Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us by Mlodinow Leonard

Author:Mlodinow, Leonard [Mlodinow, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781846145971
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-05-09T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Sorting People and Things

We would be dazzled if we had to treat everything we saw, every visual input, as a separate element, and had to figure out the connections anew each time we opened our eyes.

—GARY KLEIN

IF YOU READ someone a list of ten or twenty items that could be bought at a supermarket, that person will remember only a few. If you recite the list repeatedly, the person’s recall will improve. But what really helps is if the items are mentioned within the categories they fall into—for example, vegetables, fruits, and cereals. Research suggests that we have neurons in our prefrontal cortex that respond to categories, and the list exercise illustrates the reason: categorization is a strategy our brains use to more efficiently process information.1 Remember Shereshevsky, the man with the flawless memory who had great trouble recognizing faces? In his memory, each person had many faces: faces as viewed from different angles, faces in varying lighting, faces for each emotion and for each nuance of emotional intensity. As a result, the encyclopedia of faces on the bookshelf of Shereshevsky’s brain was exceptionally thick and difficult to search, and the process of identifying a new face by matching it to one previously seen—which is the essence of what categorization is—was correspondingly cumbersome.

Every object and person we encounter in the world is unique, but we wouldn’t function very well if we perceived them that way. We don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to observe and consider each detail of every item in our environment. Instead, we employ a few salient traits that we do observe to assign the object to a category, and then we base our assessment of the object on the category rather than the object itself. By maintaining a set of categories, we thus expedite our reactions. If we hadn’t evolved to operate that way, if our brains treated everything we encountered as an individual, we might be eaten by a bear while still deciding whether this particular furry creature is as dangerous as the one that ate Uncle Bob. Instead, once we see a couple bears eat our relatives, the whole species gets a bad reputation. Then, thanks to categorical thinking, when we spot a huge, shaggy animal with large, sharp incisors, we don’t hang around gathering more data; we act on our automatic hunch that it is dangerous and move away from it. Similarly, once we see a few chairs, we assume that if an object has four legs and a back, it was made to sit on; or if the driver in front of us is weaving erratically, we judge that it is best to keep our distance.

Thinking in terms of generic categories such as “bears,” “chairs,” and “erratic drivers” helps us to navigate our environment with great speed and efficiency; we understand an object’s gross significance first and worry about its individuality later. Categorization is one of the most important mental acts we perform, and we do it all the time.

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