How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know!
—Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger
Has anyone ever told you that you are amazing? Well, you are. You process vast amounts of information off screen. You effort- lessly delegate most of your thinking and decision making to the masses of cognitive workers busily at work in your mind’s basement. Only the really important mental tasks reach the executive desk, where your conscious mind works. When you are asked, ‘‘What are you thinking?’’ your mental CEO answers, speaking of worries, hopes, plans, and questions, mindless of all the lower-floor laborers.
This big idea of contemporary psychological science—that most of our everyday thinking, feeling, and acting operate outside conscious awareness—‘‘is a difficult one for people to accept,’’ report John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand, psychologists at New York University. Our consciousness is biased to think that its own intentions and delib- erate choices rule our lives (understandably, since tip-of-the-iceberg consciousness is mostly aware of its visible self). But consciousness overrates its own control. Take something as simple as speaking. Strings of words effortlessly spill out of your mouth with near-perfect syntax (amazing, given how many ways there are to mess up). It’s as if there were servants downstairs, busily hammering together
sentences that get piped up and fluidly shoved out your mouth. You hardly have a clue how you do it. But there it is.
As I typed this last paragraph, the words spilled onto the screen, my fingers galloping across the keyboard under instructions from somewhere—certainly not from my mental CEO’s directing each fin- ger one by one. I couldn’t, without asking my fingers, tell you where the ‘‘w’’ or the ‘‘k’’ are. If someone enters my office while I’m typing, the smart fingers—actually, the cognitive servants that run them— will finish the sentence while I start up a conversation. More impres- sive are skilled pianists, who can converse while their fingers play a familiar piece. And then there are the Cornell University students whom psychologists Ulric Neisser, Elizabeth Spelke, and William Hirst trained to copy dictated words with one hand while they read stories with full comprehension. We have, it seems, two minds: one for what we’re momentarily aware of, the other for everything else— for doing the computations involved in catching a fly ball, for convert- ing two-dimensional retinal images into three-dimensional percep- tions, for taking well-timed breaths, for buttoning a shirt, for coordi- nating our muscles when signing our names, for knowing to jump at the rustle in the leaves, for intuiting the next master chess move.
Or take driving. When one is learning, driving requires CEO-level attention. We minimize conversation and focus on the road. An Amer- ican’s first week of driving in the United Kingdom or a Brit’s first experience driving on the Continent is the new-driver experience over again, requiring concentration as one gradually masters left- or right-sided driving. With time, driving skills are learned, then ‘‘over- learned.’’ Like most of life’s skills, they become automatic, thus free- ing consciousness for executive work. The light turns red and we hit the brake without consciously deciding to do so. While driving home from work we may be engrossed in conversation or worry, so our hands and feet chauffeur us to our destination.
Indeed, sometimes they chauffeur us home when we’re supposed to be going elsewhere. ‘‘Absent-mindedness is one of the penalties we pay for automatization,’’ notes mental lapse researcher James Reason (who joins animal behavior researchers Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger on my short list of aptly named psychologists). If the boss doesn’t direct a different route, the servants—serving our usual interests—do
what they’re trained to do. But Boss Consciousness can intervene at any time. Unlike Freud’s unconscious mind, filled with rebellious, repressed workers in conflict with management, cognitive science’s unconscious mental workers are friendlier, more cooperative, and more speedily efficient. Their motto is ‘‘we aim to serve.’’
Be glad for this ‘‘automaticity of being.’’ Your capacity for flying through life mostly on autopilot enables your effective functioning. With your mental butlers handling the routine and well-practiced tasks, you can focus on the big stuff. While others take care of the White House lawn, fix meals, and answer the phone the president can ponder international crises and the state of the nation. Much the same is true for you. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed in 1911, ‘‘Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’’
We have all experienced the automaticity of being. Absentminded professors know the phenomenon well. Sometimes after leaving the bathroom I feel my face to see whether I’ve shaved. At a late-morning bathroom stop I check the mirror to see whether I’ve yet combed my hair. After walking down the hall to our department office I’m often without a clue why I’m there (like shaving and hair combing, the automaticity of walking doesn’t require our holding our intent in mind).