There is an incredibly large gap between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. You are not aware of most of the inner workings of your brain and simply have no way to consciously access it. To be quite frank you would not want to be able to consciously access the deeper processing of unconscious mind. Why is that?
If you play the game of golf the last thing you want to do is to over think the shot. The best course of action is to simply trust in your ability and swing the club. Leave any analysis of your shot until after you have hit the ball.
IMPLICIT MEMORIES
Skills such as swinging a golf club, singing the ABC’s, driving to work, signing your name, brushing your teeth or any number of other things you do throughout the day are called implicit memories. Simply put, an implicit memory is a type of memory for the performance of a particular sequence of action that doesn’t require you to consciously recall how to perform the skill. Although you can’t consciously recall implicit memories, they still have an influence on your decision-making and how you behave.
For example, if someone asked you to explain exactly how you made that perfect golf swing so they could repeat it, you would find it almost impossible to explain specifics of how you did it. The reason is there is a chasm between what your brain can do and what you are able to consciously connect to. That is to say your implicit memory of how you made the golf swing is not open to conscious introspection. They are completely separated from your explicit memories where you can intentionally remember something like a phone number or what happened to you last Saturday.
THE EXPERIMENT
Antoine Bechara and his fellow researchers conducted a fascinating experiment in 1997. Participants were presented with four decks of cards. They were also given 2000 ‘lab’ dollars and were asked to choose a card from any of the decks. Some of the cards gave an immediate reward increasing the amount of their lab dollars and other cards that carried a penalty decreasing the amount of lab dollars. Unbeknownst to the participants two of the decks were set up to be advantageous (i.e. contained more reward cards) and the two other decks that were disadvantageous (i.e. contained more penalty cards).
The researchers asked participants at fixed points for their opinion about each of the decks. That is, which of the decks did they feel were reward decks and which ones were the penalty decks. The researchers discovered it took about 25 draws of the cards for participants to consciously figure it out.
The astonishing part of the experiment came from the findings they collected when they measured skin conductance response (SCR) each time the participants drew a card. (Basically, a SCR measures a change in the electrical properties of the skin in response to stress or anxiety. The SCR indicates the activity of the autonomic nervous system - a part of the unconscious brain).
It took the unconscious brain on average 13 cards compared to the 25 cards of the conscious mind to figure out which decks were the penalty decks and which were the reward decks. So just before a participant drew a card from the penalty deck there was a SCR spike indicating a stress reaction. In other words, the unconscious brain figured out which decks were the penalty decks well before the conscious mind did.
THE UNCONSCIOUS VS. THE CONSCIOUS
The researchers’ findings suggested the feelings produced by physical states of the body come to guide behavior and decision making. For example, when some something happens to you your entire body reacts to the situation. There may be an increase in your heart rate, a tensing in your muscles, an increase in blood pressure, a contraction in your gut and so on. All of these bodily reactions become linked to the event - they get burned into your neural circuits and become an implicit memory. This means the next time you relive a similar event or something triggers the implicit memory, your brain will will fire-up the identical bodily reactions of the original event.
Just like the participant’s SCR response prior to picking up a card from the penalty deck, your implicit memories will know well before your conscious mind what is going on. The implicit memory triggers a feeling and unconsciously influences your decision-making and behavior
FLIP THE COIN
So how can you employ this knowledge to help you with your decision-making? The next time you find yourself at the crossroads of indecision pull a coin out of your pocket. Then assign each of your choices to either heads or tails. Flip the coin. The key here is to immediately assess your gut instinct after the flip. If there is a sense of relief from the coins result, then it will be the correct choice for you. If you feel uncomfortable with the result of the flip, most likely the other choice is better for you.
We encourage you to share your questions, opinions and comments. Thanks again for taking the time to read our blog.
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