1 IMPLICIT EGOTISM
You surely know why you chose your town, your partner, and your vocation—all for good reasons, no doubt.
But might other, unknown reasons—operating beneath your awareness—also have nudged your choices? This is the implication of implicit egotism—an automatic tendency to like things we associate with ourselves. For example, we come to like familiar things, including our own familiar face. Thus, we prefer a politician or stranger who looks like us—indeed, whose face has been morphed with some features of our own.
We also find someone more attractive when our face has been morphed with theirs. “Facial resemblance is a cue of kinship,” noted the University of Glasgow researcher Lisa DeBruine, who earlier had also found more trust of people with “self-resembling same-sex faces.” I can relate, having once been conned out of $20 by a seemingly desperate person seeking a taxi fare who I later reflected looked rather like me. Implicit biases operate behind the scenes.
I see you yawning: “You needed research to know that we love ourselves and things that resemble us?” The surprise comes with the many ways this phenomenon has been documented.
One example is the name-letter effect. People of varied nationalities, languages, and ages prefer the letters that appear in their own name. People also tend to marry someone whose first or last name resembles their own.
A second is the birth date–number effect. People likewise prefer the numbers that appear in their birth date. In one experiment, people, after having their self-concept challenged by briefly thinking about their weaknesses, “were more attracted than usual” to other people whose laboratory participant number (such as 11–22) resembled their own birth date.
Or consider the name-residence effect. Philadelphia, having many more people than Jacksonville, has had (no surprise) 2.2 times more men named Jack … but also 10.4 times more named Philip. Ditto Virginia Beach, which has a disproportionate number of women named Virginia, and St. Louis, which, compared with the national average, has 49 percent more men named Louis. Likewise, folks named Park, Hill, Beach, Rock, or Lake are disproportionately likely to live in cities (for example, Park City) that include their surnames.
If that last finding—offered by the social psychologist Brett Pelham and his colleagues—doesn’t surprise you, consider an even weirder phenomenon they uncovered: people seem to gravitate to careers identified with their names. In the United States, Dennis, Jerry, and Walter have been equally popular names. But dentists have twice as often been named Dennis as Jerry or Walter, and two and a half times more often named Denise than the equally popular Beverly or Tammy. Among geoscientists (geologists, geophysicists, and geochemists), people named George and Geoffrey are similarly overrepresented.
The phenomenon extends to surname-occupation matching. In 1940 U.S. Census data, people named Baker, Barber, Butcher, and Butler (and seven other occupations that double as names) were all more likely than expected—sometimes much more likely—to work in occupations associated with their names.
Ah, but do Pelham and his colleagues have cause and effect reversed? Uri Simonsohn, a behavioral scientist with a knack for exposing questionable findings, has argued exactly that. For example, aren’t towns and streets often named after people whose descendants stick around? And are people in Virginia more likely to name girls with the state name? Are Georgians more likely to christen their babies Georgia or George? Wasn’t the long-ago village baker—thus so named—likely to have descendants carrying on the ancestral work?
Likely so, grants Pelham. But could that, he asks, explain why states have an excess of people sharing a last-name similarity? California, for example, has an excess of people whose names begin with Cali (as in Califano). Moreover, he reports, people are more likely to move to states and cities with name resemblances—Virginia to Virginia and Tex to Texas, for example.
I thought of this playful surname-occupation research when reading a paper on the cognition of black bears, co-authored by Michael Beran. Next up in my reading pile was creative work on problem-solving by crows, led by Chris Bird. Soon after, I was reading about interventions for lifting youth out of depression, pioneered by Sally Merry.
That took my delighted mind to the important books on animal behavior by Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, and to the Birds of North America volume by Chandler Robbins.
The list goes on: the billionaire Marc Rich, the drummer Billy Drummond, Ronald Reagan’s White House spokesman Larry Speakes.
Internet sources offer lots more: dentists named E. Z. Filler, Gargle, and Toothaker; the Oregon banking firm led by Cheatham and Steele; and the chorister Justin Tune. But as an internet meme reminds us, “The problem with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they’re true” (Abraham Lincoln).
Perhaps you, too, have some favorite name-vocation associations? I think of my good friend who was anxious before meeting his oncologist, Dr. Bury. (I am happy to report that two decades later my friend is robustly unburied and did not need the services of the nearby Posthumus Funeral Home.) Another friend recalled that his parents’ hot water heater was installed by two men named Plumber and Leak.
If our implicit egotism unconsciously influences our preferences, might that explain why it was Susie who sold seashells by the seashore?
Although the phenomenon is usually only a modest influence on our preferences, it does introduce us to a larger reality: the surprising scale and power of the unseen implicit mind. In ways Freud never anticipated, our preferences, perceptions, memories, and attitudes operate on two levels—a conscious, deliberate “high road” and a much larger yet invisible “low road” where the mind works below the radar of our awareness.
Reflecting on this vast out-of-sight information processing, the great cognitive psychologist George Miller once described two ocean liner passengers gazing over the sea. “There sure is a lot of water in the ocean,” said one. “Yes,” replied the other, “and we’ve only seen the top of it.”
2THE AMAZING POWER OF ATTENTION
Like a flashlight beam, our mind’s selective attention focuses at any moment on but a small slice of our experience. It’s a phenomenon most drivers underestimate when distracted by phone texting or conversation. And unlike the modest implicit egotism phenomenon, the riveting of our single-minded attention is huge.
Magicians are masters at attention manipulating—thus leaving unnoticed their hand slipping into the pocket while our attention is misdirected elsewhere. As the mind-messing magician Teller has said, “Every time you perform a magic trick, you’re engaging in experimental psychology.”
Understanding the phenomenon does not confer immunity to it. One Swedish psychologist, after being surprised by a woman exposing herself on a Stockholm street, later realized he had been outwitted by pickpocketing thieves, who understood the focusing power of his selective attention.
Among the many weird and wonderful (and now familiar) perceptual phenomena is our blindness to things right in front of our eyes. In famous demonstrations of inattentional blindness, people who were focused on a task, such as counting the number of times black-shirted people pass a ball, often failed to notice a woman with an umbrella sauntering through the scene. In other mischievous experiments, it was a person in a gorilla suit or a clown on a unicycle who went undetected in plain sight.
This looking-without-seeing phenomenon illustrates a deep truth: Our attention is powerfully selective. Conscious awareness resides in one place at a time. When we attend to one thing, we necessarily ignore all else. Attention is a finite resource.
That much you likely already knew. What’s less well known is how this selective inattention restrains other senses, too. Inattentional deafness is easily demonstrated with “dichotic listening” tasks. The researchers pipe novel tunes into a person’s one ear while they focus on to-be-repeated-out-loud words fed into their other ear. The surprising result: afterward, they won’t be able to identify what tune they have just heard. Their attention was focused elsewhere. (Thanks to a “mere exposure effect,” they will, however, later like the unperceived tune better than other similar novel tunes.)
In an acoustic replication of the invisible gorilla study, the University of London psychologists Polly Dalton and Nick Fraenkel asked people to focus on a conversation between two women (rather than on two men who were simultaneously talking). Selective inattention resulted: the participants usually failed to notice one of the men repeatedly saying, “I am a gorilla.”
A recent British experiment further documents inattentional numbness. Pickpockets have long understood that bumping into people makes them unlikely to notice a hand slipping into their pocket. Dalton (working with Sandra Murphy) experimented with this tactile inattention. Sure enough, when distracted, her participants failed to notice an otherwise easily noticed vibration to their hand.
Tactile inattention sometimes works to our benefit. Once, while driving to give a talk, I experienced a painful stabbing in my eye (from a torn contact lens) … then experienced no pain while giving the talk … then felt the excruciating pain again on the drive home. In clinical settings, such as with patients receiving burn treatments, distraction can similarly make painful procedures tolerable. Pain is most keenly felt when attended to.
Another British experiment, this one by Sophie Forster and Charles Spence, demonstrated inattentional anosmia, an inability to smell. When participants focused on a cognitively demanding task, they were unlikely to notice a coffee scent in the room.
So what’s next? Can we expect a demonstration of inattentional ageusia? (“Ageusia”: an inability to taste—my new word for the day.) Surely, given our powers of attention (and corresponding inattention), we should expect it.
The moral of this story—that our attention is a wonderful gift, given to just one thing at a time—is but one small example of the marvels of our mind. The more neuroscientists learn, the more convinced they are that what is truly extraordinary is not supposed extrasensory perception, claims for which have not survived investigation, but rather our everyday sensory-perceptual system.
Consider: as you read these words, light energy particles strike your retinal receptor cells, which convert them into neural signals that activate adjacent cells, which process the information for a third cell layer, from which emerges a nerve tract that shoots electrochemical messages up to your brain, where, step by step, what you are viewing is reassembled into its component features and then somehow composed into a consciously perceived image, which is instantly compared with previously stored information and recognized as words you know.
The process is rather like taking a house apart, transporting its elements to a different location, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, reconstructing it—and in but a fraction of a second. Moreover, this effortless, implicit information processing transpires continuously, in motion, in three dimensions, and in color.
The deeper one explores these very ordinary things of life, the more one empathizes with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.” Things extraordinary lie within the ordinary.
Sherlock Holmes understood: “It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious … Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the [human mind] could invent.”
3THERE IS MORE TO HEARING THAN MEETS THE EARS
At a National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders advisory council meeting, I was surprised to hear one of its executives repeatedly emphasize the institute’s “missionaries.” Who are these missionaries, I wondered—ambassadors for hearing health? On about the fifth utterance I recomputed: mission areas!
Like vision, hearing is both bottom-up (as our inner ear transforms sound waves into neural messages) and top-down (as our brain imposes meaning on the neural input). In an effortless microsecond, our brain transforms the blizzard of sensations into a conscious perception. Listening to our language—sounds created from an unparsed string of air pressure waves—our brain instantly carves out distinct words. Lacking ear lids, we can’t help it.
But sometimes, in its hunger to find order and form in sensory input, our brain gets it wrong. So it was when the writer Sylvia Wright, while a child, misperceived a Scottish ballad—“They hae slaine the Earl of Murray, And hae laid him on the green”—as “They hae slain the Earl of Murray, and Lady Mondegreen.” And so was born the term “mondegreen”—meaning a misheard phrase or word.
Mondegreens have two parents: inexperience and context. Thanks to their inexperience with language and with life in general, children have been a fount of mondegreens, as when singing, “Lo, in the gravy lay, Jesus my Savior.” Even as an adult, I can recall bemusement when hearing a choir’s “You who unto Jesus” as “Yoo-hoo unto Jesus.” Music lovers have recorded thousands of mondegreens at www.kissthisguy.com, a website named for the mishearing of the guitarist/singer Jimi Hendrix’s phrase “kiss the sky.” Thus, OneRepublic’s “too late to apologize” gets heard as “too late to order fries,” Madonna’s “Like a virgin touched for the very first time” is received as “for the thirty-first time,” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet dreams are made of this” becomes “Sweet dreams are made of cheese.”
Context shapes auditory perceptions. While listening to sad rather than happy music, report Jamin Halberstadt and colleagues, people tend to perceive homophone words with a sad meaning—“mourning” rather than “morning,” “die” rather than “dye,” “pain” rather than “pane.” Context similarly gives birth to mondegreens by creating expectations (perceptual sets). Depending on our perceptual set, we may hear “rhapsody” or “rap city,” “sects” or “sex,” “meteorologist” or “meaty urologist.”
Mondegreens are pervasive in computer voice translation. I asked my iPhone Siri, “What is a mondegreen?” and it responded “What is Mom the green?” Microsoft’s speech recognition group used to call itself the “Wreck a Nice Beach” group—because their task was to “recognize speech.”
Mondegreens are an occasional experience for normal-hearing people. But for those of us with hearing loss—people who hear sound but struggle to carve meaning from it—mondegreens are commonplace. The former Hearing Health editor Paula Bonillas recalls giving her daughter castanets for Christmas, when actually her daughter had hoped for a casting net. I recall my wife telling me of her picture of “an autumn scene” and my puzzled reaction that she would enjoy a picture of “an autopsy.”
As the physicist Paul Davies and I discussed our hearing loss recently, he recalled his visit to a Sydney, Australia, beach. A woman emerged from the men’s bathroom he was approaching. “Had sex today?” she cheerfully seemed to ask. As the speechless Davies fumbled for an answer, he realized that the women’s bathroom was broken, so she was explaining herself by saying the men’s bathroom was “unisex today.”
Much as Norwegians can tell Norwegian jokes to one another, those of us in the hearing loss community laugh knowingly at our mishearings, and even at our in-jokes, such as about the three golfers with hearing loss. “It’s windy,” remarks one. “No, says the second, it’s Thursday.” “Me, too,” says the third. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Sometimes the results of our mishearings are not trivial, as when the kindly airline pilot, during takeoff, told his depressed co-pilot, “Cheer up.” The co-pilot heard the expected “Gear up” and raised the wheels—before they had left the ground. The co-pilot would get empathy from the hard-of-hearing person who, driving on a rainy night and about to pull out into traffic, heard her companion’s “No!” as “Go!” … and rammed into a passing car. A bad hear day.
Our everyday struggle to discern meaningful speech amid noise reminds us of a deep lesson: We are automatic meaning makers. Our minds are adept pattern seekers. Shown random markings, we may see a face on the moon, the Madonna on a pizza, or an illusory figure, such as this nonexistent triangle:
As visual illusions and mondegreens demonstrate, much of what we perceive comes from behind our eyes and between our ears. We perceive reality not exactly as it is but as our brains interpret it.
And lest we take it for granted, let’s pause to marvel at that sensing, pattern-finding, meaning-making hunk of tissue. By itself, floating in its skull-encased inner world, the brain feels nothing, sees nothing, hears nothing. And yet, fed information from external sensors, its pulsating network of some 128 billion neurons somehow makes mind. It constructs our perceptions of a campfire’s heat, flicker, scent, and crackle. It guides our motions, acquires our skills, and drives our reproduction. It enables us to experience elation, remember our grandmother, and plan our future—all while automatically monitoring and maintaining our body’s operation. The psalmist’s poetry discerned rightly: we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Copyright © 2022 by the David and Carol Myers Foundation
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