经济学人365:关于意识如何作用的新想法

 　　The unconscious mind

　　潜意识
　　Hidden depths
　　藏匿在深处
　　Subliminal 1: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behaviour. By Leonard Mlodinow.
　　《潜意识：你的潜意识如何支配你的行为》；伦纳德 蒙洛迪诺著；
　　ASK someone to name a famous psychologist, and chances are they will pick Sigmund Freud (pictured), the bearded Austrian academic who came up with the idea of psychoanalysis.
　　说起著名的心理学家，人们可能会想到西格蒙德 弗洛伊德（如图），这位满脸大胡子的奥地利学者提出了精神分析的概念。
　　His ideas about the unconscious—a sort of shadowy basement of the mind that is inaccessible 2 to rational thought, but which nevertheless influences people's behaviour—are part of popular folklore 3.
　　他关于潜意识的概念成了众相传说的一部分，颇受欢迎。他认为潜意识隐藏在意识底部，难以达到理性思维，虽则如此，但它却影响着人们的行为。
　　Although it remained popular at dinner parties, the idea of the unconscious fell out of favour among 20th-century psychologists, thanks to the rise of more scientific approaches to psychology 4.
　　尽管人们在晚宴上依然拿潜意识的概念来消遣，但由于更加科学的心理学方法的兴起，二十世纪的心理学家已不再青睐它。
　　These focused purely 5 on studying behaviour and refrained from theorising about the inner workings of the mind.
　　这些方法纯粹集中研究人们的行为，避免了将思维的内部运作理论化。
　　In his latest book, “Subliminal”, Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist 6 who has been developing a nice sideline in popular science writing,
　　理论物理学家伦纳德?蒙洛迪诺兼职科普写作，一直写得很好。
　　shows how the idea of the unconscious has become respectable again over the past couple of decades.
　　在自己的最新著作《潜意识》一书中，他论证了过去几十年来潜意识的概念如何再度受到人们的尊敬。
　　This development has been helped by rigorous experimental evidence of the effects of the subconscious 7 and, especially, by real-time brain-scanning technology that allows researchers to examine what is going on in their subjects' heads.
　　这种发展得益于对潜意识效应的严格实验证据，特别是得益于实时大脑扫描技术，该技术让研究人员能够仔细观察研究对象的头部究竟怎么了。
　　That experimental evidence suggests that, as Freud suspected, conscious reasoning makes up a comparatively small part of the activity in our brains, with most of the work taking place where we can't tap into it.
　　该实验证据表明，正如弗洛伊德所怀疑的，相对说来有意识的推理只占据了我们大脑活动的一小部分，而大部分的思维活动发生在我们无法深入了解的区域。
　　However, unlike Freud's unconscious (a hot, claustrophobic place full of repressed memories and inappropriate sexual fantasies about one's parents) the modern unconscious is a place of super-fast data processing,
　　然而，弗洛伊德的潜意识指活动强烈的幽闭区域，充满了压抑的记忆和对自己父母不适当的性幻想，不同于这点的是，现代潜意识指一种能进行超快速的数据处理、
　　useful survival mechanisms 9 and rules of thumb about the world that have been honed by millions of years of evolution.
　　有着实用的生存机制以及对世界的经验法则的区域，它们都经历了数百万年进化的磨砺。
　　It is the unconscious, for instance, that stitches together data on colour, shape, movement and perspective to create the sight enjoyed by the conscious part of the mind.
　　例如，把颜色、形状、运动状态以及远景等数据组合在一起产生视觉，让思维有意识的部分来享受，这种行为是下意识的。
　　Experiments on people with certain specific forms of brain damage, which remove the ability to perform some of these tasks, can reveal something about what is going on underneath 10.
　　患有某些特定形式脑损伤的人失去了执行这些任务的能力，对他们所进行的实验可以揭示骨子里是怎么回事。
　　People with “blindsight” can respond to some visual stimuli 11 even when they are not conscious of being able to see. Asked to walk down an obstacle-strewn corridor,
　　即使患有“盲视”的人看不懂，但他们也可以对某些视觉刺激产生回应。当被要求走过布满障碍的走廊时，
　　they will dodge 12 and weave and arrive at their destination unharmed because some residual 13 data is still making its way into their brains—although at a level that is beneath the notice of their conscious minds.
　　他们会迂回地躲开障碍，安然无恙地抵达目的地，因为一些残余的数据仍然有自己的途径进入他们的大脑，不过进入的程度无法引起他们思维有意识部分的注意。
　　The modern view of the unconscious mind may be more benign 14 than Freud's, but it can still generate unwelcome impulses.
　　潜意识的现代观点可能比弗洛伊德的观点更良性，但潜意识仍然可以产生不受欢迎的冲动。
　　Psychologists theorise that the well-documented tendency of humans to categorise almost every piece of information they come across is a survival mechanism 8 that evolved to aid quick decision making.
　　心理学家推论，人类把遇到的几乎每条信息都进行分类并存档完好，这种倾向是一种生存机制，它的进化有助于快速作出决策。
　　Yet it may also lie behind the tendency for human beings to group people into races, genders 15, creeds 16 and the like, and then to apply certain characteristics—unjustifiably—to every member of that group.
　　然而，它也可能是人类把人按种族、性别、信仰等分群的原因，接着再据此按某些特征对该群的每个成员进行不理性地归类。
　　The insights offered by modern science into the workings of the human mind are fascinating in their own right.
　　现代科学为人类思维运作提供的见解引人入胜，凭的是这些见解自身的力量。
　　But they also suggest that plenty of conventional wisdom about how humans behave may need rethinking. Mr Mlodinow notes that economic models, for instance,
　　但同时它们也表明，大量有关人类行为的传统智慧可能需要反思。例如，蒙洛迪诺指出，
　　are built “on the assumption that people make decisions…by consciously weighing the relevant factors”, whereas the psychological research suggests that, most of the time, they do no such thing.
　　经济合算的模式建立在“人们自觉地衡量相关因素再决定......这一假设之上”，而心理学研究表明，大多时侯他们不做这样的事。
　　Instead, they act on the basis of simple, unconscious rules that can sometimes produce completely irrational 17 results.
　　相反，他们的行为简单地受潜意识所支配，有时这些支配可以产生完全不理性的结果。
　　Mr Mlodinow's chapters on courts and the law are disturbing, in particular on how unreliable eyewitness 18 evidence can be.
　　蒙洛迪诺关于法庭和法律的章节令人不安，特别是关于目击者的证据有多么不可靠的章节更是如此。这点在别的书中也被广泛地引证过。
　　This has been widely documented elsewhere. But there is good news in the book, as well: people informed of the biases 19 and pitfalls 20 of their unconscious brains are better at using their conscious minds to overrule them.
　　但书中也有好消息，了解大脑潜意识存在偏见和误区的人更擅长利用他们的自觉意识来对潜意识施加影响。