Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. ~ from Mary Oliver’s “Messenger” Psychological science sometimes confirms our beliefs, and sometimes challenges them. My young adult self never would have guessed that: the home “shared environment” effect on our personality traits, sexual orientation, and intelligence is, apart from abuse or neglect, minimal. (Genes and peer influences matter more.) Although our values, politics, and religion are home-influenced, we would, notes behavior geneticist Robert Plomin, “essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.” repression rarely occurs. Experience a trauma—a disaster, a parent’s murder, or a battlefield terror—and we’re much more likely to be haunted by unforgettable flashbacks.  some therapies have disappointingly little long-term effect (think weight-loss programs) while others are surprisingly helpful (electroconvulsive therapy for intractable depression).  But perhaps the biggest revelation has been the enormity of our unconscious information processing. Given the scientific discounting of Freud’s seething unconscious mind, I have been amazed at the extent to which our lives are guided by automatic (unconscious) rather than controlled (conscious) information processing. Witness  blindsight: brain-damaged people processing visual stimuli that they do not consciously perceive—enabling them to intuitively navigate around unseen objects. problem-solving without conscious thinking: our still-working unseen mind spontaneously producing fresh insights after not-thinking (even sleeping).  implicit memory: learning new skills or conditioned associations without conscious effort or awareness. We know more than we know we know. subliminal priming: having our thinking and emotions “primed” by unperceived stimuli. When exposed to a fearsome animal on screen for one-fiftieth of a second, which is then immediately masked with a fuzzy screen, people will perceive only a flash of light—which may, nevertheless, arouse an emotion that influences their judgment of an ensuing perceived stimulus. Regarding this last nifty unconscious talent, researchers have wondered: If fear responses can be elicited and conditioned without our awareness, might they also be extinguished without our awareness? Malombra76/Getty Images For those with phobias, exposure therapy—repeatedly engaging your fears by seeing pictures of what one fears, or of having live exposure to such—helps. But it’s the psychological equivalent of a dental root canal. The result is that many decline the therapy, or drop out. So researchers have pondered: Might stress-free subliminal exposure to feared stimuli help extinguish phobias? Might repeated brief, masked exposure to, say, feared spiders weaken people’s automatic physiological arousal? In their new Psychological Bulletin analysis of 39 controlled experiments, SUNY Purchase psychologist Paul Siegel and University of Southern California psychiatrist Bradley Peterson report that “exposing phobic persons to their feared stimulus without conscious awareness” works. Those who experience the unconscious exposure therapy become less consciously fearful and less avoidant of the dreaded stimulus. Moreover, physiological measures confirm their decreased fear.  Siegel and his colleagues illustrate: Their controlled experiments exposed some arachnophobic (spider-fearing) people to spiders very briefly (and unconsciously). Afterward, they became less fearful of, and more willing to approach, a live tarantula. The phobia relief, confirmed by diminished physiological arousal, proved lasting. And it surpassed the relief from stressful conscious exposure therapy.  This “very brief exposure” research “positions unconscious exposure as a new treatment for specific phobia,” conclude Siegel and Peterson. Before appreciating unconscious information processing, I would not have predicted this result, and even now am surprised. But as Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple observed, “facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” The unconscious therapy effect also affirms one of the great insights of modern psychological science: our capacity for dual processing. Our conscious mind presumes that its intentions rule our lives. Yet much of our thinking occurs below the radar of our attention. We have a conscious thinking system, and another thinking system out of sight. Our memory, thinking, language, attitudes, and perceptions operate partly on an aware, deliberate “high road,” but also on a vast, unconscious, automatic “low road.” We are, as the Psalmist observed, “wonderfully made.” Our one amazing brain interweaves two magnificent minds.  (David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.)   ... 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Each year, millions of people, including half a million Americans, experience cardiac arrest. With no discernible heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, they have experienced the medical definition of death, notes Sam Parnia, the NYU Medical Center’s director of cardiopulmonary resuscitation research. Yet, with CPR, some 10 percent survive. Moreover, in Parnia-led interviews of 2060 survivors, about 1 in 10 recalled a “transformative” death experience, which often involved a peaceful out-of-body experience of being drawn toward a light. Two percent recalled “‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation.” Anticipating the next steps in his death-experience research, Parnia invited a dozen of us psychological and medical researchers for a day-long research consultation in 2019. There we offered advice regarding his plans for two unprecedented further studies of recalled experiences of death. In the first study, just published, a cardiac arrest at one of 21 participating hospitals alerted a trained researcher to rush to the patient with a small equipment bag. Without interfering with the resuscitation, the researcher attached an EEG recording cap and headphones, then activated a tablet computer. Across 567 cardiac arrests—defined as no heartbeat or respiration—53 patients (9.3 percent) survived. Twenty-eight did so with sufficient health to be available for volunteer interviews, yielding three take-home findings. First, most of the 53 survivors initially flat-lined on the EEG, but, with continued CPR, recovered brain activity up to 60 minutes later. This result not only encourages first responders to persist, it also suggests the possibility of to-be-recalled cognitive activity in comatose patients. Second, 6 of the 28 interviewed survivors (21 percent) had a “transcendent recalled experience of death.” This roughly accords with prior studies’ finding that 10 to 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report a memorable transcendent conscious experience (which Parnia labels a “recalled experience of death” rather than a “near-death experience”). The 6 survivors reported experiences such as: Separation from the body: “I found myself above my body.” “I knew that I had died.” “I felt so light and free.” “I was high up in the ceiling of the ward looking down upon the bed.” “I could see the doctors and nurses working over me.” “I perceived and saw everything around me, like in 360 degrees.” Perception of heading toward a destination: “I experienced going down a tunnel towards a huge bright shining light.” Reviewing and reevaluating life: “I saw my entire life in great detail.” “I felt so warm, safe, protected and deeply loved.” “My body was dead for two minutes; for me, the time passed as if it were many years.” Third, the study enabled an unprecedented objective test of survivors’ recall accuracy. Many have wondered: Have those who recall death experiences—even of happenings during the resuscitation—experienced hallucinations, such as commonly reported with oxygen deprivation or psychedelic drugs? Or are their out-of-body reports of cardiac arrest events factual and verifiable? Parnia and his three dozen collaborators creatively devised and implemented a plan to put claims of death-experience recollections to the test. As patients underwent CPR, a tablet computer displayed one of ten visual images, such as an animal, a person, or a monument. When later interviewed, could the 28 survivors report the image displayed during their death experience? If not, could they, when shown the ten possible images, guess which image had been displayed? The result: “Nobody identified the visual image." During 5 minutes of the CPR, patients also were repeatedly exposed through the headphone audio to the names of 3 fruits: apple, pear, banana. When the 28 survivors were later asked to guess the 3 fruits, how many correctly recalled them? One person. (A chance result? When a colleague invited his psychology students to name 3 fruits, a similar 2 of 50 named an apple, pear, and banana.) Although these new results are not what Parnia might have wished, his reporting models science at its best: proposing novel ideas, putting them to the test, and then, with integrity, placing the results in the public domain. Sometimes, as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple observed, the outcome is unexpected. “But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” Yet science is a process, and this is but one study, with more to come. At our research consultation, Parnia proposed a second possible method for exposing temporarily brain-dead people to stimuli that might later be recalled. Aortic repair surgery sometimes puts patients under anesthesia, cools the body to 70 degrees, stops the heart, and drains the blood—with flat-lined brain activity for about 40 minutes. Will such functionally dead people sometimes later accurately recall events occurring in the room during their dormancy? What do you think? (Stay tuned: The results of this study are forthcoming, Parnia tells me.) Parnia knows of credible-seeming reports of resuscitated patients displaying accurate recall. including one Britisher who, after being left for dead, later recovered and recounted associated events. So he would not be surprised at some accurate recall. I, however, would be stunned, for two reasons: Parapsychology’s null findings. Parnia emphasizes that his scientific exploration of people’s experiences and recollections of death transitions are not parapsychology. Yet parapsychology experiments have also indicated that mind seemingly does not travel out-of-body. Would-be psychics cannot “see” remote happenings, such as cards being drawn in an adjacent room. Brain-mind science. The entirety of cognitive neuroscience links mind to brain. Every mental event is simultaneously a biological event. No brain, no mind. Nevertheless, the data are not done speaking, and sometimes reality surprises us. As even Miss Marple’s more rationalist counterpart Sherlock Holmes acknowledged, “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Psychological science has offered many surprising—even shocking—findings. And it surely has more to come. Afterword: Some may wonder, does the assumption and the evidence of embodied minds threaten various religious understandings of human nature and hopes for life after bodily death? Not at all, argue cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves (founder of Britain’s top-rated psychology department) and developmental psychologist Thomas Ludwig. They reflect on the deep implications of brain-mind science in their recent book, Psychological Science and Christian Faith, and offer an alternative to a death-denying dualism. A disembodied immortal soul is Plato’s thinking, they argue, and not the assumption of biblical religion. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Last week, I spent 3 hours under general anesthesia (while receiving a cochlear implant). Being a curious psychological scientist, and knowing my anesthesiologist, I seized the opportunity for a simple memory test. First, the reason for my curiosity: A complete night’s sleep serves to process our day’s experiences for permanent memory storage. To sleep well is to remember. Nevertheless, the initial neural recording (the “encoding”) of memories takes a bit of waking time. Rats in experiments will therefore forget what they’ve just experienced if their memory formation gets interrupted with an electric current passed through their brain. Humans are similarly amnesic for what they experience in the moments before receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). And, as I’ve explained in my psychology texts, “Football players and boxers momentarily knocked unconscious typically have no memory of events just before the knockout.” Would the same be true for someone falling asleep, or for someone lapsing into a drug-induced temporary coma? Are you amnesic for what you were thinking or experiencing just before nodding off? To enable my experiencing an answer, my anesthesiologist alerted me to his drug administration, indicating that I would soon experience mental lights out. That was my signal to start counting the seconds out loud: “1, 2, 3, . . .” knape/E+/Getty Images On awakening 3.5 hours later, I remembered the trip into the operating room and onto the operating bed. I remembered chatting with the attending staff. I remembered the anesthesiologist connecting the bodily sensors . . . but nothing thereafter. In reality, I learned on awakening, my unremembered conscious engagement continued for about 3 minutes, including my counting to 16. A segment of my life—fully experienced but unrecorded—had vanished into the mind’s black hole. It was a weird experience. But weirder yet is what I have underappreciated until now: that I—and you—experience this fascinating phenomenon daily. An anesthesia-induced coma is not sleep (and may also be complicated by an amnesic drug effect). Nevertheless, last month when I proposed my anticipated quasi experiment to Baylor University sleep researcher Michael Scullin, he predicted my experience. The expected memory loss, he said, would be an example of (a new concept to me) mesograde amnesia.[i] We routinely but unknowingly experience mesograde amnesia as our immediate pre-sleep experience falls into oblivion. The phenomenon was demonstrated in a 1997 experiment by James Wyatt and colleagues: People failed to recall words spoken to them shortly before an EEG recording detected their transition to sleep. (The memory loss—from up to 4 minutes before sleep commenced—was, like mine on the operating table, surprisingly long.) Weirder yet, as Scullin further explained, sleep-induced mesograde amnesia implies that you and I will typically not remember our short (1- to 4-minute) awakenings during our night—a phenomenon also experimentally confirmed. Thus, university students who send a text message while briefly awake will, the next morning, often have no memory of doing so. And sleep apnea patients will experience multiple brief awakenings without remembering them. Mesograde amnesia explains one of my own recent sleep experiences. As I slipped into bed alone on a recent warm night, I pushed the blanket down to my feet. The room cooled during the night, and in the morning I awoke to find the blanket pulled up—with my having no memory of how that happened. Had my fairy godmother noticed my chill? Scullin’s memory tutorial also led to my wondering about an evening after-work experience I have at least weekly—briefly nodding off while watching a British mystery. When I snap back to consciousness, I typically need to replay about 10 minutes for which I have no memory. I’ve assumed that the program gap represents a 10-minute nap. In reality, I now realize, 4 minutes of mesograde amnesia plus 6 minutes of napping could account for the missing 10 minutes. What’s true for the sleep-experiment participants, and for me, is also true of you. Your falling asleep—at the beginning of your sleeping or napping, and again during your interrupted sleep—makes you amnesic for your immediately preceding life experience. Over time, your mesograde amnesia experiences add up to hours of your conscious life that have vanished, having gone unrecorded on your cerebral hard drive. Count it as one more example of our wonder-full lives. (For more such wonders, see my just-published How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. 😊) [i] Most amnesia is either anterograde (trouble making new memories) or retrograde (trouble accessing old memories). Mesograde (middle grade) amnesia is not clearly due to either the inability to store a new memory or retrieve the memory once stored. Some say it is produced by memory-disruptive bursts of hippocampal activity during the wake-to-sleep transition. ... View more

We live wonder-full lives. How blessed I am to be tasked with reporting on those wonders, and, on most days, to learn something new. Last week’s reading brought news—previously unknown to me, and also to you?—of an intriguing phenomenon, numbsense. But first, some background. One stunning psychological science revelation concerns how much more we know than we know we know. We operate with two minds—one conscious, the other below the radar of our awareness. An illustration of this dual processing comes from brain-injured patients who, though consciously blind (unable to perceive their surroundings visually), act as if they see. Walking down a hall, they avoid an unseen chair. Asked to slip an envelope into a mail slot, they—despite being unable to see or describe the slot’s location and angle—can do so. These “blindsighted” individuals suggest that the brain’s “visual perception track” is—surprise!—distinct from its “visual action track.” Even normally sighted people, when their visual cortex is deactivated with magnetic stimulation, may display blindsight—by correctly guessing the nature of unseen objects. And now the week’s news: City University of New York researchers Tony Ro and Lua Koenig have also used magnetic stimulation to deactivate people’s sense of touch, leaving them unaware of whether or where someone has touched them. Yet, like some patients who have suffered sensory cortex damage, they can display a blindsight-like “numbsense.” They can guess the location of the unfelt touch. The big lesson of blindsight and numbsense: The unconscious mind sometimes knows what the conscious mind does not. Moreover, the out-of-sight mind is the bigger workhorse. Much as a cruise ship’s work mostly happens without its captain’s attention, so most of what sustains us is accomplished by our mind’s unseen workers below decks, without engaging our conscious mind’s attention. We are smarter than we know. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

Since 1991, through its school-based surveys of 4.9 million high school students, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has monitored the health and well-being of America’s youth. Its Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System monitors trends in adolescent risky behaviors, sexuality, mental health, drug and alcohol use, exercise, and diet. The 2019 survey, released in late August of 2020, includes these findings of possible interest to teachers, counselors, parents, and others who support or nurture America’s youth: Sexual identity. Two percent of boys and 3 percent of girls report being gay or lesbian. But more report being bisexual or unsure. This is especially so for girls: Nearly 20 percent identify as neither straight nor gay, which accords with other studies that find women’s sexual identity less fixed than men’s. Sexual identity and victimization. It’s often presumed that gay and lesbian teens are vulnerable to becoming victims of antisocial acts, and the CDC survey confirms that presumption. Gay and lesbian youth are twice as likely as straight youth to report feeling unsafe, being bullied, and experiencing violence directed against them. They also are 3.6 times more likely to report experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 4.5 times more likely to have “seriously considered attempting suicide” in the past 12 months. Sexual activity. The long-term decline in teen sexual intercourse has continued. Psychologist Jean Twenge, also following this trend, has attributed it to the smartphone generation’s diminishing face-to-face relationships. Of those sexually active, 23 percent reported using oral contraceptives and 54 percent reported using condoms during their last sexual intercourse, with 9 percent using both (or some other accompanying birth control device). Suicidal thoughts and attempts. High school students’ contemplating or attempting suicide has increased since 2009. Moreover, both depression and suicide attempts are twice as likely among teen girls compared with teen boys. The rising depression rates coincide with another government national youth survey that reported a marked increase in teen rates of major depressive disorder since 2010. In this 2018 survey, too, the percent of teens feeling “sad or hopeless” had increased from 26 to 37 percent since 2009. Might the concurrent rise of smartphones and social media be contributing to these increasing rates? For my quick synopsis of the pertinent evidence see here. Drug and alcohol use. Since 2009, teens’ marijuana use has been stable—though with an uptick from 20 to 22 percent since 2017, coincident with widespread legalization in the United States. Daily cigarette smoking has dramatically declined, to the point of becoming gauche: But vaping has replaced cigarette use, with one-third reporting having vaped at least once in the past month, and 1 in 10 doing so most days. (In a separate survey of college age people, both  nicotine and marijuana vaping increased from 2017 to 2019.) However, a brand new government report indicates that, thanks to health warnings, youth vaping dropped by 30 percent in 2020. Other tidbits from the CDC survey: TV. In the age of internet and social media, teen TV watching has plummeted—from the 43 percent who watched three or more hours per day in 1999 to 20 percent in 2019. Video games and computer use. Flip-flopping with TV watching was the corresponding increase in 3+ daily hours of video game playing and other computer use, from 22 percent in 2003 to 46 percent in 2019. Obesity. Youth having obesity (defined by body mass index) increased from 11 percent in 1999 to 16 percent in 2019. School safety. The percent of students carrying a weapon (gun, knife, or club) to school decreased from 12 percent in 1993 to 3 percent in 2019. Those reporting being in a physical fight in the last year also decreased—from 43 percent in 1991 to 22 percent in 2019. To view and capture simple graphs on these and other health indicators—and perhaps to create a quiz that challenges your students to guess the answers—visit here. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

“Death is reversible.” So began NYU medical center’s director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research Science, Sam Parnia, at a recent research consultation on people’s death experiences during and after cardiac resuscitation. Biologically speaking, he explained, death and cardiac arrest are synonymous. When the heart stops, a person will stop breathing and, within 2 to 20 seconds, the brain will stop functioning. These are the criteria for declaring someone dead. When there’s no heartbeat, no breathing, and no discernible brain activity, the attending physician records the time of death. Yet recent advances in science reveal that it may take many hours for individual brain cells to die. In a 2019 Nature report, slaughtered pigs’ brains, given a substitute blood infusion 4 hours after death, had brain function gradually restored over a 6-10 hour period. For many years now, brain cells from human cadaver biopsies have been used to grow brain cells up to 20 hours after death, explained Parnia. His underappreciated conclusion: “Brain cells die very, very slowly,” especially for those whose brains have been chilled, either medically or by drowning in cold water. But what is death? A Newsweek cover showing a resuscitated heart attack victim proclaimed, “This man was dead. He isn’t any more.” Parnia thinks Newsweek got it right. The man didn’t have a “near death experience” (NDE). He had a death experience (DE). Ah, but Merriam-Webster defines death as “a permanent cessation of all vital functions.” So, I asked Parnia, has a resuscitated person actually died? Yes, replied Parnia. Imagine two sisters simultaneously undergoing cardiac arrest, one while hiking in the Sahara Desert, the other in a hospital ER, where she was resuscitated. Because the second could be resuscitated, would we assume that the first, in the same minutes following the cessation of heart and brain function, was not dead? Of 2.8 million CDC-reported deaths in the United States annually, Parnia cites estimates of possibly 1.1 million attempted U.S. cardiac resuscitations a year. How many benefit from such attempts? And of those who survive, how many have some memory of their death experiences (cognitive activity during cardiac arrest)? For answers, Parnia offers his multi-site study of 2060 people who suffered cardiac arrests. In that group, 1730 (84 percent) died and 330 survived. Among the survivors, 60 percent later reported no recall of their death experience. The remaining 40 percent had some recollection, including 10 percent who had a meaningful “transformative” recall. If these estimates are roughly accurate, then some 18,000 Americans a year recall a death experience. NDEs (or DEs) are reportedly recalled as a peaceful and pleasant sense of being pulled toward a light, often accompanied by an out-of-body experience with a time-compressed life review. After returning to life, patients report a diminished fear of death, a kinder spirit, and more benevolent values—a “transformational” experience that Parnia is planning to study with the support of 17 major university hospitals. In this study, cardiac-arrest survivors who do and don’t recall cognitive experiences will complete positive psychology measures of human flourishing. One wonders (and Parnia does, too), when did the recalled death experiences occur? During the cardiac-arrest period of brain inactivity? During the moments before and at cardiac arrest? When the resuscitated patient was gradually re-emerging from a coma? Or even as a later constructed false memory? Answers may come from a future Parnia study, focusing on aortic repair patients, some of whom experience a controlled condition that biologically approximates death, with no heartbeat and flat-lined brain activity. This version of aortic repair surgery puts a person under anesthesia, cools the body to 70 degrees, stops the heart, and drains the blood, creating a death-like state, during which the cardiac surgeon has 40 minutes to repair the aorta before warming the body and restarting the heart. Functionally, for that 40 or so minutes, the patient is dead . . . but then lives again. So, will some of these people whose brains have stopped functioning experience DEs? One study suggests that at least a few aortic repair patients, despite also being under anesthesia, do report a cognitive experience during their cardiac arrest. Parnia hopes to take this research a step further, by exposing these “deep hypothermia” patients to stimuli during their clinical death. Afterwards he will ascertain whether any of them can report accurately on events occurring while they lacked a functioning brain. (Such has been claimed by people having transformative DEs.) Given that a positive result would be truly mind blowing—it would challenge our understanding of the embodied person and the mind-brain connection—my colleagues and I encouraged Parnia to      preregister his hypotheses and methods with the Open Science Framework.      conduct the experiment as an “adversarial collaboration” with a neuroscientist who would expect a null result.      have credible, independent researchers gather the data, as happens with clinical safety trials. If this experiment happens, what do you predict: Will there be someone (anyone) who will accurately report on events occurring while their brain is dormant? Sam Parnia thinks yes. I think not. Parnia is persuaded by his accumulation of credible-seeming accounts of resuscitated patients recalling actual happenings during their brain-inactive time. He cites the case of one young Britisher who, after all efforts to restart his heart had failed and his body turned blue, was declared dead. When the attending physician later returned to the room, he noticed that the patient’s normal color was returning and discovered that his heart had somehow restarted. The next week, reported Parnia, the patient astoundingly recounted events from his death period. As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, reflected “It wasn’t what I expected. But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” My skepticism arises from three lines of research: the failure of parapsychology experiments to confirm out-of-body travel with remote viewing, the mountain of cognitive neuroscience evidence linking brain and mind, and scientific observations showing that brain oxygen deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs can cause similar mystical experiences (complete with the tunnel, beam of light, and life review). Nevertheless, Parnia and I agree with Miss Marple: Sometimes reality surprises us (as mind-boggling DE reports have surprised him). So stay tuned. When the data speak, we will both listen. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) P.S. For those wanting more information: Parnia and other death researchers will present at a November 18 th New York Academy of Sciences symposium on “What Happens When We Die?” (see here and here)--with a live stream link to come. For those with religious interests: My colleagues, British cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves and American developmental psychologist Thomas Ludwig, reflect on the brain-mind relationship in their recent book, Psychological Science and Christian Faith. If you think that biblical religion assumes a death-denying dualism (thanks to Plato’s immortal soul) prepare to be surprised. ... View more

“Self-consciousness [exists] in contrast with an ‘other,’ a something which is not the self.” ——C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940 We are, always and everywhere, self-conscious of how we differ. Search your memory for a social situation in which you were the only person of your gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or body type. Perhaps you were the only woman in a group of men, or the only straight person at an LGBTQ gathering. Recalling that situation . . . Were you self-conscious about your identity? How did others respond to you? How did your perceptions of their responses affect your behavior? Differences determine our “spontaneous self-concepts." If you recalled being very aware of your differences, you are not alone. As social psychologist William McGuire long ago noted, we are conscious of ourselves “insofar as, and in the ways that” we differ. When he and his co-workers invited children to “tell us about yourself,” they mostly mentioned their distinctive attributes. Redheads volunteered their hair color, foreign-born their birthplace, minority children their ethnicity. Spontaneous self-concepts often adapt to a changing group. A Black woman among White women will think of herself as Black, McGuire observed. When moving to a group of Black men, she will become more conscious of being a woman. This identity-shaping phenomenon affects us all. When serving on an American Psychological Association professional task with 10 others—all women—I immediately was aware of my gender. But it was only on the second day, when I joked to the woman next to me that the bathroom break line would be short for me, that she noticed the group’s gender make-up. In my daily life, surrounded by mostly White colleagues and neighbors, I seldom am cognizant of my race—which becomes a prominent part of my identity when visiting my daughter in South Africa, where I become part of a 9 percent minority. In the U.S., by contrast, a new Pew survey finds that 74 percent of Blacks but only 15 percent of Whites see their race as “being extremely or very important to how they think of themselves.” Our differences may influence how others respond to us. Researchers have also noted a related phenomenon: Our differences, though mostly salient to ourselves, may also affect how others treat us. Being the “different” or “solo” person—a Black person in an otherwise White group, a woman in a male group, or an adult in a group of children—can make a person more visible and seem more influential. Their good and bad qualities also tend to be more noticed (see here and here). If we differ from others around us, it therefore makes adaptive sense for us to be a bit wary. It makes sense for a salient person—a minority race person, a gay person, or a corpulent person—to be alert and sensitive to how they are being treated by an interviewer, a police officer, or a neighbor. Although subsiding, explicit prejudices and implicit biases are real, and stereotypes of a difference can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes our perceived differences not only influence how others treat us, but also how we, in turn, respond to them. In one classic experiment, men students conversed by phone with women they mistakenly presumed (from having been shown a fake picture) were either unattractive or attractive. The presumed attractive women (unaware of the picture manipulation) spoke more warmly to the men than did the presumed unattractive women. The researchers’ conclusion: The men’s expectations had led them to act in a way that influenced the women to fulfill the belief that beautiful women are desirable. A stereotype of a difference can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our acute self-consciousness of our differences can cause us to exaggerate or misinterpret others’ reactions. At times, our acute self-consciousness of our difference may have funny consequences. Consider of my favorite social psychology experiments demonstrating the influence of personal perception of differences. In the first, which showed the “spotlight effect,” Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky asked university students to don a Barry Manilow T-shirt before entering a room with other students. Feeling self-conscious about their difference, those wearing the dorky T-shirt guessed that nearly half of their peers would notice the shirt. Actually, only 23 percent did. The lesson: Our differences—our bad hair day, our hearing loss, our dropping the cafeteria plate—often get noticed and remembered less than we imagine. In another favorite experiment—one of social psychology’s most creative and poignant studies—Robert Kleck and Angelo Strenta used theatrical makeup to place an ear-to-mouth facial scar on college women—supposedly to see how others would react. After each woman checked the real-looking scar in a hand mirror, the experimenter applied “moisturizer” to “keep the makeup from cracking”—but which actually removed the scar. So the scene was set: A woman, feeling terribly self-conscious about her supposedly disfigured face, talks with another woman who knows nothing of all this. Feeling acutely sensitive to how their conversational partner was looking at them, the “disfigured” women saw the partner as more tense, patronizing, and distant than did women in a control condition. Their acute self-consciousness about their presumed difference led them to misinterpret normal mannerisms and comments. The bottom line: Differences define us. We are self-conscious of how we differ. To a lesser extent, others notice how we differ and categorize us according to their own beliefs, which may include stereotypes or unrealistic expectations. And sometimes, thanks to our acute sensitivity to how we differ, we overestimate others’ noticing and reacting. But we can reassure ourselves: if we’re having a bad hair day, others are unlikely to notice and even less likely to remember. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

On the same day last week, two kind colleagues sent unsolicited photos. In one, taken 21 years ago at Furman University, I am with my esteemed friend/encourager/adviser, Charles Brewer (who sadly died recently).  The others were from a talk just given at Moraine Valley Community College. I was a little embarrassed to see that in both I’m wearing, 21 years apart, the same Scottish green plaid tie and blue blazer with brass buttons (well, not the exact same blazer—I wore the first one out, but its replacement is identical). How boring is that? And how boring is the life of this professor who, when not traveling, arises at 7:00 each morning, dresses (often with the same sweater from the day before) while watching the first ten minutes of the Today Show; bikes to work the same 3 blocks every day of the year (no matter the weather); begins the office day with prayer, email, and downloading political news for reading over breakfast in the campus dining hall; works till noontime exercise in the campus gym and . . .  (enough of this). I know: very boring.   But consider the wisdom of mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his 1911 An Introduction to Mathematics:  Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. . . . By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.   Mark Zuckerberg follows Whitehead’s wisdom (and that of Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit)—by not wasting time deciding what shirt to wear each day. As I concluded a previous essay on the same theme, “Amid today’s applause for ‘mindfulness,’ let’s put in a word for mindlessness. Mindless, habitual living frees our minds to work on more important things than which pants to wear or what breakfast to order.” Or so I’d like to believe.   [Note to positive psych geeks: The 2018 version of my “Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” talk (given more than 200 times over the past 28 years) is available, courtesy of Moraine Valley, at tinyurl.com/MyersHappiness.] ... View more