Your Thinkery and Unthinkery

Aristophanes wrote a play called “Clouds” where in it, Socrates’ character presided over some sort of reasoning lab called a “Thinkery.”  While it was a mockery of sorts on the schools of philosophy and the philosophers at that time, it worked because Socrates was a a great fit in the Thinkery. We expect no less from this man who messaged us across time with this philosophical bulletin: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” He put forth a good case in favor of being deliberate in the way we make decisions lest we compromise the value of our lives. 

Forward to the last couple of decades and we now ask Socrates to hold that thought. This is because scientists have shown us that our “unattended” life is as much the story of our lives as the “examined” half. From voting, to how you treat strangers, to how cheerfully you will recall your life in an interview, we are influenced and even dictated by impressions we are not aware of. Our life’s signature is penned both by the thinkery and the “unthinkery” inside each of us.

In an article entitled “Our Unconscious Mind” in the January 2014 issue of Scientific American, John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale University, laid out for us the studies that he and his peers in the discipline have uncovered about the nature of our minds “hidden” from ourselves.  

Waking up in the morning, you put on your slippers, pat your dog who also just woke up, turn on the TV for the news, click the “on” button of the coffee maker, grab the bread basket. You take a shower, dress up, grab your bag and drive to work and eventually end up on your desk to flip your laptop and open your mail. You do all these things without needing to summon the parliamentarian voices in your brain that methodically lay out a case as to the many protective features of putting on your slippers, the health benefits of eating breakfast or completing the circuit in your coffee maker once you switch it to “on.”  In one of its forms, the unconscious is “habit.” Habit makes our lives operate fast and efficiently.

But the unconscious also seeps into the decisions as to how we will form opinions about the river of people we encounter – maybe how they are dressed, what car they drive and how they drive them and then we form our own general opinions of them based on such minimal information.

Highlights in research that Bargh cited could in fact, shock you. It included an experiment on mock voters with voting based only on candidates’ snapshots echoing the actual election results later.  Political conservatives who have been given a vaccine against a virus felt more given to an immigrant-friendly attitude than those who were not inoculated.  People who were made to recall an incident they felt guilty about were more likely to help in an unrelated situation but would lose that impetus if they were made to literally wash their hands after recalling the guilt-inducing incident. When we go to the store, we grab things which when you are probably asked as to the merits of such purchases, will be at a loss to enumerate. 

The most interesting for me was when people were asked on the telephone how they viewed their entire life. Their answers turned out to be good or bad depending on whether they received the call during a sunny or dim day.  However, when the caller deliberately mentioned the prevailing weather, the effect of the day’s weather lost its effect on the answer. It switched the respondent from the unconscious to make its way to his or her own thinkery.

We navigate our way through our lives and other people’s powered mostly by the thick shadow of our unconscious.  Our biases and perceptions, hidden from our own selves are often unmasked through the decisions we make everyday. A part of me finds that quite creepy.

Scientists say that the trick to checking your unconscious’ singular reign on your life is to hone your own awareness. This is not an easy thing to do especially in the light of studies which have shown that self-control, which is I think essential in awareness is a muscle that gets tired. Being aware is like being on a mental gym most of the time. It is physically tiring to be always measured and deliberate.  But that is how you bend the shadows of your unconscious in order to regain control when you have to. And maybe a constant crystalline awareness could become a habit just like how Buddhist monks have achieved such a state.

But what makes it much more complex is that the lives of our conscious and unconscious are entwined, like shifting sands in the shore of our own lives. Socrates’ mind was ruled by his own “thinkery” as much as by his own “unthinkery.”  That is the fate of the inhabitants of ancient Greece and it is our fate in the modern world now.  Perhaps, looming over Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker, should be an equally compelling rendering of ”The Unthinker.” 

The difference between the philosophers then and you who read this now is we now know (and not just think) that we often do not know why we do the things we do. We have evidence to say so.  In each of us is a very real and active “unthinkery.” That is I think as humbling as reconciling with the fact that we are just airport to microbes.