taste of the more expensive wine, even though the two wines tested were in fact both of the expensive type. While the wine tasting was going on, the brains of Rangel’s subjects were being scanned by an fMRI machine, which showed that wine price affected a part of the brain called the orbito-frontal cortex, which is often linked to pleasure. The implication is that although there was no difference in the two wines, the difference in tasteswasREAL. This is so, MlodinowWRITES, because “Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are creating it.” He puts it another way: “Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don’t just taste its chemical composition: you also taste its price.”
How hunches work
Mlodinow describes the strange case of ‘TN’. A double-stroke had knocked out this middle-aged man’s his ability to see – he couldn’t even detect shapes on a white background. And yet, when presented with pictures of people’s faces he could say two times out of three if the faces were happy or sad. Experimenters also got him to walk down a cluttered hallway, and despite being totally ‘blind’, TN successfully moved around a garbage can, several boxes and other things. What can we make of this? In the first instance, it was clear that his brain’s fusiform face area (the part of the brain dedicated to face recognition) was still working, even if he was not conscious of it. And in the second instance, it showed that even if the conscious visual system in the brain has stopped functioning, the eyes are still operational and are feeding information to the unconscious. This is how the phenomenon of ‘blind sight’ works.
Mlodinow was once in the Golan Heights, walking along a road when he spotted an interesting looking bird in a field. As a keen birdwatcher heWANTED to get closer. There was a sign on a fence around the field that said something, but his Hebrew wasn't good. Perhaps it said No Trespassing, he thought? But somehow it seemed different. Though he had a feeling he shouldn't climb the fence, he did so anyway. As he began walking towards the bird, he saw a local farmer coming down the road who was waving his arms madly; Mlodinow walked back to the fence to find out what all the fuss was about. It turned out the sign had said: Danger – Minefields. From this point on, Mlodinow always trusted his instincts – or to be more precise, trusted judgements delivered to him that his conscious mind had not properly processed. “We are all a bit like patient TN”, he writes, “blind to certain things, being advised by our unconscious to dodge to the left and right. That advice can often save us, if we are willing to open ourselves to the input.”
Reading and judging people
Mlodinow tells of a study in which a group of students were presented with pictures of faces. The pictures had already been tested as being neutral looking, but the students were told that certain people featured were ‘successful’ and that other people in the images were not. The students were then asked to show the pictures to another group of people and ask them which ones they thought were successful or failures, reading out a written script so that they would not influence the choices people made. But even with this neutral script, the nonverbal cues of the students hugely affected the choices people made. People tended to choose between pictures based on the subtle expectations of the students.
Mlodinow says that experiments such as these demonstrate that “whether or not we wish to, we communicate our expectations to others, and they oftenRESPOND by fulfilling those expectations.” In another well-known study by Rosenthal , it was shown that teachers’ expectations of children’s academic performance greatly affected their actual performance. Teachers were told that particular students had high intellectual potential, based on IQ scores, when in fact those students had only got average scores. At a later date, all the students who had been tested for IQ were tested again, with amazing findings. Normally, IQ scores in children fluctuate according to intellectual development or random variation, but of those children who had been identified (falsely) as ‘brilliant’, 80 per cent of them showed an IQ increase of at least 10 points, and twenty per cent of them had a tested IQ increase of at least 30 points, compared to only five per cent of the other children tested. Another finding was that teachers rated those students not labelled as special as also being less interested and curious, and unsurprisingly, those students only had average grades. “Labeling children as gifted”, Mlodinow notes, “had proved to be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy”.
Deep voices, pretty faces
To the unconscious mind, how someone sounds is almost as important as how they look. For birds, voice is very important in mating and sex, and we retain part of the Stone Age importance of voice in reproduction. We still pick up a lot of cues about people from their voices.
People who only heard the presidential debate of 1960 on the radio judged Nixon the winner by two to one, particularly with his baritone voice compared to Kennedy’s higher-pitched Bostonian one. But people watching on television saw Kennedy as the convincing winner. Nixon had just come out of hospital with a knee infection, was tired and drawn and his television adviser didn’t think he needed makeup; Kennedy was tanned and fit, and had the full makeup treatment. Mlodinow cites various studies which show that how a political candidate looks is a huge factor in whether or not they win an election. What is decisive is not whether a candidate is judged better looking, but whether they appear more competent. In 2006, researchers had people make face evaluations of political candidates acrossAMERICA before elections. Based on this alone, they were able to predict with striking accuracy who would be the winners. Candidates judged more competent won an average of 70 per cent of the races.
Yet there is no link, in actuality, between how people look and the quality of their work or administration. Mlodinow gives the example of Charles Darwin, who almost missed his opportunity to go on the Beagle trip because the captain did not like the shape of his bulbous nose, believing it to be a sign of insufficient energy and determination. Darwin later said in his autobiography: “I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”
We make judgements all the time based on superficial things, and yet these judgements can have a big effect on the job we get, who we choose as a spouse, babysitter or doctor, the politicians we put in power. Being aware of how the unconscious skews judgement is surely useful in coming to more correct judgements.
Categorization and prejudice
HUMANS use categorization of things to process information more easily. By having mental categories, we don’t have to reassess an object every time we see it. Any time we see a bear, for instance, we’ll probably have a ready-made reaction to run away from it. We don’t stand there looking at the bear to see if this one is friendly, even if another one killed our Uncle Bob. Similarly, we don’t analyse a certain configurement of wood and nails every time we see one to see if it is something we can sit on, we have a category called ‘chairs’, and the object either does fall into the category or it doesn't.
Yet this powerful ability to categorize means we can make the mistake of thinking that objects we put into a categoryARE more similar than they really are. Just because a group of people are wearing the same colored football scarf, for instance, we tend to think of them as a group and not as individuals. More worryingly, Mlodinow notes, is our tendency we think of people of a certain ethnicity, skin color or nationality as more similar than they in fact are. Mlodinow mentions the work of Henri Tajfel, who pioneered research on stereotyping and social categorization. He had been the victim of the latter as a Polish Jew living in France who spent time in Nazi concentration camps. Until the 1980s psychologists still saw prejudice as an intentional, conscious behavior, not the result of the brain’s unconscious propensity to categorize, but Tajfel’sBOOK Human Groups and Social Categories (1981) helped toCHANGEthinking. In 1998, three University of Washington researchers demonstrated conclusively that stereotyping is unconscious. Their ‘Implicit Association Test’ (IAT) is a measurement of the distance between what you say you believe, and your actual unconscious attitudes. For instance, the test routinely finds that 68 per cent of people have a bias for white people over black, 80 per cent favor young people over old, and 76 per cent have a bias for the able-bodies over the disabled – no matter what they say otherwise.
Obviously, such biases will have a big impact on the conclusions we reach and decisions we make. The evolutionary reason we are like this is so the brain can make quick judgements which can sometimes be a matter of life or death. We are a “machine for jumping to conclusions” as Daniel Kahneman put it, but the good news is that by being aware of our unconscious assumptions we can counteract them by acting according to principles and ideals, not assumptions. The point about the IAT, Mlodinow notes, is that people’s associations reflect stereotyping present in the culture. We tend to soak up these easy categorizations as our default, whether we are aware of it or not. Jurors tend to see defendants as less guilty if they are better looking, but this happens only with relatively minor offences. With serious cases such as murder, when more deliberate sifting of the evidence is required, this unconscious bias tends to disappear, and people are judged according to the crime, not the appearance or other characteristics.
Final comments
While the rational, thinking part of our brains is much bigger than other mammals, our automatic or unconscious mindsARE remarkably similar to those of a rabbit or a chimpanzee. Yes, our behavior is much more complex, but the new thinking embodied in Subliminal is that we are “hardwired to certain unconscious social behaviors, a remnant of ourANIMAL past.” This is a big break from the 1970s and 1980s when orthodox academic psychology assumed all human choices were conscious and deliberate. Indeed, the idea that much of our existence is shaped by mental forces of which we are not aware seems to go against our idea of ourselves as ‘captains of our soul’ and the existence of free will. Yet brain scanning technology and the range of new studies looking at the unconscious only appear to confirm this uncomfortable truth.
Mlodinow suggests that we should not fear greater study of the unconscious mind – indeed, if we are to gain more control over our actions and understand social relations better, it is absolutely necessary. He again quotes Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct yourLIFE and you will call it fate.”
There is a huge amount of information in this book that is fascinating in its own right, covering vision, memory, and social groupings. Mlodinow leans on a lot of psychological research, particularly that of Caltech’s Antonio Rangel and Christof Koch, but he references hundreds of studies, all of which are fascinating and worthy of separate exploration. As a physicist Mlodinow has worked with Stephen Hawking, and he brings the rigor of his original profession to what has always been a murky area. Indeed, Mlodinow notes that “the idea that the unconscious is important to our behavior was, until recently, shunned as pop psychology”. Where once we had only Freud or Jung to instruct us in this area, or popular but non-scientificBOOKS like The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy), now Subliminaland similar titles are lighting the path ahead.


Leonard Mlodinow
Born in 1954 in Chicago, Mlodinow is the child of Polish immigrants who only just escaped the Holocaust. During high school he became interested in physics, and enrolled at Brandeis University where he graduated with aMASTERS in physics in 1976. In 1981 he obtained a doctorate in theoretical physics from University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), followed by a stint in Germany at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics in Munich.
In a careerCHANGE, Mlodinow moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to become a screenwriter. After several months without work he sold a script and began toWRITE for popular television series such as HunterMacGyver and StarTrek: the Next Generation. In the 1990s he moved into computer gaming, becoming a producer and designer of several games, and between 1997 and 2002 worked at Scholastic, the New York publisher, producing math education and otherSOFTWARE for children.
In 2005 Mlodinow helped Stephen Hawking write A Briefer History of Time, and in 2010 co-authored The Grand Designwith him. OtherBOOKS include Euclid’s Widow (2001), Feynman’s Rainbow: a search for beauty in physics and in life(2003), The Drunkard’s Walk: the story of randomness and its role in our lives, and with Deepak Chopra, War of the Worldviews:SCIENCE vs. spirituality (2011).