Why Your True Nature Is Hidden From You |
Some unconscious behaviors arise from automated habits or implicit knowledge gained through experience.
Other behaviors, such as unconscious negativity bias, stem from our ancestors' experiences, not our own.
Such unconscious "evolved adaptations" can cause trouble when they're out of sync with modern reality.
Do you surprise yourself, reacting emotionally to a colleague or family member more strongly than seems rational? Do you occasionally observe your own behavior and wonder why you just did what you did, even though you’ve tried many times to avoid that behavior? Or do you not do things that you’d repeatedly sworn to yourself you would do?
If your answer is "yes," welcome to the human race. At one time or another, we all observe our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors and go, “Huh?”
There are multiple reasons why it occasionally seems that we are passive spectators of our own feelings and behaviors, rather than active drivers of them. One is that a particular behavior may require ultra-fast pre-conscious or unconscious processing. For example, a golf swing or the production of speech, where we lack the time to think about what each muscle should be doing while swinging a club or to consciously form individual words in every sentence.
Another reason we surprise ourselves is that we store away so many experiences in our lifetimes that shape our perceptions and reactions that we can’t remember all of them. But an unconscious part of our brain aggregates and stores the meanings of those experiences, especially those that are emotionally charged. Thus, when a new situation arises, such as meeting a new co-worker, we are apt to feel drawn to or repelled by that person for reasons we can’t pinpoint based on many previous experiences with other people. One such mechanism is implicit learning [1] where we learn without being aware that we’re learning, like knowing that someone has suddenly come up behind us on a busy street by the sound shadow their nearby body casts.
But fast, unconscious........