SDS 378: Use Your Unconscious Mind

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast everybody, super excited to have you back here on the show. In a previous FiveMinuteFriday episode, we talked about the importance of winding down in order to gain this transitional period between being really focused on work and then spending time with your loved ones, so that you can dedicate your full attention to them. 

In today’s episode, I would like to elaborate on that wind down time or downtime a bit more, and this is going to be related to an article that appeared in a journal called Science in 2006. It is by several authors, and the lead author here is a Dutch psychologist with a very difficult to pronounce surname, I’ll give it a go, but please forgive me if I pronounce it incorrectly. So their name is Ap and surname is Dijksterhuis, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, or at least close. 

There’s an interesting study that was published in this article to do with using your conscious or unconscious mind for making a choice. Let’s dive into this a little bit. Study number one, there were two studies that I would like to point out in this article. Study number one was when participants were given a choice of four cars, so they need to pick… Imagine you’re part of this study. You need to pick the best car to buy. The experiment is designed in such a way that there clearly is a best car to buy. Each one of the cars, there’s four cars in total that you can pick from, and each one of these cars has four different attributes. Four different attributes that describe that car and you are given information on these attributes on these cars, and you need to decide which one you want to buy. 

The group of participants was split into two cohorts. Cohort number one got the information about the four cars and four attributes of each of those cars, and they were required to think about these cars for four minutes and weigh out the pros and cons. And you know how we do normally in life, write a list of pros and cons, positives and negatives and decide which car they want to buy. They’re given four minutes. 

Now, the second cohort in this study, they were given the same information, but rather than them being given time to figure out which car they want, they were distracted. They were intentionally distracted to solve puzzles. For four minutes, they were solving very simple puzzles, nothing complex, very simple puzzles they were solving to just be distracted from this challenge. 

Then, after four minutes, each of the cohorts had to give their decision. So the first cohort had four minutes to think about it, and then they have to say which car they would buy, and the second cohort were given the information and then for four minutes they were distracted, and then after four minutes, they were put on the spot, which car are you going to buy? They didn’t have time to think about it. 

As a result, the first cohort did much better. They found the best car with more confidence and more of them found the best car to purchase. But then there was a second study and that’s kind of like expected, when you think about something, then you get a better result. But then there was a second study, which was very interesting. So same experiment, same four cars, but this time, instead of four attributes, each car has 12 attributes. Instead of being described by just four features, each car is described by a whole 12 different features.

Of course, it’s a new cohort of people that haven’t seen this experiment before. I’m not sure exactly how that was designed around who they picked for the second study, but nevertheless, we’re going to assume it’s brand new people that are being provided information on four cars. Once again, they provide information on four cars, but this time each car has 12 attributes. Cohort number one, they’re given once again, four minutes to make their choice, to think about their information. Whereas cohort number two, they’re given the information, then they’re again, distracted with puzzles and they don’t have time to think about information after four minutes pass and they’re doing a simple puzzle, they’re put on the spot to make a decision which car they’re going to purchase. 

In this case, the second cohort did much, much better. By the way, we’ll link to this paper, which you can find researchgate.net. We’ll link to it in the show notes, and you’ll be able to get the exact full study from there if you like. But the point is that in the second study, the people who were not given time to think they did much better. 

So what is the conclusion? And this is all statistically significant, it’s all proper science, not fake science, did much better. And so what was the conclusion from this? The conclusion here is that in simple decisions, your conscious mind is better to apply. In, for example, arithmetic or where there’s rule based where you have to follow logic, like for example, arithmetic operations, or a simple decision such as picking which toothbrush to buy. There’s not many features of a toothbrush that you can select from, maybe four different features: color, size, softness and whether it’s electrified or not. 

But on the other hand, if you have a complex decision such as a car with 12 features, or maybe when you’re deciding which country to go on vacation to, once of course all this Coronavirus settles down and we can travel again, maybe you’re deciding where to go to on vacation or where to spend your holidays, and you have a lot of choices, a lot of parameters. Well, in those cases, the study argues that your unconscious mind is better. 

How do they argue this? Well, they say that… Or what do they think the underlying reason is? They think that the unconscious mind actually has more neural bandwidth, so there’s more information can be passed back and forth through your unconscious mind than through your conscious mind, and therefore your mind is able to solve this problem even while you’re not focusing on it, actually can solve it better. 

That underpins, as well, something we’ve talked about before on this podcast, things that were invented in people’s sleep, for example, like the sewing machine, the structure of DNA, the periodic system of elements, structure of the atom and all those things. Those all happened in an unconscious state, for example, in sleep. And so what can we take away in terms of practical applications, especially in data science here? 

Well, what we can take away is that sometimes there are difficult problems that the more we think about them, actually the worse the result is going to be because we’re focusing too much on our conscious mind, and there is a lot of features, there’s a lot of unknowns, there’s a lot of things to consider, too many things to consider for our conscious mind to do it effectively. 

Perhaps for instance, if you’re selecting a machine learning model to apply to a data set, it’s not a clear cut decision, right? It’s not arithmetic or it’s not a very logical rule-based decision. A lot of the time it involves creativity, it involves unconventional thinking and coming up with interesting approaches, so trial and error and things like that. 

Maybe it’s worth giving a shot to let your unconscious mind think about it and distracting yourself from the problem by solving some simple puzzles or maybe going for a lunch break, going for a walk, getting some breath of fresh air, or maybe even having a nap and going to sleep. Sometimes we get stuck trying to solve the problem right now, right here with our conscious mind, whereas maybe actually distracting ourselves will take that problem and put it into the back of our head, somewhere in our head, into the unconscious mind and help us come up with a better solution. 

There we go, that’s the power of your unconscious mind and how can you leverage it in your life? Whether it’s your day-to-day life and purchasing a car or maybe making a complex decision in your personal life, or maybe is it about your work? How can you apply your unconscious mind to become a better data scientist and better practitioner in what we do? 

On that note, hope you enjoyed this episode, the study will be linked in the show notes, which is www.superdatascience.com/the number of this episode. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.