you don't know this young woman but whether you want to or not in this very moment you've already passed judgment on her in a split second you've already decided if you find a trustworthy competent likeable no doubt your brain is a state-of-the-art marvel managing 90% of everything you do without letting you know regardless of whether you're awake or asleep when you think you have an idea your brain has already had that idea for instance take a look at his sentence can you still understand this alphabet soup most people can your brain automatically puts the letters
back in the correct order something in your head navigates you through the everyday Adventures of modern life something that decides things for you before you can think about it because your brain is always on automatic we're driven by our unconscious mind isn't that the interesting thing so much of what we do is unconscious the decisions we make are almost dictated to us um I often wonder who's in charge here you know who's running the show how much control do we really have unconscious influences are there everywhere and as research progresses it's never going the other
way it's not saying oh we used to think these things are all oncologist now there we find out they're conscious it's exactly the opposite all these things we thought because we thought everything this conscious smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller it's become the incredible shrinking a little man in the head there's all sorts of gaps in our perception and our right confabulations that our brains are making for us in order for us to exist because it's easier to do that than actually to try and make an accurate representation of the world it's faster and easier
for us to estimate what the world's going to look like because it usually works just fine however some people are out to fool us on purpose people like Apollo Robbins a magician and the gentleman theme for the desert town Las Vegas a poly not only deceives our eyes but more importantly our brains on a good day Apollo even steals the show from the city of illusions itself his adopted home Las Vegas Apollo shot to fame in his Caesars Palace Casino once he even snatched wallets and watches from Secret Service agents guarding former President Jimmy Carter
ever since then Apollo also consults security experts magicians like Apollo Robbins take advantage of our automatic mode that otherwise like an autopilot navigates our smoothly through life magic is about what's happening inside the head it's about how you manipulate the attention it's about how that can be taken advantage of how you can take people on this journey you watch my hand right now you see that my hand is very clearly empty I don't reach up with another hand yet now I have a coin inside the hand that means you just made a false assumption about
something about my hand what you are as a human is a bunch of electrochemical signals going around a bunch of circuits inside your brain there's no windows in your skull okay the only way you get information is through your sensory systems from your memory or from your cognition that is you're making it up okay so what these electrochemical signals see about the world are other electrochemical signals coming in from other systems that form this grand simulation of reality around us so you know it's not that the world around you isn't there it's there but you've
never lived there okay you've never even been there for a visit the only place you've ever been is inside your mind every morning when we open our eyes unconscious secretary conjures a simulation we perceive as our world in this great illusion in our minds I the only part we appear to operate actively is where we consciously place our attention if this young man happens to meet the love of his life today he will only realize it if his unconscious mind shares the same view do you know for example how exactly you brush your teeth no
your brain attends to such routine things without even bothering your consciousness only switches on for new or important things that is because we can cope with no more than four or five units of information at the same time for those who don't want to believe this American Cupid peak over has invented the perfect test pick one of the symbols and count how many times it blinks now pick a card take a very close look at it and repeat yourself this suit and the value three times then look back at one of the symbols below and
count how often it wheats and now have a look we removed your guard right a miracle no we just replaced all the dots here are the originals you simply didn't notice because your working memory was overloaded suppressing those things in front of us that we don't pay attention to is something that we do all the time and most of the times we do it unconsciously we don't realize that there are huge portions of the world that we are turning invisible by the very act of paying attention to a particular object or a particular task deciding
on the right clothes for the office may appear trivial however unconscious circuitry in our heads will always have the last word scientists estimate that these circuits can simultaneously process 200,000 times more data than the conscious mind that's because our conscious mind is limited to the cerebral cortex a wrinkled layer just one millimeter thick that wraps around your brain like a bathing cap about 15 billion nerve cells can connect to activate new networks in fractions of a second however the fireworks of conscious thinking devours up more energy than the muscles of a top athlete which is
why our brain normally tries to do without our conscious mind the brainstem regulates vital bodily functions like breathing and heart rate the cerebellum coordinates Alma toric routines like walking or grasping and the limbic system knows us better than we know ourselves because it regulates everything that we feel and this unconscious filter the thalamus is in charge of deciding what is new and important enough to share with us that's why our brain always seems to know more you know perhaps that's the reason why we have so little influence on that which we are and what we
do and even on what we wear Apollo Robbins and other magicians help scientists understand how our brain perceives the world at the Barrell Institute in Phoenix even the slightest eye movements are captured with these eye trackers this helps researchers understand why tricks with curved movements work better than straight movements with curves the eye automatically follows the hand with straight line movements it jumps to the end which helps uncover the trick susana Martinez Conde and Steven Matic have studied dozens of magic tricks the married research couple says illusions other rule in our heads not the exception
magic Tony from Phoenix is a part-time magician but also a postgraduate in psychology that's why he sometimes performs in the lab test persons follow his tricks with up to 1,000 ire movements a second and yet they still don't notice how they're being cheated Tony purposely diverts their attention we apparently can't help but follow other people's gazes so magicians may use explosions or things like that in order to cause distractions at times but for the most part they use very specific tools in order to control exactly where someone wouldn't paying attention so that they can do
something somewhere else even if our eyes happen to graze the hidden movement we look but we don't see the trick because our brain suppresses everything that's not in a spotlight of our attention and in the shadows of the supposedly irrelevant Toni moves the coin with a magnet under the table it's really most of our mental life and behaviors a mixture is a combination of processes that are conscious and unconscious in a sort of symbiotic dynamic way they're supporting each other and this is this is how consciousness evolved it it evolved late that it evolved making
use of the pre-existing brain structures that were unconscious and so many similarities exist between conscious and unconscious processes especially in motivation and goal pursuit the big nursery school a kind of research kindergarten for the elite Stanford University near San Francisco the marshmallow test was invented here in the early 70s and is still one of the most important studies about self-control and motivation we brought the test back to life with kids of today putting these four-year-olds in a sticky situation so in this part of the game we're gonna have two plates here look one two marshmallows
there do you prefer two marshmallows or one marshmallow okay two marshmallows okay you don't want to okay two marshmallows okay what's going to happen is that I need to go do some work outside but you can always bring me back by ringing the bell remember but if you do that you can only eat one marshmallow if you wait for me to come back all by myself then you can have two marshmallows okay there's no right or wrong way to do this you just choose what you want to do okay see you later as with the
original test something in the children's head switches to automatic each of the four-year-olds develop their own unconscious strategy in order to resist temptation in the seventies scientists had no idea what caused some children to give up and others to stick it out but it's a surprisingly simple trick of our unconscious mind you hey baby yeah you run the bells so you could eat this one yummy the conception of willpower as a stoic thing where you essentially bite your lip and you're just going to will it and make it happen is a terrific way to have
resolutions that don't work out it's just too hard it's just too impossible you have to do you have to in some way engage the environment and change it and transform it the only other thing you can do is change your perceptions and change where you put your attention today the preschool is tested in the early 70s are over 40 years old from ongoing interviews researchers found those who at the age of four were able to wait went on to have better results on college entry exams earn much more money have happier marriages and are healthier
than those who immediately devoured the marshmallow two points all right well we're all done thanks for playing most of the time it works just perfect for us when our automatic brain attends to everyday routines that's why we can eat descender stairs and read the newspaper all at once our unconscious tells us what we want for breakfast and whether would rather have coffee or tea before we wouldn't think about it it analyzes spectacular amounts of data in milliseconds it's far more complex than any deliberate decision of the conscious mind but we don't notice this ocean of
the unconscious because it is only conscious thinking that taxes us and this makes us believe that our intellect rules the world luring fruits and yogurt on the go is not a problem for our unconscious circuitry nor is the intricacies of driving if we had to constantly think about our hands and feet as if it was our first driving lesson most of us would rather take the train did you know that accidents with cyclists happen less frequently than cities with lots of cyclists the more often we are confronted with them the better our autopilot can deal
with them with new dangers in contrast our heads switch over the reasoning that makes us much more flexible but also much slower the Santa Santa is tough interestingly we always live in the past as everything we consciously perceive has already passed by at least a third of a second this delay of consciousness has huge consequences especially regarding our reaction time and road traffic interestingly I do not consciously perceive this delay we do not experience the work of our unconscious mind we believe we experience it immediately didn't us a fault whenever we look at something a
bundle of light rays passes through our pupil and hits the retina of our eyes the new data is encrypted into millions of nerve impulses that race along the optic nerve 15 milliseconds later they hit the nerve cells in the thalamus the gatekeeper of our consciousness in an emergency the thalamus transmits the image not just to the visual cortex at the back of our heads but simultaneously to the amygdala the panic button in our heads it immediately jolts us into action and after just 115 milliseconds we get going without knowing why next unconscious modules disassemble the
image into components special neurons analyze colors outlines contrasts and send their results through the databases of our experiences from the visual cortex at the back of our heads to the frontal lobe here in a flash all bits and pieces are reassembled to a meaningful image and transmitted back to the visual cortex now from this moment on we can consciously see the image a child running after a ball out onto the street pre evaluated and projected 300 milliseconds into the future which is the simple reason why Martha is able to catch the boy in the nick
of time if you hold your thumb out at arm's length with your elbow straight and you look at your thumbnail that size of your thumbnail is about one degree of visual angle okay that means if you had 360 thumbs it would make a circle around your head now that one degree of visual angle is the size of your phobia that's the part of your retina where you can see everywhere else you're essentially legally blind but Ivana monkeys cannot in general the most important means of our perception is our memory effect assists yeah is a 99%
of what we see is projected from our memory at us lessons everything is only 1% is added by our sensory organs activated your buddies in this organ into our brain can falsify information that comes onto the retina it can conform fire in other words if we can override what is really out there and impress what we think should be out there that's the way it works it's very powerful let's take a look at Leon de and Raphael the two students are wearing similar clothing at the similar stature but are different enough to tell apart do
you think you would notice if Raphael started a conversation with you and in the middle of it was replaced by Liana yes then take a look at the test devised by American psychologist Daniel Simon's excuse me I'm looking for a false bunk sorry folks but I'm looking for a fox like folks but yep yeah let me think where is it um it's on the slapstick here yeah there is one round the corner about Market Square excuse me I'm looking for silver Street I don't have a clue where I am so could you show through you
once again you get a walk uphill vague down there and there to the left down there and then left all the way up pelvic I'm looking I'm looking for silver Street you know it is silver street silver street um yeah so do you know you see we're here that's where you want to go yeah does that have folks Bank somewhere here yeah shoving a map here okay I'm looking for a silver Street this is the zookeeper silver street um I have to admit I'm not from here either uh-huh okay so silver Street in case you
think we faked this experiment it first took place on an American University campus in 1998 it has since been conducted countless times and in all the tests more than half of the people approached didn't notice anything at all you you go to a doctor's office and you say I've obtained in my stomach and you don't want them to say well it could be aliens running around because it could be right why couldn't it be you want them to go through what's most likely down the list right that's what our brain does the whole cognitive structure
is we look at the world we make mind sets of what's familiar and we look out over the world in these mindsets our world is getting more and more complex an American psychologist calculated that today the human brain can simultaneously absorb 11 million units of information however we're only consciously aware of a maximum of 40 that's why New York is exhausting when we first visit it but the more often we venture into places like Times Square the more at ease we feel with it that's because we shift to autopilot and our brain fades out what
is considered irrelevant or familiar you half of your brain is dedicated to processing visual information so that means that a quarter of your brain at least is just for that 0.1% if you amplify that up and we saw everything in the world so that we didn't have a phobia just our entire visual field is one big high resolution phobia our brain would have to be at least 500 times bigger in order to process all that information and still we'd have an attention picking out pieces of it for us to prove this psychologist Daniel Simon's thought
up this test count how many times the white team passes the ball and go even if you did happen to notice something pop of old test persons overlooked the gorilla they were blind to the black gorilla because they were too busy counting the white team's passes our brain decides which information is new and important enough without us even knowing so when on the escalator of life we're lucky if our unconscious mind lets us know we're passing the love of our life what the unconscious specializes in is the present consciousness can time travel we can remember
the past we can get lost in the past we can we can plan for the future but what's minding what system is minding the store while we're often the future and thinking about the past we're walking down the street we have to be aware of what's going on in our environment we have to be adapting to it so what the unconscious is is a present based system and because it's operating at the same time the conscious thought is it frees the conscious mind to time travel if the conscious mind was the only one that existed
as soon as we time-travel we're going to block off a clip we're going to get hit by a car we're going to have all these other things happen to us because we're not minding the present and the present is a dangerous thing I love chicks a good pass this glad choose it is our autopilot that decides what is important and what gets ignored that's why we don't notice that our brain blanks out the group of our sunglasses as long as they don't move on our heads we get so used to them we even have to
check to make sure they're still there I like to think of our mind kind of working like a watchtower if you want to get by the tower you have to get by the guard but the guard if he's not paying attention to the surveillance systems and the inputs that he has then he can be suppressed I think that's what happened when I'm working I'm trying to get people not to pay attention to what their eyes are telling them or what their ears are telling him now you have nothing in your hand besides just the watch
you weren't now do you think it's possible for me to steal that watch without you knowing that's good because if I told you that be rather foolish for me to do before I tried to do and make my job a lot harder now what time do you have right now 1103 okay so instead of taking your watch I want to give you something of mine I'm going to try to steal it away from you this is mine it's worth about $50 it's a silver coin squeeze it in your hand does it feel like it's in
your hand will you be surprised if I could take it out good open your hand that's the easy way don't make it easy for me make a hard for me hold your hand up a little bit higher just a little bit flat like that watch it kind of close till you see it goes straight away it's back on his shoulder again do you see on your shirt yeah well keep on doing this till you catch it you're almost there you try it again one last time squeeze are very tight inside your hand squeeze firm don't
pull my finger that's a different trick I've seen that one before it's back on your shoulder bring the other shoulder it's not there as a man but Rome is not here open your hand all the way step back a little bit so he can see see you have to watch close put your other hand on top for me would you put it flat on top you see the coin right there I'm gonna put a shade in between you have to watch close it's not there yet it's more about the timing there's going to happen in
less than three minutes it's going to go in between your hands do you feel it now watch it close here it goes one two did you feel it open your hand I guess we end up with a watch instead didn't we that was less than three minutes I think I told you about this didn't you can take the watch along with a big round of applause from all your new fans you're awesome man thank you very much see it's back on your shoulder breath I check the other shoulder that's why if you like decide your
hands Shou is definitely not there we have to watch close she's tricks more about the timing but II can see pretty well now I'm just gonna loosen you up a little bit you're okay there okay that's good does that feel about right yeah all right so now put this in between your hands squeeze kind of tight just a little bit like this is the top button done on your shirt there milk and this is your watch isn't it man hey you're watching oh just like your watch that's so strange this your watch yeah what's your
name Ben Ben I appreciate the donation you've been a wonderful man in fact we had picked up something special we got your towel silly that's your tie than a man right sorry about that let's go and in fact we all got together to pay you for your time I believe this is your chance because I think these are all inside all year in the six paths it's the best watch we can find on short notice that looks a lot like good that's a heavy anaconda we stare at a bright light and then we turn our
gaze away and we can still see this very powerful after image wherever we move our eyes in the sense of touch it's something similar after a polo actually removes the watch because he has pressed the words into that person's skin previously they can feel that they're still wearing the watch even though the words is long gone we can dream walk effortlessly through our world only because every experience leaves an imprint in our unconscious memory this vast archive also guides us when we meet somebody for the first time because we have unconsciously generalized our earlier experiences
with people less than 100 milliseconds exposure to a face novel face you've never seen before is sufficient for people to make all kinds of decisions like whether the person is trustworthy whether the person is competent it's not the case that this inferences are necessarily accurate but we nevertheless to them very rapidly Alex Todorov has shown countless photos of faces to test subjects in studies prove we pass judgments on faces so rapidly our conscious mind doesn't even have time to get involved we under a baby faces as incompetent but trustworthy and we classify closely set eyes
and a square chin as aggressive when our reasoning eventually kicks in we only get more confident in our assumptions even if we aren't apparently wrong even if you don't intend to make judgments even if you don't have the intention to evaluate the faces nevertheless your brain is categorizing the faces putting the face into specific categories so in that sense a lot of the processing case one could describe the suit Ematic I'm behind looking out and not seeing my face so I'm not is able to manage it and to present it to make it so that
do you have what I want you to believe about me and this is the the classic domain of nonverbal communication and the face is hugely important it's so powerful but we're just starting with Toto rods work and some other people were just starting to realize how powerful it is and it's very hard to shake the decades scientists have tried to develop a software capable of what we do without effort recognizing and interpreting faces this specific module in a right temporal lobe is in charge of scanning faces it takes only fractions of a second to match
a face in front of you with your internal database of faces provided that the emotional records department in our insular cortex has marked the face with an emotion sometimes we even recognize a face you've seen only once our facial expressions are composed of 43 active muscle units if we look at all the possible combinations it adds up to 3,000 meaningful facial expressions next to the facial-recognition service is a facial expression Department capturing our counterparts facial micro movements and interpreting them the reports again ascend to the evaluation unit in insular cortex the empathy center of our
brain siniface we think we can feel what our counterpart feels because unconscious circuitry is forcing us to do so but we can neither put it in words nor control it anything that doesn't have a face is processed by the object recognition unit colored blue here autistic people also use the object minute when looking at a human face for them the face is just like a chair that's why they seem to be blind to other people's emotions we can contrast sometimes read too much into a face we have done some studies trying to predict political elections
from facial appearance and generally can predict about 70% of the elections based on a single glance at the face and these are judgments of people who don't know that they're looking at politicians at all so they are not familiar with the faces our faces decide how others perceive us whether we win or lose elections get hired for a job going that first day and our friends decide how we move studies of American college students revealed that female friends needed just a few milliseconds to unconsciously align their movements and gestures with one another when a person
sees without maybe even realizing it you're doing the same thing they're doing or having the same body posture or same emotional reaction on your face to the same news they think you're like them they see similarity they see you're reacting the same way they do it actually increases empathy and bonding between people unconscious circuitry is also guiding us when we're out shopping it tells us what we should buy and what we're willing to pay for it research has discovered that credit cards sidestepped the alarm system inside our heads it gets alerted when we actually give
away something but the plastic card is passed back to us by the cashier and we only notice were in the red at the end of the month until then we're safe in the illusion of having saved money by spending it on a sale we experienced solutions all the time we never have or almost never have a perfect match between perception and reality so in a way everything or most of everything that we perceive is blue Surrey Henrik Essen from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm the Swedish neurologist has proved that even our brilliant automatic brain can
be fooled his test setup is as simple as it is disturbing the test person sees 3d images taken by a camera behind Alison touches his subject and in synchronous he makes the same movement into the camera it may sound incredible but the touch and the 3d image are apparently merged by our unconscious into one and even if the test subjects conscious mind clearly recognizes the illusion the sensation still cannot be denied it's only an illusion body should be special it should be something you can trust the roll feeling when you can't trust the feeling of
your body that is also construction by the brain just like the brain constructs and what we see with a slightly modified setup the test is even taken to the next level this time essence colleague Valerio Peck over attaches the camera to a mannequin the test setup seduces the female test person to look down at the male mannequin body as if it were her own though she's only looking at a camera image the stronger a subject reacts to touch the more perfect the body swap works no matter how absurd how did it feel was it too
disturbing yeah because it really completely feel it's my buddy you wanted to cut me we can take a break yeah these solutions you can't think them away you see a mannequin it doesn't look like a real human body and still when you touch it and you see that touch at the same time with a touch you feel the brain just fuses the two signals and decides that yeah this must be my body you know the body's roughly looks like my body it's roughly in the right place and the touches I feel and see happens at
the same time so the brain just makes up this interpretation yes this is my body I skipped under I'm frogadier's Ennis Lenny more there is a hierarchy of senses the most powerful senses are the sense of touch in the sense of balance in all of our other senses are subordinate to these if we wear glasses that turn everything upside down and the world is reversed at first but the sensory motor systems ensure that it all turns back around our sensory matauri dominates the visuals and the visuals there dominates hearing don't mean yet a swirl don't
believe it then take a moment to test the McGurk effect in a second you'll hear two different syllables bar and far you can clearly differentiate between the two because you combine looking here with the lip movements you see ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba next you'll see a split screen if you look back and forth you'll hear bar when you look on the left and something else when you look on the right yet the sound remains the same ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
ba ba ba ba ba your brain doesn't even bother to let me know about the conflict it automatically solves it that's what magicians like Apollo Robbins take advantage of you wouldn't even uncover Apollo's trick if you rewound the field and the more you try the less you notice the show game doesn't work unless you have an emotional investment so when you're just watching this and you take a shot and guess I think it's under number two yes you may be right but if you have a vested interest where there's money on the table you're going
to prioritize where you choose and that's where you can be taken advantage of it's no wonder our first rendezvous gives us butterflies and makes us anxious in milliseconds our brain scans things like ratio of hips to waist the color of the eyes facial symmetry and fragrance of the body which in turn tells our subconscious whether our immune systems are a match researchers today know we're more likely to fall in love with people who are like us we even tend to fall for partners with the same width of the nose and for those who are roughly
as smart as we are 90% of our emotional communication is nonverbal and the more person imitates subconsciously our gestures and facial expressions the more we like that person it goes so far that we even tune into the same rhythm of breeding when I speaking to a person that we like in order for us to fall in love how brain eagerly pours out hormones clouding our judgment and making us downright addicted then we only have one goal being close to that person contrary to popular opinion men fall in love more quickly more definitively than women but
in each of us our brains decide for us long before we do that's why there's an automatic error monitoring system in our heads that registers every mishap before it occurs because our brains constantly calculate what will be happening next if the motion detectors of our cerebral cortex register minor deviations from the plan our unconscious alarm systems start up the motivation department chokes the release of dopamine the messenger substance anticipating all good things in our lives the drop of dopamine is registered by the nucleus accumbens a tiny interface constantly calculating what will make us happy or
not so before any mishap occurs it alarms the a-c-c a sort of fire alarm for our cerebral cortex this in turn triggers a voltage drop within the conscious brain that jolts us awake three tenths of a second after the first alarm errors feel bad for our brain that's why we learn from in the next episode you'll find out if things get really serious with our new lovestruck couple both Martha and Jake's happiness is fragile firstly you know you look at someone a potential partner and you're integrating all kinds of things the way she speaks the
way she looks the way she couldn't have the way every little motion is immediately integrated in some giant calculation saying you know acceptable like her and you know I find that interesting you meet someone on the train and they're your partner and one week later you
