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Show Notes
The Brain Science Podcast usually focuses on a single book devoted to neuroscience, but episode 13 begins with a discussion of Malcom Gladwell’s bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and then explores the ideas from several other sources. The key idea is that we do make some decisions without conscious thought and that neuroscience is discovering how this works.
References:
Consciousness: An Introduction (2003) by Susan Blackmore: Experiments from pages 38-43, 57-63, and 127-132
Consciousness Explained (1992) by Daniel C. Dennett
Freedom Evolves (2003) by Daniel C. Dennett: Quote in episode is from page 223
On Intelligence (2005) by Jeff Hawkins
Other Links for this episode:
The new Brain Science Podcast Community (Group) on Flickr.com: Please post your pictures here!
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{ 4 comments }
Oooh! This is SO cool! A Neuroscience podcast! I’ll link to it on my blog!
I’m a geeky cognitive psychology student, so this is so my thing… Thanks!!
Hey,
I haven’t heard the episode yet, but I have episode 11 twice, and everything after (the pub radio entry, ep 12 and ep 13) three times in the feed.
Just a heads-up. I’ll probably be back shortly…
Hopefully the problems with the feed will be short-lived. I am trying to move over to Podango.com and there have been a few glitches in the transition.
I think at the end of the episode you mentioned the most important aspect about unconscious devisions.
It is imperative – at least I feel that way – to inform people about the power of the unconscious, and how we often rationalize decisions after the fact. Unconscious desires and also unconscious perceptions can lead us on a path of magical thinking that, if we don’t know better, we will find very hard to leave.
So it’s not really a psychic sense of the future that makes me slow down the car, but a subtle clue from the environment that another car is about to rush out of the side street. That I didn’t consciously notice the kid turning her head that way, or whatever else, doesn’t make it a premonition.
Furthermore, this at least insulates us somewhat against attempts at manipulation of, say, advertisement agencies (priming is a tool of the moment).
Topics like the one today are why I initially sought out a/the brain science podcast.
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