The New York Times recently published an article about subconscious mental processing. It describes a number of unexpected findings (e.g., people who are unobtrusively exposed to the scent of a cleaning product are more likely to clean up after themselves when they eat a crumbly snack) that reveal the things our brains get up to behind our backs. The article explains how subcortical areas of the brain, which evolved earlier than the prefrontal cortex, often make quick decisions for us and act as “automatic survival systems”. There’s a line in there about how the prefrontal cortex, with a major role in conscious processing, is often the last to hear the news after a decision is made. This reminds me of a quote I ran across years ago, from Timothy Ferris’s book The Mind’s Sky:
“The mind may rule the self, but it is a constitutional monarch; presented with decisions already made elsewhere in the brain, it must try somehow to put on a good show of their adding up to some coordinated, sensible pattern. Functionally it resembles Ronald Reagan’s presidency: It acts as if it were in control, and thinks it is in control, and believe it has good reasons for what it does, when in actuality it is often just mouthing soothing rationalizations while obeying the orders of unseen agencies hidden offstage.”
