The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  In one especially interesting analysis, Tesser examined the relationships between famous male scientists and their fathers. He found that when the father and son were scientists in the same field, the success of the son predicted an emotionally distant parent-child relationship. When father and son were in different fields, the success of the son predicted emotional closeness with the father. Even when it comes to our own children, in other words, having a child outperform us in a domain where we have long sought excellence ourselves can be threatening to our self-esteem. All fathers bask in the reflected glory of their sons’ successes, but when a father and son share similar interests, a persistent voice at the back of the father’s head asks why such success was denied to him.

  All this, as you might guess, spells trouble for two people like John Trojanowski and Virginia Lee. They are married to each other, which means they are close, and their professional lives and feelings of achievement are tied up in the same things. They are both smart, ambitious, and competitive. It’s not just that both of them are academics. One of them is not doing social science while the other does clinical science. No, they are both in exactly the same field, working in the same university, out of the same office. They even have the same job title. Given the differences in their personalities, Tesser’s research would predict that John and Virginia would quickly become envious of each other, and that jealousy and competitiveness would poison their relationship.

  But as I said, John and Virginia have a secret. It can be summed up in a single word: complementarity.

  Although they appear to be doing identical things and have identical interests, John and Virginia have figured out how to do slightly different things—to divide up their everyday tasks so that they work in complementary ways rather than competitive ways. They have unconsciously harnessed the selfishness of the hidden brain to their mutual advantage. They have agreed, for example, that she is the expert when it comes to biochemistry and cell biology—the basic tools of bench science. They have also agreed that he is the expert on clinical issues—and a lot of scientific work involves working with patients. They have also divided up the human resources needs of running a large laboratory, which is like a small business. Virginia thinks of herself as being a “lab rat,” and there is nothing she likes as much as discussing science with postdoctoral fellows. John is much more social and enjoys talking to collaborators, the press, and the outside world.

  “The strategy to make sure our partnership did not undermine each other was not do the same thing,” John said. “We have different skill sets and different management skill sets. Even though we say we work with each other all the time, we have to get appointments to see each other.”

  “It never started out as, ‘This is what I do and this is what you do.’ It started out as ‘This is what we do together,’” Virginia added. “It naturally sorted out. If, at the end of the day, I am not in town, John can substitute for me. We don’t really stake out an area but go with whoever is better at it.”

  Given how similar their interests are and the extremely competitive structure of modern science, it is astonishing that John and Virginia have perfectly complementary strengths. But Tesser’s research suggests blind luck probably played a modest role in their division of responsibilities. When couples are emotionally close, Tesser found they automatically and unconsciously stake out complementary domains. It is almost as though, recognizing the potential threat that competitiveness poses to an intimate relationship, the hidden brain nudges people toward complementarity. Tesser found that if one partner has a strong preference to do task A over task B, but the other partner has an even stronger preference for task A, the first person unconsciously switches preferences and says he actually prefers task B. On his own, John might well have been a lab rat and Virginia an outgoing communicator, but in the context of their relationship they have unconsciously adopted roles that allow them to see each other as collaborators instead of competitors.

  John and Virginia have also—consciously and deliberately—set up rules to reduce the risk of competitiveness. By specializing in different tasks, all of which are essential to the functioning of their laboratory, they have increased their dependence on each other. John knows he needs the engine of bench science that Virginia provides; Virginia knows she needs the engine of research grants and collaborations that John generates. Every publication that goes out from their lab has both their names on it.

  They both insist all recognition be shared equally, and are prepared to make sacrifices to see that this happens. John once applied for a prestigious million-dollar grant that neither he nor Virginia thought was within their reach. To their surprise, John won the grant. But before he accepted, he told the organizers the grant would have to have both their names on it. The private organization giving out the grant balked; after all, John had applied for the grant on his own. John told the group that unless the grant was given to them both, he was going to turn down the million dollars.

  “Initially they did not want to do it, and I said, ‘Sorry. We don’t want the money,’” John told me. The organization relented and gave the grant to both of them.

  “Neither of us would do as well on our own,” Virginia agreed. “But together we work very well.”

  “People tell me, ‘You don’t do anything unless Virginia gives you permission,’” John added. “What it is, is there is no single boss in our operation at work or home, and to some men that seems weak. I don’t mind acknowledging that nothing I have accomplished would have been possible without Virginia.”

  I am skeptical about the accuracy of this claim. John and Virginia are immensely talented people and would very likely have been successful if they had never become partners. But I am certain that their belief in this claim is essential to the success of their personal and professional partnership. With all their personality differences, John and Virginia have to see their individual success as intertwined with the success of the other person. Absent that belief—that bias—they would lose a very important pillar of their love. The unconscious bias of the hidden brain to look out for itself can be an immensely destructive force in personal relationships, but it can also be harnessed to create dense networks of interdependence. Unlike most couples who have been married for more than three decades, John and Virginia hate spending a single night away from each other. When either is invited to give a talk in another city, each invariably arranges for the other to come along, too, like opposite poles of two magnets that cannot get enough of each other.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tracking the Hidden Brain

  How Mental Disorders Reveal Our Unconscious Lives

  The reason people have no awareness of the hidden brain is that it is usually not accessible through introspection. Turning the spotlight of our attention inward does not reveal a subterranean world. But there are times in the course of everyday life when we are suddenly made aware of the hidden brain—not by its presence but by its absence.

  Scientists, researchers, and clinicians regularly encounter patients with hidden-brain impairments. As Abraham Tesser and others have shown through experiments, and as Freud intuited through experience, the hidden brain regularly causes people to make the same errors over and over in their lives. Couples that sabotage each other in order not to be outshone have no idea they are sabotaging each other, let alone why they are doing so. One of the most powerful forms of psychotherapy developed in recent years is called cognitive behavior therapy. Simply put, the technique teaches patients to become mindful of unconscious thought patterns. The alcoholic may feel his addiction is completely beyond his control, but it turns out there are patterns to his behavior: He tends to drink after he gets a paycheck, or when he walks by a favorite bar, or after a fight with his wife. Fighting alcoholism is partly about becoming aware of these triggers and consciously setting up mechanisms to guard against them—to have a paycheck direct-deposited into a bank account, for example, or to walk a different route home that does not go by the bar.r />
  It’s the same with depression and other mood disorders. People feel their emotional problems are largely caused by external events. There is little doubt that losing a job or a spouse can be devastating, but a core insight of all talk therapy is that a large portion of how we feel about our lives rests within ourselves, in unconscious patterns of thought and habit. Treating psychiatric ailments with medications achieves the same thing. Neurochemical changes make patients feel better about themselves. No one intuits the presence of a neurotransmitter, but depression and the effective treatments for it show that we need neurotransmitters to function properly. In recent years, high-tech brain scans have allowed us for the first time to observe the physical brain in action—to directly glimpse dimensions of the hidden brain at work.

  While these insights are increasingly well established in clinical science, the role of the hidden brain is disregarded in most other realms. We may concede that schizophrenia and depression have something to do with the hidden brain, but commonplace things such as table manners, politeness, and honesty seem driven by conscious intent: People are polite because they choose to be polite, and they are honest because they want to be honest. It takes an unusual disorder to reveal that the basic elements of everyday life—morality, kindness, and love—rely on the unconscious mind.

  Brian and Wendy McNamara live in Oakville, Ontario, just outside Toronto. In keeping with their friendly personalities, both Brian and Wendy chose sociable professions. Brian became national sales manager for the computer maker Hewlett-Packard. Wendy sold casual clothing for Weekenders. She called people on the phone and arranged to come over to their homes to make presentations of the latest fashions. Both Brian and Wendy were very good at what they did. In 2002, Brian accepted an early retirement package and settled into a life of semi-retirement. He was happy to kick back, even if it meant giving up the perks and bonuses that had come with his high-profile job.

  Brian and Wendy were close and enjoyed each other’s company. For Brian, retirement meant they could focus on things they loved to do together—travel, antiques hunting, and exploring different wineries. Life seemed full.

  In 2004, thirty years into their marriage, Wendy had a partial hysterectomy to remove a fibroid growth. She took a long time to recover. Around the same time, Brian sensed Wendy’s drive was slowing down—where she once had demonstrated a lot of get-up-and-go in making sales calls, she now just sat around. Brian thought it might be time for her to kick back, too. He sounded her out about retiring from the clothing business and doing something else, such as volunteer work. Wendy was not enthusiastic about the idea, but she made no move to pick up the pace on her business responsibilities.

  Over the following weeks and months, Brian felt something else was amiss: The woman who had been his high school sweetheart seemed to be growing increasingly distant. He would propose things to do together, fun things, and she wouldn’t say yes and she wouldn’t say no. When he cuddled up to her, she seemed uninterested in affection—not angry but indifferent. In late 2005, Brian took Wendy’s sister into his confidence. Evelyn Sommers is a clinical psychologist, and Brian told her about Wendy’s lack of emotional connection to work, to life, and to him. They discussed the possibility that Wendy was suffering from depression, an outgrowth of her lengthy recovery from surgery, or the scale-back in lifestyle that had come with Brian’s retirement. Brian felt that the time he now had to enjoy life as a result of retirement was well worth the lost perks and bonuses, but was it possible Wendy secretly did not feel the same? Brian asked Wendy if she wanted to talk to a psychologist. She was neither enthusiastic nor averse. As usual, she was indifferent. She met a psychologist half a dozen times in late 2005 and early 2006. When Brian asked her how the sessions went, she gave monosyllabic answers. Brian hoped she was unburdening herself to the therapist.

  The couple had always been intimate, but that was falling away, too. Brian kept asking Wendy what was happening to them. “Are we falling out of love?” he would urgently ask. “Are we parting?” Wendy would turn his plea for connection into an argument: “Do you want to leave me?” “No,” he would say. “I just want to understand what is going on.”

  There was little by way of overt fighting; if their marriage was dissolving, it seemed to have gone from warmth and love to distance and indifference without making the traditional pit stops at anger, resentment, and conflict.

  If there was any anger, it mostly came from Brian. He would go out of town on trips for a couple of days to do some consulting, and come home to find newspapers strewn around the house. There would be unwashed plates and cups on the dining table. Wendy used to be the kind of person who pushed her chair back into place after getting up from a table, and who put her cup in the dishwasher after drinking her coffee. What was going on? Brian felt lonely. It was difficult to communicate to other people what was wrong because once he started talking about it, it felt like small stuff. He and Wendy had always enjoyed shopping for groceries on weekends and then cooking a meal together. Now when he asked her what she wanted to eat, she would shrug. When they did bring groceries home, Wendy would sometimes put her shoes right back on and say she was going out for a walk. It wasn’t possible to communicate the gravity of things like this to another person. But to Brian, who craved emotional connection with his wife, the incessant accumulation of minor events felt like the stuff of divorce. Maybe they were just falling out of love, he thought. Maybe it was his fault, too, in ways he did not fully understand. Brian felt terribly sad but knew it was hardly earthshaking. They were going through what millions of couples had gone through before them.

  But there were some things that were just strange. When they went for walks, Wendy closely examined the bark on trees. She studied whorls in the wood, and pointed out patterns that resembled human faces. She ran her fingers across the bark, over and over, as though trying to divine some secret message. She was an amateur painter and had an arts background, and Brian marveled at her ability to find incredibly subtle patterns in bark and on rocks.

  When they were in the car together, Wendy counted the wheels of passing transport trucks. That one has eighteen wheels. This one has twenty-four. On a drive to Brian’s sister’s house, he once saw her intently studying the passing forest. He could hear her quietly counting to herself. When she got to two hundred, he finally asked her what she was counting. “Dead trees,” she said.

  One summer day, when Brian made a quick pit stop at a store to pick up some beer, Wendy jumped out of the car and followed him inside. A young couple had caught her eye; the man had a series of elaborate tattoos down one arm. Wendy approached the stranger fearlessly. “You have wonderful tattoos,” she said. “Can I see them?” The young man was taken aback, but Wendy disarmed him. Her charming personality and winning smile made behavior that might have seemed weird coming from another person just seem unusually friendly. Before Brian managed to hustle her away, Wendy told the stranger about patterns in his tattoos that he had not seen himself.

  Brian felt the strange events were like shadows. They were here one moment, gone the next. If Wendy did something odd one day, she did not repeat it the next day. To Brian’s precise mind, there was no connection between counting dead trees and Wendy’s growing propensity to send off checks to buy books she did not want to read.

  But the odd events kept occurring—with increasing frequency. Wendy went up to men she didn’t know, admired their hair, and asked if she could touch their beards. Sometimes she didn’t ask. Brian feared for her safety. The people she stopped were shocked but guarded. What would happen if she accosted a stranger who was dangerous?

  At home, Wendy walked around at night looking at shadows, searching for patterns. She owned a lot of antique glass, and these nocturnal trips often involved visits to her china and dishware collection. She wasn’t a Midas reveling in her possessions; she just had an insatiable urge to run her fingers over ridges of all kinds and was drawn to intricate patterns in glassware. The couple had stopped sleep
ing in the same bedroom because Wendy was so restless. Brian sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to see his wife standing silently by his bed, watching him. “You need to go back to sleep,” he would say, and she would obediently comply.

  The couple had a grown son living in the house, and the young man had closely cropped hair. Wendy loved to run her hands over her son’s scalp, feeling the texture. But it got to a point where it became weird and annoying. Both Brian and his son asked Wendy to stop. She started sneaking up and ambushing her son. It was silly, but when she didn’t stop after repeated pleas, Brian felt such behavior constituted abuse.

  Wendy had been a great animal lover, but she now grabbed hold of the cat, set her electronic keyboard to play “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and vigorously rocked the poor animal back and forth until it was terrified. When she dropped the cat, she was mindless about the height of the fall. If the cat was left in her care, she did not feed it.