As importantly, people are extremely resistant to believing that such factors have any influence on them at all: I’m reminded of some in the medical professions arguing that they were above being influenced by free and luxurious presents from drug companies.
Speakers are rated as more intelligent if they talk faster than others. A detergent was rated as more effective if it came in a blue and yellow box instead of an all-blue or all-yellow box. (Or presumably, “soggy chicken” and “raw, dirty beets.”). (FYI, we talked about Consciousness in Dogs in a post in August.)Ĭertainly, examples abound of the power of our unconscious in all aspects of life: People rate food as tasting better if it was described on the menu as “crispy chicken” or “slow-roasted beets,” versus plain old chicken or plain old beets. I’m raising it here to speculate about how much of our behavior around our dogs is based on our unconscious. However, the current conversation is motivated by a far more nuanced view, which is based on the knowledge that most of what we humans do is generated by our unconscious, not the part of our inner life that we are aware of. At first blush the suggestion that animals are not conscious entities is reminiscent of Descartes’ argument centuries ago that, without language, animals are more akin to mechanical objects than to humans.
This is relevant to my upcoming talk (and my fascination with the cognitive life of non-human animals) because there has been so much discussion lately about whether animals are or are not conscious.
I burst out laughing after I’d purchased the book while thinking: “This cover is beyond strange” and then discovered the full cover while walking out of the bookstore.) (He also gets my vote for the best cover ever of a book: If you check it out on Amazon you can’t tell that, in person, you can only see part of the cover until the light hits it just right. Here’s a talk given by the author himself about the topic. I highly recommend it Mlodinow elaborates on our increasing, and sometimes unsettling knowledge about the power of our unconscious. In preparation for a talk I’ll be giving soon in Madison, WI about the mental lives of animals, I’ve been reading Subliminal, by Leonard Mlodinow.
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