The real reason why we succeed in our relationships and careers is the strength of our unconscious, according to David Brooks, who was inspired by a meeting with Gordon Brown to unravel the power of our inner voice
Everyone knows that a first date is a minefield, but when scientists become involved, it starts to look like a particularly clustered one, where you are simultaneously being shelled from above and where your own platoon may well be guiding you towards the mines.
Typically, you would make some immediate judgments of your date: first, a general evaluation of their attractiveness, before drawing some conclusions on how interesting, smart or funny they are as the date develops; you might begin to speculate on how wealthy they are ? if you are a tiny bit shallow, which it seems the vast majority of us are; or discount them, perhaps because they check their teeth for food using the knife blade as a mirror or they mispronounce "bruschetta".
One thing you probably won't give a lot of thought to is your date's nose width. Or the distance between their eyes, unless it's really freaky. Yet there is evidence to suggest these can be significant factors in the partners we select. We overwhelmingly prefer people whose facial features mirror our own. Other aspects of attraction might be comparably sized vocabularies, living near each other and other seemingly superficial factors that could not even perversely be described as "romantic".
What's happening here, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks would contend, is that our unconscious mind is playing a silent, unregistered but hugely influential role in controlling our actions. The human brain can take in 11 million pieces of information at any one moment but, even by generous estimates, we are consciously aware of maybe 40 of these. Brooks believes that the path our lives take is for the most part decided by inner workings over which we have little control. Or little control until now. In his new book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, he identifies the enormous vastness of our unconscious and how we can bend it to our will.
The unconscious, in Brooks's definition, "is not what Freud and Jung thought", a warren of buried sexual urges. Rather, it is our inner mind of emotions, intuitions, character traits and genetic inclinations and biases. While the conscious is often logical and linear, the unconscious is more sensitive, judgmental and perceptive. Now, due to a boom in research, we are starting to appreciate how sprawling its remit is. "It's like we are living in a house and we always knew there was a basement level," Brooks explains, "but now we are discovering that there are 8,000 storeys of basement down there."
These are important choices that the unconscious is meddling in. Going back to that first date, the person we choose to spend our lives with is one of the most important decision we will ever take. According to happiness studies, admittedly a contentious area of scientific research, we place far too great a stress on work, money and property and hugely underestimate the value of personal relationships. Evidence suggests that people in long-term marriages are significantly more content than those who are not; one piece of research even suggested that it had the psychic benefit of an annual salary of �65,000.
"I tell university students that every course they take should be about who they are going to marry," says Brooks, from his home outside Washington DC. "They should read novels about marriage. They should study the neuroscience and psychology of marriage. Universities should offer one course after another in marriage. But our institutions are structured based on this false view of human nature, so they emphasise the professional skills, which are important, but they underemphasise the things that seem soft and squishy and frankly unmanly.
"The relationship between money and happiness is very tenuous; the relationship between personal bonds and happiness is incredibly strong," he continues. "So joining a club that meets once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. It's all about the number of people you associate with and how intimately you associate with them."
David Brooks has a very different background to most psychology and popular science writers. In the United States, he is a revered and reviled political commentator whose twice-weekly op-ed columns for the New York Times are so influential that, as his deadline nears, he will often receive a call from the White House to find out if they should be worried. His stance is moderately Republican, but he has also been called the "liberals' favourite conservative" because of his willingness to engage both sides of the debate. He met Senator Barack Obama in 2005 and pushed in his column for him to run for president; he has also called Sarah Palin "a fatal cancer to the Republican party", although he has since retracted the severity of the sentiment.
Brooks has long had an interest in research on the mind and the brain, but the impetus of The Social Animal came from an unlikely source. "Gordon Brown, when he was PM, was in the US for some UN meeting in New York and invited me for coffee at the consulate," says Brooks. "I was describing the brain research and he said, 'Well, what are the policy implications?' I really didn't have much of an answer for him so the book really flew out of that question."
The book may have come out of a grand impulse, but Brooks quickly realised that it should not read like a turgid thinktank report; he also wanted to make it accessible and relevant to a general reader. Borrowing from Rousseau's treatise Emile, or On Education ? and inspired by the accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer ? he decided to write up his research as a novel, featuring an imaginary couple called Harold and Erica, who are guided through their lives by an omniscient and somewhat smug narrator. Their whole lives, from womb to tomb, take place "perpetually in the current moment, the early 21st century", which makes it less a social history and more a manual for modern life.
Harold and Erica never truly come to life as three-dimensional characters, but their main role is to be unquestioning guinea pigs for three decades of neuroscience and the studies it has thrown up. Brooks's eternal favourite is Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment. In 1972, at Stanford University, Mischel took four-year-old children, sat them in a room on their own and put a marshmallow on a plate in front of them. They were told that, if they waited a few minutes, they would get a second marshmallow; alternatively, they could eat that one now.
"Mischel shows me videos of the kids trying not to eat the marshmallow: some of the girls are banging their heads on the table," says Brooks. "One little boy ? Mischel swapped the marshmallow for an Oreo cookie ? picks up the Oreo, carefully eats out the middle and puts it back. My joke is that now that kid is a US senator."
Where the experiment moves on from a You've Been Framed! clip, however, is when you spin forward two or three decades. Those children who could wait 15 minutes for the second marshmallow were much more likely to have gone through university and, 30 years after the study, would have significantly higher incomes. Among the kids who could only wait one or two minutes, there were much greater incidences of drug and alcohol addiction and incarceration too. They struggle to maintain friendships and do not handle stress well. "Even at a phenomenally early age, some kids have learned to control their impulses and some kids have not," concludes Brooks, "and it's a sign that these unconscious abilities can have a tremendous power over our life course."
Brooks worries that part of the problem with society is that we have become conditioned to scoff the marshmallow. He is distressed by the relentlessly adversarial nature of politics in the States and he believes the country could be careering towards a crack-up or bankruptcy on a Greek scale. He is particularly downbeat about the future of the Republicans, although his solutions might raise some eyebrows over here.
"Whenever I tell American Republicans what to do, I just say, 'Do what David Cameron and Oliver Letwin want you to do,'" he says. "Compared with our conservatism, Cameron's approach is much more sophisticated. But when I would see him or George Osborne in the US they were always visiting Democrats, the Obama people. I sometimes think there is more overlap between Cameron and Obama than between Cameron and the current Republican party."
The problem with much of the policy-making now is, he believes, that it relies on an overly simplistic view of human nature. One area, however, where the research is making an impact is education, in particular with the creation of disciplined, almost militaristic schools for children who grow up in disorganised homes.
The aim, as with the marshmallow experiment, is to provide an ordered existence to channel their impulses. The most established example is the Knowledge Is Power Program academies in the US, but the new free school movement here, which promises a "competitive atmosphere" and to "instil ambition in all pupils, no matter what their background", seems to have learned the same lessons.
The Social Animal, Brooks hopes, will also encourage politicians to move away once and for all from individualistic culture that dominated the 80s and 90s. "The thing I like about Cameron's 'big society' ? I'm not sure it's been fleshed out ? is that it's an acknowledgment of the importance of social bonds," he says. "This research points to the fact that we are not so much individuals but we are very deeply interconnected."
The affection has been reciprocated. Letwin is saying The Social Animal could be key to realising practically the woolly ideas of the "big society"; education secretary Michael Gove is enthused to test out some of its recommendations for schools. Brooks will meet both Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband when he comes to London this month and has been invited to host a seminar in Downing Street.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, not all of this manifesto has been well received, with reviewers in the US lining up to take down one of journalism's tallest poppies. Brooks is quieter and more considered than most political commentators and the harsh comments really seem to sting.
"As a columnist, you just have to thicken your skin to the criticism," he says, "but I have never met anybody who is totally oblivious to it. When you interview a president, say, they come in for a lot and I find they are still very aggravated by it. If they are not inured to criticism, I don't think anybody is."
It could be worse, I agree; at least he doesn't have to put up with what Gordon Brown went through. Brooks laughs and thinks back to the start of the project. "It was a very sunny day and we sat on the balcony and, of course, we sat huddled over and had a very serious, gloomy conversation," he recalls. "It was very Brownian."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/08/david-brooks-key-to-success-interview
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