Scientists Unlock The Secrets of Intuition

Opportunity to influence human decisions taken by television and evoked great interest is the creators of advertising, and panic among ordinary people. When the first attempts were unsuccessful, a bit of passion subsided.

A recent experiment by British scientists has shown that our decisions can indeed be taken under the influence of a certain kind of signals received by our subconscious.

It is an unusual experiment, exhaustively described in a scientific journal published by Neuron, is of great importance because it can help reveal mysteries of human intuition.

Scientists at University College London (University College London), led by Dr. Mathias Pessiglione (Dr. Mathias Pessiglione) using perceptual masking, computational modeling, and neuroimaging were able to detect that some learning processes may be unknowingly using other tools.

For example, one such tool is intuition. Sometimes intuition helps make a better decision than it would have been done at the level of consciousness. “The subconscious knowledge can be formed on the basis of associative learning,” – says Dr. Pessiglione.

For example, a poker player is somehow always knows when to fold and when to bluff. Perhaps it is because his opponent is somehow produces itself, and somewhere on a subconscious level, the player can pick up these signals.

Previous research has shown that people, like rats or dogs can be brought into this state when they begin to obey unconsciously receive the incentive. Are in the subconscious feelings, such as those associated with electric shock in such a situation, lead to what people like in advance, begins to experience these unpleasant feelings. This so-called “automatic” responses, which occur in consciousness plays no role.

New research has shown that such signals can influence the adoption of deliberate decisions.

In an experiment conducted by British scientists, was attended by 11 men and 9 women aged 18 to 39 years. During the experiment, they repeatedly pointed out one or two characters located between several abstract images. The characters appeared in 33 or 50 milliseconds, which is not sufficient for their realization.

After reviewing every three images, the participants set about the next assignment. “Following my intuition,” they had to choose the characters, and symbols for some hidden benefit, but for others, respectively, – a loss.

Somewhere halfway “training session”, during which I had to take 120 decisions, most participants began to win the money that they could keep.

On average, 63% of cases they have been doing the “right” choice, although some very distinguished.

Dr. Pessiglione had magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions that was active among the participants during the task. The scientist discovered the activity in a region called the ventral striatum (striatum), which responded to visual signals received by the subconscious.

Thus, it was concluded that even without treatment received by our consciousness of contextual signals, our brain assimilates and uses them to make a decision.

This ability to influence the human use and are the creators of advertising, because the human brain is most influenced by subconscious associations (so actively used in commercials), which once again proved the studies. And the first failed attempts were due to the fact that people do not always listen to advertising copy, “with half an ear”, and then turn to the work of his consciousness, which is an effective remedy.