I am enjoying reading Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. I’m halfway through, and since
I’ve read a number of popular cognitive science books the last several years,
much that is written is familiar. The book reminds me of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Many of the same
“classic” examples are used to illustrate the main point, although Nisbett’s
prose is breezier and less technical. Each chapter ends with a Summing Up
section that recaps the main points, but is also written in an advice-giving
style for the reader looking for how the science can translate into thinking
tips! This makes the book accessible to a wide audience.
The book is divided into six parts. (I’m in the middle of
Part 3 which deals with statistical inference.) Today’s post will be about Part
1 (“Thinking about Thought”), in particular Chapter 3 (“The Rational
Unconscious”). Nisbett opens the chapter discussing the fact that “although it
feels as if we have access to the to the workings of our minds, for the most
part we don’t. But we’re quite agile in coming up with explanations for our
judgments and behavior that bear no resemblance to the correct explanation.”
We, humans, are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us – and
we’re very good at finding patterns, even those that are not there, to weave
together a narrative. Nisbett argues that sometimes choices that engage the
conscious can be suboptimal, if one doesn’t allow the unconscious to play its
part. This is because the conscious “tends to focus exclusively on features
that can be verbally described” while the unconscious covers both the verbal
and non-verbal.
There are many experiments showing that the unconscious
perceives much more than the conscious (that we are aware of). One example
Nisbett provides came from a Dutch study where students try to determine the best
apartment to rent given several options. There were objective criteria that
could be used to rank the apartments by desirability. Students were placed in
three groups. After seeing the apartments, they (1) had to make an immediate
decision, or (2) were given some time to deliberate on their choices, or (3)
were given the same amount of time as the second group, but “weren’t able to
process it consciously because they had to work on a very difficult task”
(presumably cognitively). Group 3 came out clear winners over Group 2 (who
could not even do better than Group 1).
What can the unconscious do better than the conscious?
Learning complex patterns is one category (and Nisbett provides examples)
although sometimes we make up patterns than are not there, ascribing “a
collection of events that are utterly random [to] have been caused by some
agent such as another person”. Problem solving is another example. I even
experienced it firsthand just this morning. I do the New York Times crossword
puzzle daily. On weekdays, I usually work on the puzzle in the evening. Perhaps
my brain is tired from the day’s work. On weekends, I do it over breakfast.
Yesterday (Friday) evening, I barely completed half the puzzle before I got
stuck – making no progress after a certain point. So I gave up. This morning,
however, as I looked at the puzzle over breakfast, I was very quickly able to
solve it to completion. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this experience, and
I often take a break when I get stuck, do something else, and then come back to
the puzzle an hour or two later.
Midway through the chapter, Nisbett poses the question: “Why
do we have conscious minds anyway?” This is an interesting question that he
doesn’t quite answer. He does provide examples that show how the conscious and
unconscious problem-solve using different rules. We are able to verbalize the
process for the conscious, but we still don’t understand how the unconscious
works. One example provided is playing the game of chess. Newbies “move the
pieces around without being able to tell you what rules, if any they are
following” but they are apparently following the “duffer strategy”. If effort
is made to improve by learning chess strategy, players becomes “conscious” and
can articulate why they are doing what they are doing. But then once a certain
level of expertise is reached, it becomes more difficult once again to
articulate strategy. Nisbett explains: “This is partly because they no longer
have conscious representation of many of the rules they learned as an
intermediate player and partly because they have induced unconsciously the
strategies that made them masters or grandmasters.”
All this reminds me of the wonderful Pixar animated movie Inside Out. If you have not seen it, and
you find thinking about thinking interesting, go watch it! While the personal
storyline was interesting and engaging, I found myself thinking hard about how
the brain, the conscious, the unconscious, the emotions, and thinking, were
represented. In a recent conversation, where an old memory was triggered, my
spouse even described it as a “memory ball being drudged up”. When the human
protagonist goes to sleep, interesting things happen. The “Train of Thought”
stops, although there is still plenty of activity. There are workers (bean-shaped,
perhaps resembling proteins) deciding on which memories to dump or move to
different storage areas. A whole crazy cast of characters makes up mash-up
movies for the dream world. Abstract thought changes the dimensions – perhaps
leading to different solutions! One of the best parts is how you get ditties or
jingles stuck in your head that crop up at the most ridiculous random times. I
might have to watch the movie again now that I’m thinking more about thinking!
What advice does Nisbett have in his Summing Up section? I
will just highlight one item: “You have to help the unconscious help you.”
Nisbett argues that consciousness is “essential for identifying the elements of
a problem, and for producing a rough sketch of what a solution would look like.”
Without this “draft”, you can’t actually make your way towards the solution.
After waking up from sleep, “consciousness is necessary for checking and
elaborating on conclusions reached by the unconscious mind”. Nisbett’s advice
to teachers is not waiting to the last minute to prepare discussion questions
for class, simply because they are of lower quality compared to those one comes
up with after mulling things over them (both consciously and unconsciously) for
several days. His advice to students: “Question: When is the right time to
begin working on a term paper due the last day of class? Answer: The first day
of class.”
As Nisbett concludes: “The most important thing I have to
tell you – in this whole book – is that you should never fail to take advantage
of the free labor of the unconscious mind.” Hence: “If you’re not making
progress on a problem, drop it and turn to something else.” I’d like to think
that my best blog posts come after mulling over something for a stretch, and
then having the story tumble out as I type the words. But perhaps I’m imposing
a pattern that isn’t there. In any case, it’s interesting to be on the carousel
thinking about thinking!
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