Could Inner Zombie be Controlling your Brain?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26742742/

by DanielBMarkham • 18 years ago

8 12 18 years ago

msnbc.msn.com

swombat3• 18 years ago

Sensationalist (and quite lame) title. This is an article about how a large part of our behaviour is driven by subconscious thought - nothing new there except for the title.

robg3• 18 years ago

IMO the author has provided a nice metaphor, and explanation of, "subconscious thought". Can you to come up with a better metaphor that's also as concrete? It's tougher than it seems. And I'm not so sure the idea is as widely accepted as you presume. Having taught intro neuroscience to undergraduates, they are not generally aware of these findings.

I agree the title is lame - but then it was written by someone at MS.

aslkjdf3• 18 years ago

Crappy MSN articles made for bored soccer moms. Keep HN pure and away from the border tabloid sources.

robg3• 18 years ago

Except Carl Zimmer is a well-known and well-respected science writer.

http://carlzimmer.com/bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zimmer

Keep HN news pure and away from troll comments.

P.s. Are you a sockpuppet? This is the second comment from you, in the five days since your account was created, with community-based concerns expressed in an anti-community sentiment.

robg3• 18 years ago

Then there's this:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aslkjdf3• 18 years ago

If you followed digg as close as I did from 05-07 and saw what happened you would feel the same way. Current HN was digg in early 05/06. Now look at it. It went from articles on computer science/tech at UW/google research/stanford/MSR to MSN/college humor in what seems like a flash because people flocked towards what was popularized instead of technical. I took solace in the fact there was a tech section but all those articles lost any sort of insight because the community fell apart. I recall reading explanations and watching videos about the internals of Map Reduce/GFS/Big Table soon after they were released for publication. Videos from the core kernel development team at MSR (check channel9). Understanding how Microsoft managed their software development teams from people at MS. How to ace alot of algorithm questions at interviews (mapping mazes,sorting,etc). All from digg. I recall having a brief discussion with a person at slashdot about this. I asked them if they were concerned about what digg was doing and if he thought it was the new paradigm. He didnt flinch one bit. Since slashdot was old it had been through this before. It knew that topics would quickly swerve towards "popsugar" type articles real quick. They knew need they needed editorial control and thats why slashdot is still around and kicking. I dont want to be a control freak, I just love HN and try and keep on top of the sources used!

gruseom2• 18 years ago

I agree that the article is marred by the asinine "zombie" schtick and generally dumbed-down.

But if you're interested in research on unconscious mental processes, there's a lot of it here: at least 4 or 5 experiments that I hadn't seen cited before. I'm still hoping someone will write a good book about all this.

swombat3• 18 years ago

Try "Blink" and "Predictably Irrational" if you haven't read them yet. Blink is a bit light on practical things you can do about it, but not too bad. PI is quite good.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

Thanks, I'll have to thumb through PI next time I'm in a bookstore. Gladwell I find too glib.

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

My concern is the article's conclusion geared towards a sort of dichotomy - the "me" part of the brain vs. the "zombie"/unconscious part of the brain. This seems contrived and artificial, reminiscent of the discredited "Cartesian theater" models. However, subtracting the conclusion of the article, and just taking the data at face value, is interesting. I think it is consistent with the Daniel Dennet "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, where the brain is effectively a "multi-threaded application", where sometimes thread A is "observed" (conscious) or thread B is "observed" (conscious) but A and B are both still there, whether we are aware of them or not. So basically the "zombies" in the brain are all that there is - it is a multi-threaded application, where each "thread" is a "zombie" to use that terminology. Sometimes this zombie or that interacts with the environmental stimuli to the point of "awareness" but there is no "awareness" per ce, just a lot of unaware threads running around which create the illusion of "self", etc. As far as I understand it anyway. :-)

Could Inner Zombie be Controlling your Brain?

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