THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN
Male or Female Chick
In a chicken and egg production company, learning the sex of the chicks early on was crucial to reducing costs. If the chick was female, it would be considered a chicken, and if it was a male, it would be culled to avoid cost. However, it took 35–40 days for the chick’s sex to be understood. In order to shorten this period, they sought help from a person who had lived in a village life since childhood. The villager could know the sex of the chicks one to two weeks after hatching with 95% accuracy. When they asked him about the secret of this method, the villager could not explain how he did it, he simply replied that he somehow knew. A similar situation was the same when people from different villages were asked. For many years in the village, people who took care of animals could predict the sex of the chicks with 95% accuracy, but they could not tell how they knew it.
Thereupon, the company started to implement a method like this: A company employee (novice) would work with the master villager and guess whether the chicks were male or female at 1–2 weeks old. The master would also tell whether the apprentice’s guess was correct or not. The process went like this. The novice takes the chick in his hand, examines the weight, beak, color, abdomen, wings, etc., and tells the gender, and the master tells the novice whether he knows it correctly or not. Initially, the probability of the novice knowing the chicks correctly was 50%. Over time, the novice’s probability of guessing increased, and after a while, he began to give predictions with an accuracy close to his master.
Interestingly, when the apprentice was asked to describe how he correctly guessed the gender, he was unable to provide a logical explanation either.
Warplanes
A similar event took place in England during the Second World War. It was not easy to tell whether the planes coming from a certain altitude were German or British planes. For this reason, they sometimes mistook their own planes for enemy planes, causing unnecessary panic to the public. The opposite was also true. There were also times that they mistook German planes as British planes and were hunted.
Civil defense teams have discovered people who can tell who owns planes at very high altitudes. These people knew with 95% probability whether the incoming planes were British or German, but they could not explain how they had guessed correctly. In order to increase the number of such people, the novices were given to the masters. The correct estimation, which was 50% at first, increased in a short time and reached 90%–95%. But no one has been able to explain how he made the correct guess. They just knew, well.
Subconscious
Think about your first, manual gearbox car driving experience. Driving a manual gearbox is a complex process that requires eye, hand, foot and ear coordination. In the beginning, if you try to increase and decrease the gear logically, you question the logic of the gear (I know some people who can’t drive just because it’s a manual gearbox). Over time, you start to make eye, hand and foot coordination automatically; In a way, you wear the car like an outfit. Now the car becomes a part of your body. As you master, you start using your subconscious, not your logic, to change gears, give signals, and look around, and you act with your instincts.
So it’s not just our logical mind that drives us. There is also a subconscious mind inside of us that makes us do routine work.
The important detail is: The subconscious mind can be trained and strengthened. If you want to reach expertise in a subject, if you repeat (study) that work without getting tired of it, you can reach the expertise you have targeted after a while.
For example, a person learning to play the guitar will initially follow their fingers and strings with their eyes to find where to press their fingers. But as he masters it, he learns how to make the right sound without ever looking at the guitar and his fingers.
You may have witnessed that people who use a 10-finger keyboard both chat with their surroundings and continue to write. How do these people’s fingers know where the keys are on the keyboard?
The content I described above are just a few examples from the book Incognito.
This book is an important turning point in my life; So, I recommend it to all young people.
If you direct your brain correctly, there is no challenge that you cannot overcome. It’s about giving yourself the effort and time you need to succeed.
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