Subliminal: the new unconscious

Sunday 1 July 2012 5:00PM

Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who’s turned his mind to the unconscious. Not the unconscious mind of Freudian fame which was examined through psychoanalysis in the 19th century – but a new science of the unconscious made possible by technologies which reveal the physiology of our brains. We discuss the hidden forces that rule our behaviour. 

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Lynne Malcolm:  You’re with All in the Mind, I’m Lynne Malcolm and today we explore the subliminal, the new science of the unconscious mind and how it rules our behaviour. 

Leonard Mlodinow:  These are processes that are automatic that you do without any effort, you do not have to try, but you also have little no control over and you’re not aware of.  So those are the basic traits of what we call unconscious processing or unconscious thinking.

Lynne Malcolm:  Leonard Mlodinow lectures at the Californian Institute of Technology in the United States.  As a theoretical physicist he’s done pioneering work in quantum mechanics and theory and he’s worked with Stephen Hawking on a couple of books including a rewrite of Hawking’s original work called A Briefer History of Time. But now he’s turned his scientific mind to the unconscious.

His latest book is titled Subliminal: how your Unconscious Mind Rules your Behaviour.

Leonard Mlodinow:  I called the book Subliminal because there was a hoax in the 1950s that really introduced that term into our culture and that occurred when a fellow named James Vicary who was a marketing consultant claimed that he could make people buy more Coca Cola and popcorn at a movie theatre by flashing very briefly the words ‘eat popcorn and drink Coca Cola’ while they were watching a movie. But he flashed it so briefly he said that they didn’t consciously perceive what they were seeing and yet they were manipulated into making those purchases.

And that turned out to be a hoax. But the truth is that there are many subliminal effects that occur in our environment every day that do have just that kind of effect on us and we’re not aware of them. And the reason is that our unconscious mind, even as our conscious mind is taking in various data visual, and auditory data, and information about our surroundings, our unconscious mind is also taking in data and it’s feeding so to speak into our conscious deliberations without our knowing it and affecting the way we behave and perceive the world.

So by subliminal I mean things that occur in our world that are below the threshold of consciousness but do have a psychological effect on us.

Lynne Malcolm:  And we’ll hear in this program how our unconscious mind shapes all our experiences and judgements, including what we buy, how we see and taste, who we’re attracted to and even how we respond to being touched.

But the unconscious that we’re talking about today is not the Freudian notion of the 19th century, that shadowy basement of the mind with its repressed feelings and hidden phobias which was examined through psychoanalysis.

The new concept of the unconscious has been transformed by the explosion of knowledge we have about our brains made available through increasingly sophisticated technologies.

Leonard Mlodinow:  The modern idea of the unconscious which has really only come to fruition in the last 10 to 15 years is that the unconscious mind is not hidden from us for motivational reasons and cannot be revealed by the traditional methods of introspection or therapy but rather it is hidden from us because it occurs in certain modules of your brain that are inherently inaccessible to your conscious mind.  And the reasons scientists have come to this new concept of the unconscious is that in the mid 1990s a technology became available called FMRI or functional magnetic resonance imaging which is a way – it’s like the MRI your doctor uses to look at your organs except if you do it on the brain it not only shows you the anatomical features of the brain but it also tells you what parts of the brain are operating at any given time.

And so now we can connect the behavioural studies of psychology to real structures in the brain and get a much clearer, more concrete idea of what’s going on.

Lynne Malcolm: Is it possible to identify the actual physical place in the brain where the unconscious mind is?

Leonard Mlodinow:  It is but the unconscious mind is not a monolith, we call it the unconscious mind but the unconscious mind is a collection of many, many different independent or sometimes inter-dependent modules.  It’s not that we can say here’s a spot in the brain, here’s the unconscious, here’s a spot in the brain here’s the conscious.  Really there are different processes around the brain that we are aware of and that take effort and are conscious and there are other parts of the brain that produce processes that we’re not aware of that are unconscious and it’s when you look at it anatomically it’s not quite where you can draw a map and say the red parts are this and the blue parts are that.

Lynne Malcolm:  So this is very different to our sort of old understanding, the Freudian understanding of the conscious mind.  Just explain how it differs from that?

Leonard Mlodinow:  Well the unconscious that scientists talk about today is an unconscious that we have in our mind that has developed through evolution because it has what they call adaptive advantages for us.  The easiest way to understand it is through our sensory perception, think about your vision – when you look at the world what you perceive is a very clear picture, a 3 dimensional picture of what’s out there and you think that that’s real.  And whether or not it’s real I don’t know but I’ll tell you what your eye is actually picking up.  What your eye is picking up is a very fuzzy pixelated image, one that you would never accept if it showed up on your TV screen and it even has a black hole near its centre.  And it’s only clear in a very small region outside of that, it’s extremely fuzzy.

And if you went through the world having to take that image and decipher it to figure out what you were really looking at we would all have been eaten by tigers, or never caught the rabbit for dinner that we needed when we lived in the wild or whatever it was; because we’ve taken quite a while to decode what’s actually going on.  But the gift of evolution is that our brain has unconscious modules in it that do this processing for us almost instantaneously and with no effort, with no requirement of will power and automatically it fills in the image and it massages the image and presents to us what seems to be a clear picture of reality.

And it turns out that people are extremely social animals, our species really relies on social interactions to survive or at least it did while we were evolving in the wild and so we have similar unconscious processes that give us a social picture that take information beyond what’s actually the data that’s out there and factor that in and present to us a filled in, clear looking image that we perceive as being real but is really constructed by our brain just as the visual image is constructed.  And that leads to certain kinds of illusions called cognitive illusions that are really the analogies of optical illusions but I really want to stress that the unconscious mind is a gift, even though it is interesting in studying how it works, to examine the illusions, it really works very well and for the most part the illusions are not important.  And what is important is that it allows us to function smoothly and quickly whether it’s we are travelling through the physical world or the social world.

Lynne Malcolm:  In his research into the ways the unconscious mind influences our behaviour Leonard Mlodinow found that there are many social cues that determine how we respond to each other.  Cues which we are barely aware of.

Leonard Mlodinow:  One of the ways we interact with other human beings and form social bonds is through touch and  probably most of us are not aware of the extreme importance of touch.  But in all primates touching is a way of forming bonds and social alliances and of understanding and trusting and co-operating with other people.  And in humans it’s a little bit more subtle, we don’t spend hours grooming each other but let me tell you about a study that scientists did in France.

They asked three handsome Frenchmen to stand on a street corner and spend a few days over a nice sunny weekend standing on a street corner and propositioning every single young woman who walked by. Sounds like a good weekend job. And they all propositioned them using the identical words and they were all told to when they spoke those words to give half of the women a light quarter to half second touch on either the forearm or the shoulder and to the other half just to speak to them and not touch them. And they studied the results to see if this touch would have an influence on how much success the men had, the idea being that if touch really does increase our sense of co-operation and trust that they would have a higher success rate with these little light touches.  And indeed it doubled their success rate so they got about 10% of the women agreed to give their phone numbers without the touch but 20% agreed with the touch.

And in exit interviews when the women were intercepted after this was done a few of them even remembered having been touched. So this is really a subtle thing and it has a unconscious effect, it feeds into our conscious perception of the person or a conscious calculation and that’s been demonstrated in many other context as well. When waiters for instance touch their customers their tips in one study increase from 14% to 17½%, when people stood in a crowded shopping mall trying to get shoppers to take 5 minutes off to answer a survey half of them agreed to do that without a touch but three quarters when they were touched.  And so on, this has been replicated in many areas so when we’re doing our mental calculations of what’s going on around us and perceiving the world this feeling of touch feeds into our calculation usually without our knowing it.

Lynne Malcolm:  As we heard earlier Leonard Mlodinow’s latest book on the unconscious mind is called Subliminal after James Vicary’s hoax of the 1950s which claimed that you could make people buy products by delivering imperceptible images or messages in advertisements.  Even though that claim has been disproven, there are still many ways in which we can be manipulated whilst shopping.

Leonard Mlodinow:  Imagine walking through the grocery store aisle looking for wine and they might have French and German wine.  Well if there was a store here in England who had French and German wine mixed together in the aisle the wines were of comparable quality and price.  And as shoppers walked down the aisle they are consciously assessing certain data, you know the price, the type of grape, the origin of the wine etc. what they’re having for dinner.   But as they are doing that their unconscious mind is also feeding in its data and what the researchers did in this case was they asked the shop keepers to play on alternate days either German music or French music quietly in that aisle.  And what they found was that on the days when the German music was played two thirds of the shoppers bought German wine and on the days when the French music was played two thirds of them bought French wine.  And in exit interviews when they were asked whether they had heard any music most of them didn’t remember, hadn’t registered it and they certainly didn’t believe that they were buying the wine based on the music.

But in truth as they are factoring in all the data that the conscious mind had absorbed this mood or emotion that was stimulated by the music through their unconscious was feeding into their decision.  So in many aspects of our social perception our consumer behaviour or financial decisions, our unconscious mind is feeding data into our conscious mind and building up a picture for our conscious mind that seems to be real and based on only what we consciously perceive but really is based on much deeper thinking than that.

Lynne Malcolm:  So the implications there, the implications in the marketing world and the advertising world are quite enormous aren’t they, they are very powerful?

Leonard Mlodinow:  They are, it’s ironic because the original subliminal hoax by James Vicary where he claimed that he could persuade people with very quick flashes of images to buy something was a marketing based claim and it wasn’t really true but it turns out that marketers can indeed use these new results of neuroscience to persuade us to do things.  And there’s a whole field now that’s grown up that’s emerged since the 1990s when the new technologies for imaging the brain became available.  And that field is called neuro-marketing which applies the new lessons of neuroscience specifically to marketing and to ways of subliminally persuading people to buy what the advertisers want them to buy.

Lynne Malcolm:  Does that area concern you?

Leonard Mlodinow:  It does and I’m not happy to see that kind applied science, science is knowledge and it can always be used in different respects for different purposes. But on the other hand I know we live in a capitalist society and I don’t think that marketing and advertising should be banned but these subtle ways of influencing people are a little scary.

Lynne Malcolm:  And by manipulating our environment and the context we can even be influenced to perceive taste differently. Leonard Mlodinow gives the example known as the Pepsi paradox.

Leonard Mlodinow:  One of the ways that marketers have always tried to influence us at least for the past few decades is not to really give a hard sell with regard to their product but to give a soft sell to try and make their brand feel one way or another for us. Either to feel sophisticated, or to give us the warm fuzzies, or to have a certain association in our mind. And Coke has done a very good job with that, they’ve had advertisements that are always very happy, have a Coke and a smile, or there’s people singing about them, how many in the world and what not and this apparently has had a huge effect on the taste of Coca Cola that people perceive.

So the unconscious mind helps you build perceptions of the world that go beyond the actual data that your brain is recording and incorporates things like your emotions, your expectations, your desires and by feeding into the brand perception Coca Cola has been able to change the way people taste the drink.  And here’s the science that shows that – it’s called the Pepsi paradox because when people drink Coke and Pepsi blindly, without knowing what brand they’re drinking, they tend to prefer Pepsi but when they know what brand they’re drinking they tend to prefer Coke.  So the obvious culprit there is the effect of the advertising although when you ask people after they’ve tasted these drinks they certainly don’t claim that they taste better because of the ads. 

And then scientists have gone a step further now that we have the FMRI brain imaging technology and they actually look at people’s brains and they see that when they are drinking Coke and know it’s Coke a certain part of their brain called the VMPC or ventral medial prefrontal cortex lights up which is thought to be the seat of the warm and fuzzy feelings you get from brands.  And they can see that when they’re  tasting Coke and know it’s Coke that’s lighting up and it’s feeding into their perception of the taste.  And really the smoking gun is this, scientists found people who had brain damage there and therefore they can’t really have the power of the brain that appreciates all these wonderful ads that Coke has been spending billions of dollars on and they give them the Pepsi and Coke blindly they prefer Pepsi and when they tell them what the brands are and they have them taste it they still prefer Pepsi.  And when they taste the drinks in the FMRI machine their brand appreciation module does not light up because that part of the brain in those people has been damaged.  And so this really is pretty strong evidence that the reason you taste Coke,  that Coke tastes better to people who prefer Coke is largely due to these ads.

Lynne Malcolm:  You’re listening to All in the Mind on ABC RN, Radio Australia and online. I’m Lynne Malcolm and I’m speaking with theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow. He’s author of the book Subliminal: How your unconscious Mind Rules your Behaviour and we’re exploring the new science of the unconscious mind.

Just to demonstrate how the unconscious mind influences our behaviour in the way we relate to each other your story about your mother and how she harassed your room mate because she was worried about you – tell us about that.

Leonard Mlodinow:  Well thanks for broadcasting that all over the Australia.  Well my parents went through the Holocaust and my mother was 16 at the time, her own mother had just died actually of very painful stomach cancer and then shortly after that the Nazis invaded and took away and murdered her father and sent her and her sister off to a labour camp where her sister died of typhus.  And so within a period of a few months she really lost everything and of course after the war she was liberated and met my father and they had a family in the States and I’m the kid.  But these events that happened at a very young age formed a context for the way she interpreted the social world throughout her life and she’s still alive, she’s 90 now and every time she looked at events she looked at them through this strange lens and in the case that you mention, in the case of the time I didn’t call her when I was in graduate school, I used to call her every Thursday night and we’d chat and one Thursday night I didn’t call her because I was out on a date.  So I think it was 8 o’clock I was supposed to call, if 8 o’clock passed, 8.15, 8.30 she calls my apartment and gets my roommate and my roommate tells her that I’m not home.  And then she calls back a bit later and she keeps repeatedly calling and then starts accusing my roommate of hiding the fact that I must be injured and in a hospital somewhere in an emergency room and that’s why I can’t call.

And then eventually she started accusing my roommate of hiding my death and to my mother this was a very natural conclusion to jump to, I always felt that it was a bit embarrassing that my mother would think it’s more likely that I’d been killed than out on a date but to her that was the world.  She lived with a constant context that everything that she knows and loves and values can be taken away suddenly with no rhyme or reason and she continued to live her whole life with that kind of context that her unconscious mind would automatically be put in as she was building pictures of the world.

Lynne Malcolm:  So the implication is that our unconscious minds are formed by the sum total of our experiences the whole of our lives.

Leonard Mlodinow:  Right, the whole of our lives our emotions and feelings.  We have emotions for a reason, for instance imagine pain, you have pain so that if you touch something that’s hot, or if you slam your hand with a hammer you will pull your hand away and not do that again.  It’s a way to protect your physical body and we have emotions for similar reasons to either make us avoid or attract us to things that we either should or shouldn’t be doing from a point of view of evolution.  And so our unconscious mind is keeping track of that and it’s feeding in these emotions as we’re making our supposedly objective decisions and we really can’t avoid having that fed into us.

One good example of that is in the stock market, people who are stock market traders on Wall Street are people who are extremely intelligent, spend hours on end studying various industries and companies and factoring it in and going on to make presumably objective rational financial decisions.  Well they are also people affected by their emotions and their moods and so psychologists know that people are in a better mood when it’s very bright and sunny and not such a good mood on overcast days so they look at 20 years of stock market data and they also looked at the weather data and they pulled out the days that were completely sunny and they pulled out the days that were completely overcast and raining in New York City.  And they calculated an annualised net return of stocks on sunny days versus stocks on rainy overcast days and they found out that on the rainy overcast days the New York stock exchange went up in those years on average about 7% and on completely sunny days it went up 24%.  So even these very sophisticated quantitative traders were making decisions that unbeknown to them were being greatly influenced by their mood that came from the weather.

Lynne Malcolm:  Well if you think that’s a bit unnerving take a moment to consider how our unconscious mind may influence who we’re attracted to.  Leonard Mlodinow suggests that some of our unconscious motivations aren’t always particularly romantic.  In fact sometimes they can be fairly mundane.

Leonard Mlodinow:  Here are some of the factors that we take in; of course we take in their facial appearance that has a very important effect on us. Also their body language, their facial expressions it helps us understand their emotions, whether they are attracted to us or not, also whether they’re angry with us or happy with us.  We analyse their voices unconsciously, when we talk to somebody whether or not we realise we are conscious of whether they have a sexy voice, or unattractive voice, it has an effect on us either way.  And when we factor all these elements in, when we perceive someone we make our bigger picture of who that person is.

One of the things your unconscious mind does for you and it’s a great gift is it gives you extra courage to view the outer world and it does that by giving you an extra special view of yourself. Of course 50% of people are above average but most people think they’re above average, it’s really astounding. In a survey for instance of college professors 94% of them said they did above average work.  And our view of ourselves in general tends to be an optimistic view of our abilities, of our personal qualities and our view of the barriers that we encounter in life also tends to be overly optimistic.  We tend to automatically underrate challenges that are before us and overrate our ability to overcome them.  And this again is not done consciously but it works that way because our unconscious mind is feeding these certain kinds of data into our thinking that tend to make us be overly optimistic.

And that’s for good reason because otherwise when we face such barriers when we could be daunted and when we lived in the wild it was often very hard to find food, or people could have been very cold or too warm and shelter was difficult and rather than curling up in a ball and dying, nature wanted us to keep fighting on and we have to keep fighting on in today’s world too if we’re starving, or a small business, or we have a medical issue and this unconscious tendency to have an overly optimistic view of ourselves feeds into that. And one aspect of that is that we tend to like things that remind us of ourselves such as our name.

So the study that you refer to the scientists did a study about people who marry other people with different names versus the same name, to do that they gathered records on people in the south eastern United States who had I think six different names, very common names, Jones, Smith, Johnson – the scientists looked at marriage records and they counted how many Jones’s married Smith’s, Johnsons, Browns and other Jones’s and how many Johnsons married Smiths, Browns etc and other Johnsons and so on and they made a little matrix of who’s marrying whom in those states.  And they found surprisingly that a significantly larger proportion of Johnsons married other Johnsons than those with other names and Smiths married other Smiths etc.

This doesn’t mean that they’re all marrying people with the same name, it just means that the Johnsons might marry 4% Smiths but they’ll marry 8% of the time with Johnsons or something like that. So there was a statistical bubble there where you could actually see how people are being attracted to other people with the same name. This doesn’t mean that you can see someone with the same name and you consciously are attracted or that you even unconsciously automatically want to marry them it just means that there’s enough of an effect there to be statistically visible. One of the things your unconscious mind is feeding into your conscious decision making about marrying a person or into your feelings about that person is the name.

Lynne Malcolm:  Does our unconscious mind inevitably rule us?

Leonard Mlodinow:  Well there are ways of overcoming these unconscious effects so the greatest kinds of knowledge a person can have is self-knowledge and since the unconscious processes are inherently inaccessible to yourself we can rely on scientists who do these kinds of experiments to expose what’s going on and then we can learn about it.  So in the course of writing the book I’ve changed the way I interact with other people or the way I look at the world and I take into account much more the possibilities that unconscious processes are affecting things and I don’t look at life as superficially as I used to. If I’m interacting with somebody I’ll take for instance not only into account our specific words and our specific interactions but I’ll have a bigger picture of what is the situation, what might have just happened to them that has a lingering effect on their emotional state that’s kind of bleeding over into our interaction.  And once you become aware of these things you kind of automatically tend to take them into account in your daily interactions.

Lynne Malcolm:  So what would you say is some of the key insights that you have since you’ve studied the unconscious mind?

Leonard Mlodinow:  Well the first is that all of our perceptions and all of our judgements and decisions are not completely objective but are fed into by factors that we’re not aware of and are based on emotions and deeper insights that our unconscious mind has.  Also these unconscious insights that we have are usually helpful to us and so we shouldn’t overrule our hunches and our feelings because they counteract our intellectual beliefs.  And third that we’re all animals like other mammals and our behaviour and our brain has evolved in a way to help us survive but fundamentally even though humans have this small amount of consciousness as a tip of the iceberg floating above a sea of the unconscious and most other animals have mainly that sea and even a smaller tip of the iceberg, we share with them a great heritage which is the unconscious mind which allows us to move around in the world and survive.

Lynne Malcolm:  So what do you think the future holds in the field of studying the unconscious mind?

Leonard Mlodinow:  Well as we get deeper and deeper into it we’re learning better and better exactly which parts of the brain are responsible for which of these influences and how they’re all interconnected.  And as time goes on and our technology gets better we’re going to be able to better and better localise where our feelings and thoughts and our perceptions come from and understand in a better way how the physical meat of the brain, how all those individual neurons, one hundred billion individual neurons produce what we call the human mind.

Lynne Malcolm:  My guest today was Leonard Mlodinow, he’s a theoretical physicist from the California Institute of Technology in the United States.  His book Subliminal:  How your Unconscious Mind Rules your Behaviour is published by Pantheon.

How aware are you about those subliminal influences in your life? Have your say on the All in the Mind website on and click on All in the Mind in the drop down list and you’ll find transcripts and information about all the programs there.  And why not organise to podcast the program while you’re there if you haven’t already done so. Catch All in the Mind on Facebook and twitter as well.

Today’s sound engineer is Steven Tilley, I’m Lynne Malcolm and stay with RN now for the Philosopher’s Zone – we’re rebroadcasting a series of programs from the late Alan Saunders.






Leonard Mlodinow
Theoretical Physicist and author
California Institute of Technology in the United States.


Leonard Mlodinow
Allen Lane

Further Information

Leonard Mlodinow's website


Lynne Malcolm

Comments (17)

Add your comment

  • Quick question :

    01 Jul 2012 7:24:12pm

    Hi there AIM team,

    Just wondering whether u might have uploaded the wrong podcast for this program. The current one seems to be on IQ ('are we getting smarter?') rather than on the unconscious

    Thank you!

  • Steve :

    01 Jul 2012 9:49:23pm

    Something worth bearing in mind when discussing subliminal perception is that subliminal advertising is permitted on Australian commercial TV - so long as the frames in question occur within an advert.

    I'm guessing that this would come as a surprise to many people.

  • Allan :

    02 Jul 2012 12:15:11am

    Lynne, you have the wrong audio download posted with this programme. Instead of receiving an audio download about "Subliminal-The New Unconscious", I got something about IQ and a fellow named Flynn from Otago in New Zealand. Murphy is still alive and doing well it seems!

    Moderator: Allan, thanks for pointing out that mistake. It has been fixed now so you can download the correct audio from the site. The program that was put there by mistake is for next week. That program about IQ and James Flynn will be available later in the week, and of course broadcast next Sunday and Monday.

  • Ben Heslop :

    02 Jul 2012 2:43:09pm

    Excellent discussion.

    Will use as thesis reference.

    BTW I wonder what the good doctor thinks of using the mind as a "universal machine"?

  • A Monotheist :

    03 Jul 2012 3:01:11pm

    Hello Everyone:

    Leonard Mlodinow's view on the unconscious mind is very interesting although not new since he has already given the gist of it in "The Grand Design".

    However, I have a few points to: 1) Is the unconscious mind the same as the subconscious mind?

    I can hear my conscious mind is warning me not to sound pedantic here since English isn't my mother tongue; but! The subconscious mind is crying out: they can't be the same! For, unconscious mind, as Mlodinow himself has pointed out, is a state of being "not aware of".

    Now, if there is something which one can't be aware of it, what possibily can motivate him/her to study it methodically? This may sounds trivial, but if one considers Mlodinow's view on materilaistic determinism, expressed in 'The Grand Design', you see that it is not! There, he says the biological process in human beings are determined by the chemistry and the laws of physics just as are the orbits of the planets.

    Here too Mlodinow's view is that the unconscious mind is a "gift" developed in an evolutionary process. If that's the case, there must be another thing which brings the unconscious mind to our attention. In short, the Mlodinow's view, if not percieved through his own ideological spectrum, is just as fuzzy pixelated image with a large hole in the middle as is the visual images received by his brain.

    The problem is that, if the development of human mind were to be solely determined by the evolutionary process, then a lot of things which are outside of the imediate range must not have been detectable through human intellect. For instances, the evolutionary process could not have equipped human brain with the means to deal with the subatomic particles or the quasars, just as it has not equipped human brain with the night vision.

    2) The evolutionary process can't account for many geometrical shapes, for instance, a perfect circle or a square, let alone all those arithmetic calculation which comes with it. I believe subconscious mind is better term for describing hunch or intuition. It's not about being unaware but rather about doing thing authomatically.

      • Francisco :

        05 Jul 2012 6:50:04am

        Given that, time and time again, we have found inbetween steps to things that people have not possible by evolution alone, suggests that it is possible for evolution to create complex systems.

        You state that a brain capable of understanding subatomic particles could not have arisen from evolution. However, it's possible, indeed likely, if you take a step back and look at what's really happening. All that's happening is that a person is making deductions from observed evidence, following the train of logic that those deductions lead to come to a conclusion then using that knowledge to devise a strategy to deal with that. It is simple problem solving and planning.

        Let's have a look at how these do relate to our survival (and how, through experiments on other animals) we can show that they are not that unusual:

        Experiences with other animals:

        A chimp, that we know has never been in a similar situation, is put in a cage with a load of boxes and bananas held near the ceiling of a cage (out of reach). The chimp looks at the boxes, the bananas and thinks. It then piles the boxes on top of one another and reaches the bananas.

        I refer you to:
        (article The Ape of Wrath)
        The skills that chimp is using are:
        Theory of mind of another creature (that doesn't think like him), planning, problem solving, etc.


        Those skills also suit evolution very well. Yes, lasers, high energy physics may seem divorced from survival but the ability to think abstractly about problems would have helped us in the past.

        A person sees a footprint of another animal. That animal could be a quarry that would be good on the dinner table or a predator that's mean enough to challenge us. Being able to devise ways of reading footprints would have helped our predecessors a lot.

        It may not seem like needing to be able to think in abstract concepts but to read a footprint well requires a great deal of abstraction and problem solving (especially as humans are creatures known to explore and expand their range of influence -- so will come across new situations all the time). For example, it takes a level of abstraction to realise how a footprint is caused and how the different properties of the ground material may change and distort a footprint.

        Just as a modern day scientist has to take into account how other factors may confound their experiments, our predecessors had to take into realise that they had to take into account other factors (e.g. wind and rain) when reading a footprint. So yes, it is possible to get a creature that is capable of esoteric concepts can evolve.

        You talk about geometric shapes. Aren't the sun and moon circular? Furthermore, the more we discover about the natural world, the more realise how important geometry is in nature.

          • A Monotheist :

            05 Jul 2012 1:55:41pm

            Hello Francisco:

            It's not me who 'state that a brain capable of understanding subatomic particles could not have arisen from evolution'. It is rather the evolutionary theory which states that.

            According to the evolutionary theory, natural selection prefers certain characteristics by the way of trial and erreor: that's why it has taken so long for human species to enter the scene. This theory also states that, the natural selection only favours characteristics which are essensial for servival.

            Now, one has to ask this question: how could the natural selection have determined the importance of the boson particle by the way of trial and error?

              • HairyHu :

                03 Aug 2012 12:58:15pm

                "This theory also states that, the natural selection only favours characteristics which are essensial for servival."

                The above statement shows that your view of evolution is not correct. Evolution selects for advantage, not essentiality.

  • Francisco :

    05 Jul 2012 6:21:32am

    I enjoyed the programme.

    I am not sure how scientific it is but I was reminded of an article by the business commentator Lucy Kellaway (of the Financial Times). Her article "The dull names of those who rose" (available as both a written article and an audio podcast) looks at the possible influence of a person's name and their career.

  • Sally :

    19 Jul 2012 10:09:52am

    The "new" unconscious? Mldoinow offers a new concept of the unconscious that's interesting and worth exploring but I'm tired of AITM's subtle anti-Freud and anti-psychoanalysis stance.
    Contemporary psychoanalysis has much to offer and has developed and reworked some of Freud's idea of the unconsious considerably. Why not have a series on contemporary psychoanalytic ideas and treatment?

      • Rose :

        15 Aug 2012 5:07:36pm

        and I cant understand the ongoing attachment to Freud. Freud contributed some useful findings (the importance of childhood experience, use of various types of "defence mechanisms" in some circumstances) but wrapped them up in some really strange interpretations and blew them up into a human theory of just about everything.

        The basis of his theories are truly weird and lack any empirical evidence. It seems to be part of the post WW2 culture of hostility to technology and fascination with the irrational and sex as liberation in and of itself
        For example

        And freud's attitudes to "hysteria" regarding women and fervent support for his friend Fliess appalling experimental treatment of Emma Eckstein (that nearly killed her) are well known

      • Karl :

        24 Oct 2012 10:29:59am

        I agree, Sally: I don't see what's "new" about this approach. The anecdote about Leonard's mother is precisely the type of thing that is most useful about Freud's legacy. This type of unconscious activity should be distinguished from the nonconscious processes discussed in relation to visual imaging etc. The former can be brought into consciousness through various types of practice and therapy, thus alleviating psychological stress, while the latter will forever remain beyond conscious awareness.

  • anon :

    01 Aug 2012 6:29:50am

    Version 2? is there a part 1?

  • Darryn....Perth.... :

    05 Sep 2012 11:06:17pm

    I'm aware of how the unconscious mind , UNM , affects every aspect of my life and I love it. You can play a game with yourself and question your actions and reactions, or manipulate others into reacting or agreeing with things because of the way you kept eye contact or sent an ever so slight element of sadness in your conversation . you can witness so called intelligent people living a dis functional life because they are un aware of how they have been programmed by society, it's fun. You must enjoy your work. Comments please.

    Moderator: Yes I agree that considering the way our unconscious mind effects all of us is endlessly fascinating - and I'm sure there's still so much more to learn!

  • Richard :

    25 Sep 2012 7:01:24pm

    This book looks like a real good read rather than the junk freudian behavioural-analytics, repressed feelings & hidden phobia, cruelty empathetic so called model of medicine which fills your life w-. Sounds like a quite a transparent & logical approach to understanding us and our surroundings i think :d

  • Hayrick :

    20 Oct 2012 11:18:12am

    Maybe there are many levels of the 'unconscious' some relatively accessible, like emotional and other processing 'functions' affected by our evolution and then there might be other cellular levels of unconsciousness affected by our origins arising from the nuclear 13 billion year old 'soup'. These basic building blocks of us might not even recognise our existence as time scales are not compatible.
    Then again maybe the 'strangeness' of matter itself makes analysis of the 'unconscious' impossible.

  • stefan :

    25 Jan 2013 4:42:17pm

    the subliminal message is clear. one is authoritarian, the other is enlightened. a smile uses less muscles than a frown.