and how the factual behaviour on your perception of the world,

especially the social world

so I just start by the finding what I mean by the unconscious

and what scientists today mean by unconscious processes

are processes that occur, first of all, with no effort on your part - at least no conscious effort

and they're automatic. You're not aware of them. You don't need any will, power to create them.

and they are more or less beyond your control.

As a result, we don't really understand what's influencing us in many ways.

And we often cannot avoid the behavior that it produces.

But this is not the Freudian unconscious so let me make that clear

That the Freudian unconscious is the concept of the unconscious

that is hidden from you from motivational or emotial reasons. And it can be relieved

through introspection or therapy. But the modern idea of the unconscious is much different from that.

It's something that evolved evolutionary to help us navigate our world, our perceptual world

and our social world and it takes place in your parts of your brain that are

inherently unaccessible to your conscious mind.

And the field I'm gonna talk about is called social neuroscience.

And social neuroscience is really a combination of three fields. Traditionally we

have social psychology, which is a field of how the psychology of how people interact with each other.

and cognitive psychology, which is the science of how we think.

But in mid-1990's, a new field grew up called neuroscience.

Neuroscience is largely based on a new technology, many new technologies but in particular one has been dominant

and that's called FMRI or "functional magnetic resonance imaging", which is a bit of a mouthful

but you may have be familiar with MRI from medical testing which gives you a nice image of your internal organs.

When FMRI has a word functional in front of it because it also tells

when you do out the brain what part of brain is at work,

here you can see for instance.

And this is bit.. eh.. it's totally revolutionized psychology

because the modern and social neuroscience, for neuropsychology that has grown up from this,

is not only based on the studies of behavior, but connects those studies to what's going under the brain

so makes the concepts much more concrete and makes them to much more a hard science.

I'm gonna give you one example of FMRI and how it works or the results it's gonna achieve.

This is a study done at Berkeley where subjects where shown in different slides and you can see four of the slides here.

and the subjects were looking at the slides and gaggles while they were laying in an FMRI machine.

and the scientists took the data from the brain, not the data from the slides, but purely the readings from the brain

from the visual cortex and from other parts of the brain that were relied to the thematic nature of what they were seeing

and they asked the computer to reconstruct the slides they were seeing, the kind of mind reading.

And the computer took all this data and then looked into the database that has had 6 million images

and the ones that were closest.

And as you can see here all were really close

not just in the layout and the physical data of the slides

but thematically it was really a kind of mind reading.

So I'm gonna talk about today I really.. eh.. that the unconscious mind in two areas

one is our physical perception and the other is our social perception

now my real point here is that we create our image of other people,

of social situations, business, financial situations.. using not only our conscious thought

but our unconscious mind. But I'm gonna start by illustrating that

in sensory perception, partly because sensory perceptions are much more dramatic

and I can easy to illustrate in a talk like this

and probably because the ways that we reconstruct reality from limited data,

our analogous and sensory perception, and in social perception.

And I want you to come away thinking there are perceptions both our visual and our auditory perceptions,

and our memories, and our social perceptions are all not literally what's out there

but they're something constructed by our brain from what's really out there plus many other things,

such as context, expectations and even desire.

And I want you to come away thinking that the way we experience the world is largely driven by this unconscious processing.

Here's an example. This is what you perceive when you look at a road let say

but this is not really what's hitting your retina.

The data that's sitting your retina is really much more fuzzy and it looks like this.

The yellow dot was added just to show where the person was looking at.

But the black dot wasn't added. The black dot is where the object nerve attached to the retina and there's no data at all.

So your eye takes this kind of fuzzy data and without any effort and automatically

and without any control on your part turns it into that.

Into something that is very clear.

Let me illustrate that more specifically with this slide.

If you look at this you see a checkerboard and you probably see the rectangle with the "B" in it

it lookes like a white square and the rectangle with the "A" in it, looks like a black square.

But I'm gonna tell you right now the truth is that A and B are identical

so the actual physical light that is emanating from A and B, that you're seeing at the screen, are identical.

The square B is the same color as the square A.

So I want you now have your context...try and have your conscious mind override that

so I've said it's automatic and you can't control it

I want you to look at that and see B as the same color as A.

And you'll find that you can't do that.

Now why do you see B as being lighter than A, it's the context!

your unconscious mind is taking the context of this photo and making you see the square B as a white square,

and A as a black square. And you can call it an optical illusion but it's a gift to you.

Because you don't wanna go through life taking in the actual litter of physical data and stopping

every few seconds to figure out what it means and to reconstruct this pattern

from the data of light and dark that's there.

Now in case you don't trust me and you think I'm just making this up

let me take the context away, so watch the screen and you'll see what happens to A and B

when I pull the context of the checkerboard away.

So now without the context you can see that A and B are the same.

Thank you!

Now, I quit if I had more that 18 minutes, but I can't.

So this is a picture of Barack Obama who we may recognize on.

This is to illustrate the social component of your mental processing.

When you look at these two pictures of Obama

they probably both look like Obama up-side-down

and fairly normal. But your social, our social perceptions, our social interactions are extremely important to us

and so our brain operates laxly to help us with our social perception.

And these pictures are actually very different, they are not really very similar

but your social perception is not really working in full speed

because it's up-side-down and we are not made to see people up-side-down

maybe if you are a yoga instructor and you stand on your head

but most of us don't see people up-side-down

so we don't really know the step.

Look what happens when I turn them over

So if you were to see this fellow on the street you go "wow"

looks little like Obama but something happened.

And maybe how he looks after the election race.

But... If you see this fellow you see a normal human being.

Well now your social part of your brain is interpreting this for you and it's doing it automatically

Let me turn them over again, and see what happens.

So you see how that works.. the effect kind of disappears when it's up-side-down

and comes back when it's right-side-up.

Now let me show you some another example in hearing.

Just to show you that this is not just the way are visual processing works

but our hearing is also, it takes the auditory data comes into our ears

and just as our own brain plays games with us to construct an image and vision

it doest the same thing in audio.

Listen to this song, you may have some of you recognize it by Led Zeppelin, "Stairway to Heaven"

and it's now playing.

One more time

Ok, so.. this song probably sounds pretty normal to you

and you can decode mentally the eight or ten lines that are here on the song played forward.

And now, in a second, I'm gonna played for you backwards, ok?

and I want you to listen it backwards, I want you to see if Led Zeppelin is clever enough to create an audio file

that make sense both forwards and when played backwards.

So now you heard about eight of ten lines of the song played backwards

and you think you could..if I gave you a paper you could write down the lines?

It sounds like gibberish!

So I think it sounds to people like gibberish.

And this is because it really is gibberish.

But this gibberish that comes into your brain can be transformed into something

by helping your unconscious mind have a little context.

So I'm gonna play you some.. I'm gonna play it again with words.

And just as the checkerboard looked different when I took the squares away and put them in the context

this song is gonna sound differently to you backwards now that I play it with the context.

So please read along.

So we have two version of reality.

Now the physics of it is the same - we have the same audio, the first time and this time.

But your perception is totally different 'cos now your mind has taken this and constructed something out of it.

Now just to show you again that it's automatic and you can't avoid it and I'm sure you understand

that it's been effortless.

I am gonna played it for you again.

I want you to watch the words again, listen to it.

But I want you to hear it the way you'd heard it the first time.

And not hear the word, just hear the gibberish, ok?

So you couldn't avoid it now because once you have heard it you're spoiled.

And because of this some people actually think they're hearing messages,

subliminal messages in a backwards song

but it's not really there and if you go sceptics.com, Michael Shermer's group, you can see some discussions

about how this is really false.

What I'm gonna get onto now I wanna go to social perception.

And because the point of this is that all the same tricks that your mind plays is to create our visual or our auditory perception

also work in social perception.

And one of the things our brains use to create a social perception, an image is appearance.

Now people are inherently very social animals.

We couldn't have survived as a species without social cooperation

and indeed when scientists studied it today

they find that people with a low amount of social context, with a small social network

are at much higher health risk that people who have a large social network

in fact having a very small social network is as big a health risk as a heavy smoking or obesity.

And in this study scientists gathered together people, two groups of people,

and they showed them political data on two candidates - a republican and a democrat.

And the data was not only pure data on what they believed but also a picture of the two of each candidate.

And to one group they showed the democrat in a photo that looked more confident

and the republican in a less confident and less fluttering photo,

and the other group they switched it.

Now I don't mean beauty, I mean a look of confidence.

So the only difference between the two groups was they were seeing the same data

but a different view of the candidate and a question was how much this affect their voting?

And the answer is it amounted to a vote-swing of 14%.

So by switching the photos to being more confident versus less

it was a 14% vote-swing, which is enough to swing most elections

and that's a very dramatic evidence.

But of course it was in a laboratory so what about the real world?

Fortunately, a psychologist at Princeton University decided to test the real world.

And he gathered pairs of headshots of the democratic and the republican candidates

in dozen of races for governorships and for congress.

And he brought hundreds of people onto a laboratory

and he showed them these pairs of photos and asked them purely to judge

which person looked more competent in each case.

And he told them if you recognize one of the candidates don't vote

this is purely a.. we're just looking at the photos of people, and picking who looks more confident.

And then he checked a bold step and predicted the outcome of each of these elections

based purely on who was voted more confident looking.

And a question is how successful was he?

If competence had no effect he would be 50% successful but he was 70% successful.

So in 70% of the cases, the more competent looking person won the election.

Another thing that our brains use unconscious mind to fill in our social perception is touch.

I've said that people are inherently very social animals

and in fact all these primates that are here, I'm trying four different kinds of primates

engaged in a social touching behavior.

And the non-human primates tend to touch each other for hours a day