

Could Inner Zombie be Controlling your Brain? - DanielBMarkham
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26742742/

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swombat
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.

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robg
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.

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gruseom
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.

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swombat
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.

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

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swombat
Agree, me too. It was singularly lacking in any practical advice, too.. I
spent most of the book waiting for him to start explaining ways to hone one's
subconscious, and was disappointed to find that he didn't bother with that
part.

PI is a bit more practical and provides some actual techniques you can use to
tap into that subconscious brain.

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

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robg
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.

~~~
robg
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>

~~~
aslkjdf
I'll flag next time. The title and source aren't anything to be proud of.
Sentences such as "Their research raised the disturbing possibility that much
of what we think and do is thought and done by an unconscious part of the
brain — an inner zombie." sound asinine and misinforming. Really its
disturbing huh? Shit im be controlled by an inner zombie like in the movies!

He would be better off just using the term subconcious or maybe working off
the verbiage the researchers actually used. Maybe something along the lines of
hidden levels of awareness and automatism. This way you wouldnt be trying to
hook the reader as if they were a moron. Then again this is MSN. And if you
read anything off the front page of MSN you realize that articles like this
are dwarfed by tabloids and sensationalist crap.

Let him take on the difficult task of defining subconscious to a layman
without the zombies.

Also don't forget to read some of the related articles such as "Eight
organisms that make you go 'eww'" .

Give me a fucking break.

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Allocator2008
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. :-)

