Consciousness is Overrated

Incognito's author would go so far as to say that consciousness is useless, but then qualifies that statement. What's certain is that the unconscious mind does far more than most of us are consciousof. A group of people unable to retain short term memory were in a study in which they were taught to play tetris. The following day, they had no recollection of this, but their ability to play the game was on the same level as right after they were taught. Some had reported seeing colored shapes falling from the sky in their dreams.

There's more. Plenty more examples of where the unconscious mind controls our actions and decisions against our wills. People end up in relationships with someone with the same first letter in their name more frequently than randomness would allow. You're more likely to believe something that's familiar. A group was presented sentences that contained a false fact, and then a week later were asked to rate the veracity of a series of statements. When the one they had heard before, but did not recall hearing, was uttered, participants were more likely to say they believed it even when they knew it was incorrect. Repetition and familiarity create reality. It's why politicians say the same things over and over again, and why advertisements are so repetitive. 

It's not all bad. A good driver doesn't think much about driving. A good editor can look at a page and spot a problem without consciously reading a thing. That one is my example, but one the author offered was professional chicken sexers. 

Chicken sexers are people who take one day old chicks, look at their butts, and determine whether they are male or female (and then toss the males on a conveyor belt that ends at a meat grinder to gruesomely tear the live chicks apart). This ability to efficientlytell the males from females apart comes from just doing it and being told whether you are right or wrong. Within a few weeks you are able to discern the genders with a high degree of accuracy, but you won't be able to say how you can tell. You just intuite it.

Because the unconscious mind is powerful, and underrated.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS OVERRATED, PART II

More reading from Incognito, but on the same topic. There's so much to this, and some that relates to my work that is very interesting. 

Intuition is a real thing. In a study conducted on a group of people with damage to a part of the brain that drives decision making, participants were given two decks of cards and were asked to predict which deck was better by flipping cards one by one. There were subtle differences on the back of the cards that normally functioning brain participants unconsciously picked up on after about 25 rounds. However, sensors attached to their skin picked up smal pulses that revealed which deck they would choose. These indicators showed the more accurate reactions after only 13 rounds, twice as quickly. Same for the folks with damaged decision making capacity - the pulses predicted the right choice after about 13 rounds, but they never actually made those choices consistently.

Other examples are playing tennis, where if you have to mentally think about your reaction, you won't be quick enough physically. In fact, the author suggested that if you are playing against someone and losing badly, ask them what they're doing. Ask them to break down their serve, for example. They'll start thinking about it as they serve, and will then be less effective.

And fighter pilots engaging in dogfights is another example. Pilots have to trust their instruments, not their eyes, because sometimes your eye will lie. But fighters engaged in battle at absurd speeds at absurd heights against absurdly small and fast opponents, while relying on their instruments, also go by feel because their onboard computers can't keep up and make decisions quickly enough.

Back to Tetris - brain researchers seem to love Tetris - as players get better and better, their brain works less and less. They become far more efficient. When Bobby Fisher famously defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in chess, he did it using less than one percent of the energy expenditure of the computer. Humans are, it turns out, remarkably energy efficient machines. 

With the growing use of AI, and the increasing need for massive data processing centers that eat up energy of a scale never before seen, those computers could really learn from humans. And scientists are trying. Flipping trillions of sequences of ones and zeroes is vastly less efficient than our own neural networks.

Image source: IEEE Pulse

The Future of Brain–Computer Interfaces

https://www.embs.org/pulse/articles/the-future-of-brain-computer-interfaces/