Buying In - (Page 55) buying in 55 pattern invention Now, there are several caveats to all of this. Those false memory rates, for example, are well below 100 percent. Merely seeing an ad is obviously not going to make you rewrite your entire life experience. And although such “source memories” are not always reliable, they are easier to distort if the scenario seems likely—for example, few if any would be misled into remembering meeting the president, or Elvis, or an alien from the planet Clarion, at Disneyland, no matter what ads they saw. As for the “priming” effects studied at Yale and elsewhere, they would be extraordinarily difficult to duplicate in the real world on behalf of a specific product. These caveats are important, because you should not come away from learning about the interpreter by concluding: Wow, people are idiots. That’s not the point. And behavioral science researchers (Gazzaniga emphatically included) will tell you that it’s not even close to true. While nonconscious thinking has, in the past, been linked to ideas about repression and so on, the more recent view is that it is simply a matter of efficiency. In his thoughtful and impressive book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that at “any given moment our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of information.” That’s simply a lot more than the conscious mind can deal with. Relying on nonconscious thought, then, is “vital to our survival,” Wilson suggests. Gazzaniga strikes a similar theme and points out that all in all, the brain does a pretty amazing job. Most of the time, he writes, “our interpreter works beautifully to help us understand the world.” The lesson is simply that we can be affected by influences that we are not directly aware of; this is not a wild-eyed argu-
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