Mind Games

A truly great article is making the rounds causing people to think about the mind and how it works. Who's Minding the Mind? delves into the subconscious and how it influences conscious thinking in ways that will astound anyone who reads the piece.

"In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java."

And..."psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.

Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously."

Almost quantum like, the subconscious mind's perception of reality causes the conscious mind to alter course in ways that cannot be predicted yet the SC/C pattern is forever locked in and nothing can be done to alter the process. Chaos works the same way in always teasing out deterministic behavior out of seemingly random events without fail in phenomena ranging from river flows and planetary orbits to the motion of a pendulum. Very cool and very though provoking to be sure.

In reading something as good as this encourages further research as to learning how the mind may work as a physical system and Henry Stapp, a highly respected quantum physicist working out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, just might have the answer but before checking out his new book, a short detour into Quantum Darwinism may be required as this provides the basis for Stapp's take on brain processes.

Wojciech Zurek, a young Polish physicist, is the guiding light behind Quantum Darwinism, a theory that articulates how reality may work and how we make sense of it. His pdf titled Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical—Revisited is an elegant explanation that can understood by lay people like myself, something truly impressive given how mathematically challenged I am.

As one would think, Henry Stapp's book discusses quantum theory at length and how it applies to the brain, no small accomplisment given just how deep both topics are. Check out the in-depth review by Allan Combs and Jeffery Martin to see why Stapp is a player in both areas of cutting edge research.


Click on the Mindful Universe cover to get details about the book.

"The Devil's in the Details" - old English proverb