Buying In - (Page 48) 48 rob walker The interpreter is Gazzaniga’s name for the functions of the mind that enable us to make sense of the world and construct a coherent narrative of our lives much like the one Zaltman proposes—even if doing so sometimes involves errors of judgment and perception and memory. The casual student of psychology will be familiar with the sources of these errors. There’s “the confirmation bias” that makes us give greater weight to messages and perceptions that confirm our preexisting beliefs and less weight to those that don’t. There’s our tendency to overestimate our control over the fortunate events in our lives and deemphasize our responsibility for the unfortunate ones. People are more likely to get angry when it’s hot, focusing that anger on whatever “intentional object” the conscious mind is trained upon and not the completely unrelated factor (weather) that’s exerting a nonconscious influence. And so on. Keech’s story is an extreme, and obviously quite rare, example of just how much power the interpreter can exert. The interpreter is a thing bent not on manipulation, but rather on seeking “to understand the world,” as Gazzaniga writes. It is with us as we experience day-to-day life and as we remember those experiences. It’s almost certainly impossible—and probably not even a good idea—to control the interpreter. But it’s worth understanding something of how it does its job. eat popcorn Critics of consumer culture often talk about our materialistic obsessions, but the truth is closer to the opposite: Much of our consumer decision making plays out somewhere below the level of explicit, conscious thought. This may conjure up corny
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