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Wealth Beyond Reason

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Your Unconscious Makes 95% of your Decisions

By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
US News.com

The snap judgment. The song that constantly runs through your head whenever you close your office door. The desire to drink Coke rather than Pepsi or to drive a Mustang rather than a Prius. The expression on your spouse's face that inexplicably makes you feel either amorous or enraged. Or how about the now incomprehensible reasons you married your spouse in the first place?

Welcome to evidence of your robust unconscious at work.

While these events are all superficially unrelated, each reveals an aspect of a rich inner life that is not a part of conscious, much less rational, thought. Today, long after Sigmund Freud introduced the world to the fact that much of what we do is determined by mysterious memories and emotional forces, the depths of the mind and the brain are being explored anew. "Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, " says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan. "Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness."

Fueled by powerful neuroimaging technology, questions about how we make snap decisions, why we feel uncomfortable without any obvious causes, what motivates us, and what satisfies us are being answered not through lying on a couch and exploring individual childhood miseries but by looking at neurons firing in particular parts of our brains. Hardly a week passes without the release of the results of a new study on these kinds of processes. And popular culture is so fascinated by neuroscience that Blink, journalist Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of "thinking without thinking," has remained on the bestseller lists for four weeks.

Most of us can appreciate the fact that we make up our minds about things based on thinking that takes place somewhere just out of our reach. But today, scientists are finding neural correlates to those processes, parts of the brain that we never gave their due, communicating with other parts, triggering neurotransmitters, and driving our actions. Says Clinton Kilts, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, "There is nothing that you do, there is no thought that you have, there is no awareness, there is no lack of awareness, there is nothing that marks your daily existence that doesn't have a neural code. The greatest challenge for us is to figure out how to design the study that will reveal these codes."

Burgeoning understanding of our unconscious has deeply personal and also fascinating medical implications. The realization that our actions may not be the pristine results of our high-level reasoning can shake our faith in the strength of such cherished values as free will, a capacity to choose, and a sense of responsibility over those choices. We will never be able to control the rhythm of our heartbeats or the choreography of our limbic system. And yet, Gladwell writes that "our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled . . . [and] the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."

But unconscious processing is not just the stuff of compelling personal insight. For those with emotional disorders like anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and others who suffer from traumatic brain injuries either from a stroke or an accident, peeling away the behavioral layers of their dysfunction has revealed fascinating activity out of conscious awareness that may eventually provide clues to more effective treatments. Recent research on minimally conscious patients, for example, shows language centers on fire when they hear personal stories recounted by a family member. Research on schizophrenia reveals that most who are afflicted have an impaired ability to smell, which researchers think may provide some clue to understanding why they have such difficulty perceiving social cues. Or consider the case of Sarah Scantlin, who was hit by a drunk driver and lay mute at the Golden Plains Health Care Center in Hutchinson, Kan., for 20 years. After the Sept. 22, 1984, crash, the doctor told her parents that it was a miracle she was even alive but that she would never talk or move again on her own. Last month she began to speak--a simple "OK" at first, then more words, even short sentences.

How does this happen? What was going on all that time? How do we get some access to this thing called the unconscious?

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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New Research Points to a "Sixth Sense"

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

Ever get a gut feeling something just isn't quite right, and make a decision accordingly? Science is beginning to suggest those instincts may have roots deep in the brain.

Research in young volunteers points to some kind of "sixth sense" -- a mechanism in the brain that picks up on subtle clues, then sends out subconscious signals of trouble ahead.

The finding could help explain certain intuitive phenomena seen among humans. For example, in the recent Asian tsunami, aboriginal people sought out higher ground in the moments before the disaster, as did many wild animals. Could subtle changes in weather or the environment have warned them early on?

Just such an early warning system may exist in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area important in processing complex information, according to a report by psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis. Their findings appear in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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Scientists Can Read Your Mind

By Scott C. Anderson
Science For People

You no longer have to go to Madame LeFoni's to have a mind-reading session. Scientists can read your mind too, at least a little. And what they see when they look into your mind is, well, thought-provoking.

How do those tricky scientists pull off this legerdemain? They use a special type of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) that can measure minute flows of blood in your brain. Most scientists have believed that blood flow correlates to neural activity, but the proof has been hard to obtain. Is your brain really working out – pumping irony, so to speak – or is the blood flow totally unrelated to mental processes?

An experiment by Nikos Logothetis in 2001 put this to the test. In a very delicate study, he showed a tight correlation between the blood flow as measured by the MRI and electronic pulses as measured by an electrode implanted in a monkey brain. This finally put the science on a firm footing.

How does this spooky mind-reading trick work? It uses an intriguing aspect of MRI, namely that it can precisely locate specific types of molecules in a 3D space like your head (unless your head is only 2D -- in which case we can read what's on your mind by looking at your thought balloons). Using a variation of normal MRI called BOLD (blood oxygenation level-dependent) contrast they can actually distinguish the fresh blood that's carrying oxygen from the spent blood that is oxygen poor. This sensitive MRI then creates a 3D image on a computer showing what part of your brain is getting oxygen when you are thinking certain thoughts.

So if you're thinking about a rib-eye steak smothered in mushrooms (never write articles when you're hungry), can these scientists see a picture of it in your brain?

Well, almost. There are layers of nerve cells at the back of your head that act a lot like a movie screen, showing a processed image of what your eyeballs are looking at. And there are areas at the top of your brain that seem to map to a little person laid across your cortex. When you stick a bite of steak in your mouth and start to chew, a spot in your brain lights up, and it's reliable – a good scientist can tell when you're chewing by looking for that spot. Well, even a lousy scientist can tell you're chewing by looking at your jaw going up and down, but the point is that there's a definite correlation between the things that you do and certain parts of your brain that light up.

At least that's the theory.

But lately, things are being stood on their head. Turns out, if you just think about eating that steak, the same chewing area lights up. Okay, that makes sense. You have to think about it before you can make it happen, so maybe the scientists are seeing the thought that leads to the action. But it turns out to be stranger than that.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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More news at the Mind Power Blog

• Sales and the Law of Attraction
• Reading the Enemy's Mind
• Scientists Try to Explain Deja Vu
• The Crucial Error in "Think and Grow Rich"
• Brainwave Cap Controls Computer
• Matrix Realized: Scientists Connect Brains to Computers
• The Straight Truth About Hypnosis...
• Beat Slot Machines With Mind Power
  

Read them all here: www.mindpowernews.com/Blog

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