Okay great thank you everyone for coming two major addendum to this event are the pizza in the back and booktv is part of cspan is with us tonight thank you for being here. As well we will have a q and a after the event just so you know, we have a audience mic ill be passing arranged if they can hold a question until they receive a mic so we can hear each other as it were. And then also if everyone could put their devices to silent mode or off that would be great so we have any interruptions during the event joan one of them apparently, and then just by way of introduction social psychologist is enroll leading experts on unconscience mind in 170 publication and 2014 received scientific contribution award from American Psychology Association and he was on the faculty here at nyu from 1981 to 2003, and is currently faculty at yale university. This is actually before you know it launch event, and publication date is tomorrow o. So if you want to pick up a copy ahead of time registers are at the very best and well be closing at 7 30 but until then, dr. John everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you to bookstore for hosting this this is a really Perfect Place for this to happen. At nyu where i started fresh out of the midwest, i was a disk jockey in high school an college for most of the 1970s, there you go great mustache, from there from the midwest and the lakes of Northern Michigan and family cottage, coming right to moshings that was a bit of a shock and then being in nyu starting in the 80s yeah i know. That was a lock time ago right this was taken last week so [laughter] but but to be from that kind of a background and then to come to new york city as it still is you know this teaming with crazy noise and people and something not crazy people but so much going on at once and i remember being on the street here in Washington Place just a couple of blocks from here. And wondering how in the world do people do it . How yipght know i could do it how do i handle all of this and railingsing that only way you cant handle it through your conscience attention you cant handle it by thinking because it is just too much and we must have ways to deal with it that help us out thats why i got the idea that unconscience influences in our life are not because of some dark secret second mind that is hidden away for unconscience at all baa its a matter of where our attention is so limited and we have to pox on somethings theres so much else going on a lot of us slip through that influences us most the time in daily life so this is 40 years of research of the of the new scientific and systemic way looking at the unconscience influences on our life how we think and teal and do. And in everyday life its not the unconscience of a level and evil twin in living inside of our head at all its a very adaptive helpful system that that survive Natural Selection right so its in our favor and we can make use of it especially if we with know whats going on we can make use of it. Theres a disconnect between all of that going on in our minds and focused on present so we think the way we feel and the reasons what for what we do is right there in front of us because thats where our attention is right in the present but our mind is also in the path and of the future and thats all going on inside but we only think whats going on in influencing us is whats right there in the present and thats the big disconnect and thats the source of the influences so thats how the book before you know it is organized and theres one who localize unconscience in inside, insided head instead of being by evil spirit people who had Mental Illnesses had a physical problem this was a medicalization of Mental Illness but a separate unconscience mind. She did not believe this was true of everybody that they have a level selfdestructive mind going on but freud did he did from mentally ill from people with problems, to everyday normal human functioning for everybody and thats not what were talking about in the last 40 year of research which is on basic randomly selected human beings not people with problem, abnormal schedule this is how the talk is organized and sort of how the book is organize od, and i know i have, you know, maybe 20 minutes so ill hit the highlights theres a lot more in the book theres a lot of study and real life demonstration, applications, therapies of faking it out into the real world and so stores and Grocery Stores and normal settings of everyday life not just neuroscience social network malice, lots of different kinds of analysis of studies. But this was sort of how it is organize od from thes as, future within and jump right into influences to come from the fairly deep evolutionary path of course we dont have any memory of that. Something we were born with that was innate and what are influences were born with just basic motivation for survival for safety, to avoid disease, reproduction and mating and bonging and cooperating with each other and we have those sort of factory equip we have those at birth were not aware of them and were not necessarily aware of how they operate but its interesting because these deep roots are in our evolutionary path influence us in surprising ways and abstract kind of thoughts, with for example, as well see in our Political Attitudes our attitudes towards immigration and being conservative or liberal based on things like physical safety and avoidance it is a current event. We hear our leaders talking about being disgusted. We hear them talk about having putting a barrier and boundaries and kicking people out just bairvegly like a disease of a body we have to get rid of. We have to e eradicate to protet ourselves from the virus coming into our body and metaphor by leaders for hundreds of years that immigrants are like bacteria or the outcast groups of society or like viruses or germs that need to be eradicated up to save the body politics. So what we did here in these studies of very simple. Is to take advantage of a flu epidemic 2010 or 2011 the h1n1 and asked them about the flu virus that raise threat of the flu that was deadly and dangerous and attitudes towards immigration. Sort of a main part of the study and this was a nationwide sample and also people at Yale College Students at the dining hall. And it turned out that everwards we asked them if theyve been vaccinated or not and what happened is if we had raised idea of the flu and hay hasnt been attitudes towards immigration became more negative they were more against immigration if you raise the flu virus unsystemically related and you raise flu virus and those attitudes become more negative if they hadnt been vaccinated if theyve been vaccinated you found that u up at the end their attitude to xraition become more positive. So now theres no threat. The feeling of physical safety is underlying of political safety or feelings towards immigration, and a immigrants and we do the same thing with having them wash their hands with Hand Sanitizer only thing if you raise idea of the flu and give a chance to wash their hands with sanitizer their at to dos towards immigration become more positive. So when you hear a lot of this talk about disgust and immigration being disgusting and so forth, and unfortunately were talking about people, you know, and using a metaphor of people being like germ or viruses it is a powerful one and speaks to a very deep need for actual safety and very important one and questions are at end. So hes a germaphobe. Exactly. Hes a germaphobe. [inaudible conversations] i think its a perfect illustration of that study theres a question and answer period, okay, thank you. So we have conservative bairvegly having more of a concern for physical safety than liberal. Theres lots of rrnlg on this. Children who are age 4 or more afraid of something fear provoking stiming plus and having more of a reaction or more conservative than attitude 20 years later at age 23 size of the human process of fear and e Emotional Center is larger than those in licials and studies going back ten years underlying issue here is the physical safety. So a lot of them make them feel afraid and they become more conservative it is known for a long time but no one has ever meads, turned a conservative into a liberal before so what we did in a studies up at yale is to have people imagine being totally physically safe and genie gives you a superpower to fly what most people prefer, or o its to be invulnerable to harm like you fall downstairs nothing bad happen hads a bullet would bounce off of you you cut yourself, and this is very rich and imagination of having the superpower. So then we see is on gay rights or samesex marriage or marijuana use, or whatever you have it. The standard attitudes that differentiates clearly especially in our society, and we look in the different conditions if they just imagine themselves if they were able to fly or to be invulnerable to harm what you see is in the fly condition had is the control condition, no change you get the standard conservative are are more conservative than liberal which is no big surprise but they become more liberal and a difference is much less if they just imagine themselves to be physically safe. And further study we asked the very direct question as it captures the essence of being conservative which is resistance to social change. And if you ask that question under same kind of manipulation now you basically turn conservative into liberal if theyve just imagined themselves being physically safe from harm, now their social attitude become more liberal and liberals arent affected. Okay these are democrats and republicanses in terms of who they voted for in the last election. You have bairvegly change their social attitude and turned conservative into liberals for the first time. By making them feel physically safe so the point is, these roots of the tree had in the revolutionary needs for physical safety and disease and so forth manifest themselves in ab tract social attitudes in other ways. Theres other o aspect of the past, and if youre a parent you know a lot of things happen in the first three or four years of life. And were not aware of them we have Early Childhood amnesia we dont have memories before age four or age three, and you know hardly anything before that. But a lot of things happen had to us during those years. A lot of experiences happen to us. But we with dont have memory for them and influence us without knowing why were a certain way. This is my daughter long time ago now shes 11 but back then she was a fan of Lightning Mcqueen with loved car movie and sat in a chair and rode around the house in Lightning Mcqueen chair and car is beat up she watched this movie 60 times every night she wanted to see this movie years go by now shes five or six. I say you know she wants to watch a movie how about cars we havent seen cars for a while whats cars . She has no memory of it. What are you talking about the chair youre sitting in is cars she has absolutely no memory of ever seeing this movie before and we watch it that night im watch withing her shes surprised at the things that are surprising and laugh at the jokes like shes never seen this movie before but seen it 50 or o 60 times and thought she was Lightning Mcqueen saw a red corvette thats where she saw it all of the time. But she had no memory of it so what is going on early in life . Very important things your attachment to your parents whether your parents are there for you at age one whether their when weather you feel you can trust them to be there or o feel they have your back on theyre wave out for you in all of that. That can be measured at a age one. And predict outcome later in life like how many friends you have in high school. How long your relationships last in your 20s. And this is at age one when it is measured longitude studies are showing that thats something we dont have memory of not that much memory of what was going on early in life and yet it has this dramatic effect later. So thats a recents past. What we have with is a feeling of warm a physical warmth being held close during breastfeeding or being held close by the parent early in life and have that with this idea physical warmth. This is another kind of physical experience, feeling physical coldness or o physical warmth and having it effect us to make us feel people are warm and trustworthy or not. Theyll betray us and they wont be so studies show this link between again, physical experiences of warmth or coldness and cold or warm experiences if you same part of the brain in human is active when you touch something warm as when youre texting to your family and friends. The same part of the brain is like the two things are connected. Same thing happens with cold experiences. If you touch something cold, its same part that is active that part with small part of the brain is when someone betrays you in economics game when they keep autoof the money you gave them instead of giving you your share that kind of they betray your trust. Theres lots of studies now showing this, in fact showing that your body temperature tracks how how warm you feel towards your family and Friends Hospital studies measuring bodies temperature, and having you rate how close you are to your family and friends they track together. Daily diary studies where people write how warm or cold they feel at the moment and also a record of the kind of generous and prosocial things they did that day they also go up and down together and your physical temperature is relate ared to your social temperature so a connection of like physical experiences connecting to the to your influencing you without your knowing it, your social warmth and social coldness. Even therapies are being developed people who feel isolated and lonely giving them heat treatments and showing two weeks later a market improvement in how in how happy they are and how good they feel about the relations with other people like family and friends so it is wail being used now in therapy so we have known this in a way right. You know, but warm fire plays in the winter time or warm cup of coffee when they greet you when they come into your house or office. But even dante knew this and i was watching a documentary on hell had is something i like to do on the Discovery Channel and documentary on hell who was featuring donte and i was windchilling yeah, and announcer was saying and heres the ninth level worst level right you know, murderers are on search and lawyers are on five and this is nine. This is down nine with satan with a frozen lake this is where the coldhearted are punished betray others and judas but betrayed dante himself and had him executed chewed on by seitan but in middle of hell this is worth punishment and others this will be frozen in ice. From the great poet remember fits the crime so it has been arranged for 1,000 years or soso weve known this this our culture so these are deep roots that influence us in normal everyday poppingsings feeling good or bad or cold towards people and feeling political attitude this kind of thing influenced by deep roots, and so were moving now as fast as we can to the present. And influences going on in the present again with all of this going on how do we deal with it and manage to to do the right thing in social situations and one thing we do naturally is to intimidate each other to mimic each other we know that school is fish and birds school is fish and flock of angt lope and flock and herds of antelope move this as one, and recently has been discoveredded in cats although im skeptical about this having three cats of my own but it whats in people and infants who are natural imitator and soak up and intimidate what adults and their fellow boys and girls are doing around them, and really soaking this up with age two or three by inti at a timing by what others are doing. We studied that here at nyu tonia and i basically a study of how people physically imitate physical behaviors crossing arm, shaking your nervously and cross leg and that kind of thing showing people do that naturally without realizing theyre doing it and someone shaking their foot youll do it more and hands behind all of these things people do it more and again without realizing theyre doing it that was nice. In real life showing antia social kind of behaviors are manifest in graffiti people are more likely to litter if theres grandfather tee like on the right side more likely to take a pamphlet to throw it on the floor ands not throw it away so antisocial behavior is contagious and what you see it what you do. When that regard social Network Analysis sews obesity, happiness, depression, cooperation, all of those spread through social network. So that if someone three steps from you is o obese depressed youll be obese yourself even though you dont know them because connection is u through somebody else you both know maybe three or four steps removed. And these are large scale social networks of aloom nigh association for people in a credit union or bank and online online shows in a big way these things lap on facebook three days so hood of somebody you read will influence you and make you have a mood three days later. One moral of the story is take a life hack be careful whoa your facebook friends are because these things spread and most of us let everybody you know if we know them be our friend who cares right but youre going to get their feed and their post, and their behavior their moods and so forth are contagious so we dont have to have everybody in the world emp though you know people we dont know as our friends because were definitely opening ourselves to these kinds of influences were all very much connected in the present to what everybody else is doing to their moods and to their behavior. Theres a real downside what have you see is and what you do thats through ads this this isg study that kill out last year request 1,000 teenage drinkers sample teenagers 13 to 19 who drink alcohol and sometimes they drink a lot but underage drinkers of the more tv alcohol ads they watch, the more they drink. And big effect and a lot of the time theyre watching things with parents for example afternoon sports like nfl gails or whatever. Theyre watching and lots of lots of beer and rum and other kinds of alcohol ads. Its specific more kind of alcohol ad they watch the her they actually drink and it raises it three or four times. So people on cnn correspondent who is run stories they know longer watch games live with their kids they record them and then play them back and zip over the comerls because they realize the effect that these ads are having but often kiss watch whatever they want and not realizing maybe the effect of well just merely watching these ads or having on their behavior and something we have to be very careful of. In a real world theres nice effect and why do we do this kind of imitation so forth it does cause bonging and increase bonding closeness to each other and waitresses who have order of the customers repeat back the actual order and get larger tip significantly larger tips as a result thats all they did was repeat back the order in a French Department store Electronic Store a large large Department Store in france, the same kind of has been studied in same kind of effect happens you reare pete back what customer is asking is like what can i help you with like to buy an mp3 player okay, or for your grandson who is turning 13 or not that and what you see it sales go up into the 80 instead of 60 and a Customer Satisfaction they get them outside in the parking lot afterwards is dramatically increased as well. So this had is actually been taken outen the field this actually works, and its again, just naturally imitating what other people do causes wonderful effect of bonding. Other that is discussed before you know it but also a very big one a study by economist behavioral economist is how your current context life, context like work or home or whatever, causes you to be a different person the context make you a different person you kowk a different permit in different context we all know this. But this is standard meme expressing that idea that you can be a different person and different places. Maybe not dramatically but well known economist, and his colleagues have studied how Investment Bankers in Swiss Investment banks are actually more or less honest dpengdzing if theyre at home or at the work place and what they do is they ask questions on a a coin toss game when theyre all at home on a saturday. But before hand for some of them asked them to describe their Work Environment so they have to imagine being at work and a write down what it is like in or office and so forth and that puts them back in that work context. Or not but theyre all at home other people they dont have that kind of thing and then they have them flip coin told to win 20 or 20 euro or o 20 swiss rank for each successful head that they toss. And then they have to say how many but if you see distribution on the right where theyve thought about their Work Environment, and it is shifted far to the right suddenly oh, i imaginelyically got 20, people on the left are same people theyre randomly assigned to be in the work or office sorry, the work or Home Condition and when theyre at home and not reminded of the office theyre very honest. But distribution of what they get in heads follows a standard by normal distribution which is what you expect by chance so theyre being fair and not cheating people on the right if theyve been reminded of Work Environment is honest and greedy but these are same people randomly assigned to be work or home kind of context. So that changes people. And thats another kind of influence they have no idea this was going on in this study identify kind of unconscience influence on what you do. Unfortunately this happens to kids we know the problem with girls and math and stem and a science and the idea that girls cant do math or girls cant be good scientists unfortunately the study was about ten years old now. But this happens even in fiveyearolds this is so much in the culture that these are children at Asian American girls at harvard preschool. About 2002 or so, and this study caused a lot of shock when it was announced when they found if they had just been reminded these children by drawing coloring in cartoon of their aaron identity so these are asian they do better at math its but colored in cartoon having to do with their girl or female identity, they do significantly worse than average and again these children are randomly assigned to be in either the asian or with stereotownship that very good at math or science or girl it is the opposite and it changes their actual performance again these children have no idea this influence is operate oing on how well they do on the math test but again it is a different identity causing differences in their actual performance and their actual behavior. The future we think of the future and goals that aware trying to get done and theyre sort of driving our behavior and this is a game that is horrible and never play it if you dont already called candy crush because what will happen is you work on some level an you get real close, oh, you fail. Real close and then for a week and impossible so close. But at the end they offer you you know, like for money and if you pay 5 or 10 it will give you five extra moves it is just this stupid game its an app but youll do it. Because i dont to beat this level may never get this close again so tempting and then you find yourself because you want that goal of finishing that level you pay and then you get your Bank Statement the next months which is like apple store, apple store 10, this is like oh, my god you think what was i doing its a stupid game. Right. Who cares if i get stupid candy crush things . But you do. You do because goal is operate oing youre close to the goal you want it so bad and yeah, you have 5 who cares and do it over and over again, an you pay you pay at leisure. It changes all these things in the present, so the future and thinking about the future is changing what you think in the present. And peters here today. Peter and i, this was 20 years ago you took this photograph, gabriela. Yes, you did, of course. In berlin, 1989. 30 years, oh, my god, 1990. And we were working on this idea of how do we study, how do we experimentally show the idea of unconscious goal pursuit in the laboratory and so forth. And we started a program of Research Showing we could provoke people without their realizing it unconsciously to achieve more or to cooperate more or to do whatever goal more. And theres some nice field studies that have been taken out in the field, and that was shown to be a very reliable effect over, you know, hundreds and hundreds of studies and a recent review. But the nice demonstrations, this is ethers work esthers work with gold priming in Grocery Stores. People come in and get a recipe flyer, and these are people who are obese and have a diet goal and people who are not to bees do not have the diet goal show no effect of these recipe flyers. But what happens at the end, they had seen these words about health and Healthy Eating going into the store, is they spend significantly less on snack foods. They get them coming out of the store, and they take a picture of the receipt, and they show that they spend onethird as much, half as much on Healthy Snack foods in the store because this goal is operating. The goal is determining what youre buying, what youre paying attention to, and they have no idea that this recipe flyer had triggered that goal at all. They show no awareness. People remember what was on the are recipe flyer at the end, and yet they made e this dramatic improvement in their purchasing so they dont have it at home to eat. Which is a nice effect. So, yeah, theres somebody who came before us who talked about unconscious motivations. But, you know, were doing this experimentally with random, average people and not people who have psychopathological problems. But its certainly a concept, an idea thats been around before us. Another nice thing about goals is they operate all the time, they operate in the background. And ill get to why that alligators there in a second. The alligator is featured in the book, before you know it. But the goals keep operating. For example, have you ever tried to remember something, you know you know the answer, and you think and you think, and you cant, and later on youre doing something completely different, the answer pops into your head. Thats showing your unconscious goal was working on that in the background still trying to find the answer. You may have forgotten you even wanted to know that anymore, and it pops into your head. Sherlock holmes did this. When he got a problem he cant solve, he does something completely different. He plays the violin or takes cocaine or whatever he does. He does Something Else besides what hes working on. He says its a great way to refresh the mind so that when he goes back to the problem, he has ideas and he has solutions. And this is, you know, a very nice trick, because what youre doing is youre letting the unconscious problemsolving work happen with focusing your conscious attention on Something Else. And, actually, were very good at solving problems. Norman mailer gave advice to people, gave them unconscious assignments so in the morning they were ready to write whatever the assignment was about. And, actually, i did that writing this book. You get up in the morning, you have structure, and it really just happens. I think this is great advice, and it comes from sherlock holmes, so it cant be wrong. [laughter] we know it happens in historical events such as ark immediate d. C. And his solution when he shouts eureka and runs naked through the streets of syracuse. This is a grated version of that, but he actually ran naked through the streets of syracuse because it came to him in the bath, right . The public bath. Came to him out of the blue. The alligator is mine. I had a dream about an alligator. I was trying to find an answer to something i was with my daughter who was less than a year old, we were at our house in new haven where she first started out. She never took naps, and i was exhausted. And i finally got her to, you know, i got her in her crib, and i shut the door. I dont think she took a nap, but at least i could take a nap. I fell down on the belled. It was about ten years ago, it was fall, you can see the colorful leavings. I fell completely asleep, and i had this dream immediately, and the dream was an alligator that flipped over, that looked at me and flipped over it was a very short dream, i immediately knew the answer to the problem id been work on for years. And that was how can it be that science was showing these effects of stereotyping, say, in five stereotypes in 5yearold kids or even infants who had these things, how could it . Because we always were trained and our field taught us that these only happen with lots of experience, these only should happen in adults with lots of experience. How could they be happening with little kids and infants, and thats what the research was showing. And the answer was they were there first. The alligator is saying flip your assumptionings. Dont think that assumptions. Dont think that everything has to start out in your conscious mind and gets practiced until it gets to be like driving or typing. The unconscious kinds of influences can be there first, and thats where we started this talk with the idea of the path. But i did not have that insight. I looked back through all of my writings, and suddenly its there. It was this stupid alligator who, you know, grinned at me and told me that, but i immediately knew the answer, and it was an incredible relief i felt. After years of trying to understand those data which were growing and growing at the time. So what does this say . Just to conclude, about your ability to be, you know, have control over your own mind. You look at this and say, my god, look at all the ways i dont really have control over my mind. And thats, i dont think, the way to look at it. Because people, we want to believe that were the captain of our ship, captain of our soul and, you know, where we point the ship is where its going to go. But, you know, thats a bad captain, because the good captain is the one whos going to take into account the currents, the wind and the other influences that arent his or her influences, you know . And if you dont do that, you crash into the rocks, you drift out to sea. So the best way to increase the free will that you do have is acknowledge these other influences are existing and not that you have total control. Once you know about them, you can do something about them. You can even use them to your advantage. Instead of aiming at the whole when the winds going like this and if you do that all the time, youll play golf as well as i do, which is pretty badly. Youve got to take these things into account and adjust for them and know about them, and that way youll have a lot more mind control. And thats really the end story that you have mind control is the last chapter of the book. It really says you have a lot more control over these things. You can use them to your advantage. Theres a lot of Practical Implications and useful life hack kinds of things that come right out of, i have a list of 17 that was easy to generate just through the book. Its a lot of Practical Implications and utility there too. So thats where we are, and thank you for coming. I really appreciate your coming, and i want to thank cspan for televising this and recording it too. And this is the Opening Event of this, the book comes out tomorrow. So its going to be in bookstores tomorrow. I was at nyu for so long, and a lot of nyu family are here, they came here tonight, im really happy. And everybody else, Simon Schuster and touchstone and is just want to say thank you to everybody. [applause] yeah. So theres a boom mic that goes around if you have a question because theyd like to record it for the booktv program. So theyll stick that in your face. Yeah. Yeah, im fine with it, yeah. [inaudible conversations] alligator reference, i didnt understand. If you could just are repeat the alligator reference. The alligator flipped over, and thats how yeah, i was going, its a story i tell in the book in great detail. I was trying to do it quickly. What happened was this, i was we have all these, all these new studies coming out of infants and Young Children especially showing these kinds of effects. And theres also an area called evolutionary psychology which is also showing these effects. But theyre things that people dont practice. They dont do it frequently. And theyre showing it in young people who dont have a lifetime of experience. We had thought for so long that we could get at kids at age 6, in first grade, because its the educational system puts the idea into a girls head that she cant do math. We thought, oh, something by age 10, it happens, we could get them early, first, second, third grade and make sure they know they have just as much ability as boys do and all of that. And thats why that study was so shocking with 5yearolds, because it was already in their head. Things we thought took a lifetime or at least a good deal of adolescence to really get engrained to be unconscious, like you drive a car long enough, you can do things without thinking. That was sort of the standard model of how these effects happened. A lot of people still believe this is how it happens, this is how it getted ingrained in your gets ingrained in your mind. And i couldnt understand how these effects could happen in Young Children. The alligator was saying, flip it over. Consciousness was a relatively late human evolutionary development. It wasnt there early on, you know, through evolutionary history. It was there later. We already had these unconscious abilities that are discussed in the book such as sort of immediate reactions to people based on their emotional expression. We can read motional expressions. We have friend or foe reactions to people right off the bat within half a second or less. We have a lot of these abilities to go with or to avoid something. We have a lot of these skills that are there sort of innately and to make sense of them in terms of the old model didnt make sense. The alligator was flipping saying flip it over. Think about it, the unconscious is there first. Conscious skills build on that, and then it all makes sense. You can build your own demons, you can build your own skills through a lot of experience, and we do that all the time. Its wonderful. We start factory equipped with a lot of them already, and i hadnt gottennen that point. And it took that. It took that i was exhausted, that dream hit me, and it just everything and interestingly to me, ill just add it was such a relief that i just felt like i wanted to give up. I was demotivated. Thats what i wanted to understand, and now i understood it fine. I didnt want to do any work anymore. This totally answered my question, i had the answer, and that was it. I wanted to just relax and goof off and retire at an early age. But thats the effect of a motivation when youve finally got your goal and you satisfied it, its like youve done it. You sort of let off, you sort of relax a little bit. But thats a little longer version of the alligator. But the alligator, you know how these discoveries, einstein shaving and the guy who discovers the benzene ring, sees a dragon or snake in the fireplace, these examples im not saying mine is up there with these great scientific discoveries, but it is interesting that i have a dream, right in and so what is my dream about . My unconscious is telling me about itself. Its telling me about how the unconscious works, you know . And thats interesting. Its not about a benzene ring, its about how the unconscious is saying something about how unconscious things work which is very, i thought, cool. And ill never forget that dream, and ill never ever forget my feeling after i woke up. Yeah. [inaudible] i dont know. Thats up to them. I think they want to have what youre saying on the recording. I was just curious to know when you gave the example about the orange crush and that people always go for that extra reward, what percentage of the people or is it absolutely everyone . Because revealing something about myself, huhuh, no way. Good for you. I mean im not a gambler either. Yeah, yeah. But they have a Business Model that they are incredibly hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars theyve made, and this is where they make the money. These are free games. You can download them for free. The only way they get any money is if you buy these extra moves, and theyre making hundreds of millions of dollars. [inaudible] what percentage of people go for that in. I dont know. For that . I dont know. Its high enough. I mean, its a very widelyplayed game. Tens of millions of people around the world, i dont know. But its something that works, and i feel it myself. I understand how that, how you feel tempted to do that, and you kick yourself the next day when you see that, you know, your receipts in your email and stuff like that. But, yes, if you cannot do that, good for you. I mean, thats the smart thing. Also with supermarkets, theres a psychology to marketing naturally where they place the product absolutely. The, you know this, im just going to say it. The milk and the bread and those things, the basics that you have to have are in the farthest corner of the store. Why . Because you have to walk through the rest of the store being tempted by all the things on the shelf. And what to they put there at the Cash Register at the end . Impulse buys, thats right. Do you want to come up here . [laughter] you could, i think you could. They put the impulse stuff. Why is that . Because if you put it to the back of the store to say i dont really need that candy, that gum, that stupid magazine about madonna, you know . But if its right there, they ring it up in phi seconds, and you have no five seconds, and you have no chance to change your mind. Thats why they put that stuff there, absolutely. I was just curious because when talking about unconsciousness, i think its mostly about, like, something which comes by nature instead of come by nurture, or you could, like, adjust them by yourself. Im a freshman, so basically know nothing, but i do know that there is this clear distinction between, like, super ego, the rational part instead of the unconscious or, like, nature part. So how do you explain this, like, traditional conflict between nature and nurture . Yeah. I think thats absolute fallacy. What you just described is a way a lot of people as in historically from descartes on, we have that today, we had that with freud, the unconscious mistakes of bad pathology, and the conscious mind was the white knight that came in and rode to the rescue and fixed everything. But theres just as many good things and adaptive things going on very quickly unconsciously that thats why its there. Thats through Natural Selection. It wouldnt be destructive and bad. Why would it be there at all if it led people to the make mistakes . So these are tendencies to deal with people immediately, to read motion aleck presentations immediately emotional expressions immediately. To do the right thing on the spot. My book is absolutely full of those things. The conscious stuff is very good and helpful in in many circumstances. The most difficult chapter i had to write called when can you trust your gut, because there are some books that say you should always trust it and other books that say you should never trust your gut. You should never use your impulses or trust your unconscious intuitions. So its nuanced. Its a question of there are times when you can and times when you cant, times when you should and when you shouldnt. Its not so easy as saying one is good and one is bad. Ill give one example. Oh, this is an emotional, impulsive kind of thing, and its so bad that you did it, but sometimes people emotionally and impulsively go into freezing water and save a child too. They do it without thinking. And its the case of a person whos not that far from here 30 years ago named reginald andrews, i tell this story in the book, jumped down in the 8th street and and 14th street subway because a blind man mistook gap between with his cane, the gap between two subway cars, and he walked mistook it for the door. And this man jumped down as the train was leaving, risking his own life, grabbed the blind man, pulled him underneath the lip where the platform goes out a little bit and saved his life. And it was such a heroic, spontaneous act. He had no time to think. And often times we dont do these things, somebody else will do it. A very negative thing to cause us not to exercise, to have that extra dessert, to drink again tonight instead of not drinking tonight and starting we are very good at coming up with conscious rationalizations to do negative, destructive things. All im saying is not ones good and the others bad, but its a twodimensional thing. Theres good and bad both kinds of thoughts, and its not rational and consciousness is the source of evil. Freud wasnt the first to do this. People have always said the devil made me do it. Anything negative they blamed that they were possessed by an evil spirit, and freud just put it in our head and called it the unconscious. And, again, it was the scapegoat for all the bad things that happened. A lot of these bad things were because we actually thought about it and made the decision it was sort of selfish or a good rationalization, but we want to blame it on, oh, this part of our mind that we dont control is not us. You saying that instead of like a model of two sides like a biside model is actually a fullon model which you actually have consciousness and unconsciousness [inaudible] its just some of those are beneficial and others are not. I would say, you know, the dimension good bad does not map onto conscious unconscious. Have it be orr nothingal, a separate dimension that you can have good and bad of each. Instead of just saying one is always good and one is always bad. Because the idea that we have these unconscious systems and tendencies and innate motivations and all of that how can this survive natural evolution, Natural Selection. It didnt fitted with evolution and darwin at all. Its not the case that one is good and one is bad. Its not that simple. Its that theres good and bad of each, and its certainly great that we have conscious thought and conscious abilities to override these things when were, we have a bad impulse to do something, we want to try to control it. Thank you. Okay. I have a second question. It seems to me the part where you explained the studies about people conforming, emulating people around as a way of fitting in. Its age and your survival. You become part of the group. So this kind of thinking, i think this is really related to conscious thinking. Am i correct . This is, like you can do it without realizing it. Okay. Its a controlled thing that we do without realizing it. I was thinking, okay, more along the lines like people who behave a certain way according to like, for example, alliances. If they have a Political Alliance with certain group, they will behave in accordance with what their alliance was originally. This is not the same thing as conforming to the group. This is more conscious thinking. This is about political selfinterest. Sure, sure, sure extreme conscious thinking. Sure. Possibly going against your own innate desires, but youre doing them just because you have so in this sense, the conscious thinking is very Destructive Force in your life. Yeah, but we do also have sort of an innate tendency to cooperate and do things together and coordinate our activities with people who are in our own group, and that is supported by this more unconscious cooperation kind of mechanism that people are studying more and more these days. So there are these sort of supports for that kind of thing. But, certainly, alliances in the old days, tribes, the coordinated activity in the political sense, you know, one group against the other, its certainly its supported by both kinds of thinking. I mean, youre definitely right. I was curious, like, during your 20 years of research have you ever encountered a case where you need to interpret a dream . Like, would you prefer the freudian, like, everyone is bisexual in theory or putting electronic, like, into humans brain and examining the data . Like, which one would you prefer . I choose neither . [laughter] putting something in someones brain and analyzing it, i dont know how to do that. I would not trust myself to do that. You mean like imaging someones brain, like neuroscience . How brains are imaged when doing some task . Yeah. Maybe some magnetic maen chiens that observe machines that observe the data and activities you know, this is a great question, but where it takes me is the idea that we have many, we have many really great methods today, and we shouldnt just, people shouldnt just stick to one and the answers they get just from the one, you know . Very different methods are converging on the same answer, then its really persuasive. And what i try to do in the book is show for any of these topics that neuroscience thoughs these effect shows these effects are there, in reallife applications, it works in the reallife applications. And all these different methods are very different, but theyre all saying the same thing, that pattern and across all the different methods. So neuroscience is important, but by itself it doesnt tell us all that much. Behavioral studies are important, but if you put all these together, they really build a rich model and deeper understanding of whats really going on instead of the surface kinds of effects youre getting, the why and the reasons and the mechanisms. So i would say we should not close our minds to any kind of method as long as its done in a scientific way. The dream analysis would have to be done, and there are people like alan hobson, for example, who to these kinds of studies very scientifically and experimentally and study the dream content and so forth. Even induced dream content from outside, people who are sleeping in the lab. So there are studies of sleep and dreams that are very difficult to do. But to interpret after the fact what someones dream means in terms of your own theory is just, its not plausible. I mean, its just, basically, you can take anything after the fact and interpret it to be correct with your theory. And what you really want to do is make predictions beforehand that wouldnt with have made that would not have been made otherwise and see if theyre true. Predicting things, like planets that no one knew were there that should be there and they were there, and these were amazing predictions but only generated because of einsteins theory. And thats the kind of thing we can have more faith in. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. [applause] we close at 7 30, so youve got a little bit of time, and books are on sale at the other end of the store. [inaudible conversations] heres a look at some of the best books of the year according to amazon. Edward luce, columnist for the financial times, argues that liberal democracy is threatennenned in the retreat of western liberalism. In the last castle, Denise Kiernan reports on the largest private residence in u. S. History. Tom nichols of the u. S. Naval war college argues that due to the spread of the internet and 24hour news, Expert Opinion is now being discounted in the death of expertise. The future of humanity in homo deus, and buzzfeeds essays on her upbringing of the daughter of indian immigrants in canada, one day well all be dead and one of this will matter. Our teacher gave us a checklist of dominant versus recessive alleles. The subtext from this particularly nationalistic teacher appeared to me only years later was that we would all end up looking darker and more vague than we did in the past. She wasnt exactly unhappy about it, but she did express some concern regarding the eventual loss of the blueeyed and natural blond. We were paired up with someone of the opposite sex so we could compare genes to determine what our potential child would look like. Let me really drive this home. A public schoolteacher in suburban calgary told her teenage students to pretend they were going to have sex with each other and their biologically likely babies. I, one of the only ethnic kids in the class my genes were already steamrolling everybody elses [laughter] my partner eric, a white boy who was a holster tshirt personified went down the checklist with me. When we arrived at hair on fingers or knuckles, i looked at my hands for the very first time. Standing up were soft, black strands of hair. I was horrified. How had i never noticed such a grotesque feature . I always knew my legs were hairy, my upper lip bristled enough to catch flies, but i had overlooked this few barbarity. Well, i dont have any, erin said looking up eric said looking up at me. I nodded and said, me neither. You can watch these authors on our web site, booktv. Org. Youre watching booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Heres our prime time lineup. Starting shortly, lindsay fifthsharris fitzharris looks at the medical advances of dr. Joseph lister. Then at eight, George Mason University professor kimberly mehlman examines human trafficking. At 8 50, David Horowitz examines the left s impact on americas universities and colleges. And then on booktvs after words at 10 p. M. , the career of james conant, administrative director of the Manhattan Project and later the president of harvard university. And we wrap up at 11 with Rolling Stones matt tie week by who reports on the life and death of eric garner. That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. Television for serious readers. And now, author Lindsay Fitzharris looks at 19th century medicine and the advances made by dr. Joseph lister. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Can everyone hear me well . Good. Im mary mcloughlin, im a Program Coordinator with the smithsonian associates, and id like to welcome you to what promises to be the very perfecting halloween evening [laughter] on the grisly world of victorian surgery. Before we begin and i introduce our speaker, id like to ask everyone to, please, check their cell phones and make sure th