(15 of 16) CREATING YOUR LIFE: What You Shouldve Learned as a Teen, Book 1 APPENDIX SCHOLARLY BACKGROUND He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet. Joseph Joubert In 2010 researchers demonstrated the power of imagination. They knew that when people become habituated to eating certain foods, such as cheese, that people would eat less of them. They conducted five experiments against control groups having people imagine eating certain foods and then observing their subsequent consumption. Their findings suggest that habituation to a food item can occur even when its consumption is merely imagined and that mental representations alone can engender habituation to a stimulus (Morewedge, Young, & Joachim, p. 1530). This research continues decades of studies correlating the pictures or visions that people hold or practice and their performance. In 1994 Driskell, Copper, & Moran conducted a meta-analysis on the literature trying to determine the extent to which mental practice enhanced performance. The results indicated: …that mental practice has a positive and significant effect on performance, and the effectiveness of mental practice was moderated by the type of task, the retention interval between practice and performance, and the length or duration of the mental practice intervention. (p. 481) The history of research on performance reveals a heavy focus on peak performance in athletes. An article by R. J. Harmison (2006) cites research correlating psychological and behavioral skills and strategies with peak performance in athletes, “including (a) goal setting, (b) imagery, (c) competition and refocusing plans, (d) well-learned and automatic coping skills, (e) thought control strategies, (f) arousal management techniques, (g) facilitative interpretations of anxiety, and (h) attention control and refocusing skills” (p. 234). The research that follows indicates that a conscious understanding of the functions of the reticular activating system and the adaptive unconscious can enhance these eight skills and strategies, particularly goal setting and imagery, and thereby contributes to peak performance in sports and areas beyond sports. Reticular Activating System [Ive] emphasized the importance of fixing, in your mind, a vivid picture of your goals. I said that once a specific goal is imprinted in your subconscious, an alerting device in your brain can then help you find information you need to accomplish it. That unique device is the filtering device I just described: the reticular activating system. Its the most essential tool you have to lead you to success (Tice, 1989, p. 58, italics in the original). According to Siegel (2002), the reticular activating system (RAS) was identified in 1949 by Moruzzi and Magoun as the part of the brain that regulates levels of arousal, primarily the neural control of waking and sleeping (p 35). Siegel further notes that later research by Dell, Bounvallet, and their colleagues demonstrated how the RAS can be influenced by the cerebral cortex to inhibit arousal; for example, any incoming information that is perceived to lack value to conscious awareness (boring, meaningless, inconsequential) gets screened out (pp. 56-58). Essentially, the RAS acts as a filtering mechanism, shutting down any distracting sensory input; what a person does not value, does not get through. Cognitive science researchers take into account the RAS when studying—and developing theories of—attention control, motivation, and task performance (Pribram & McGuinness, 1975; Kirby & Das, 1990; Stewart, 1996; Bernard, Mills, Swenson, & Walsh, 2005). The adaptive nature of the RAS operates mostly unconsciously; sensory input is screened out as the mind loses interest or devalues it. Often a person can be aware of the screening activity after the fact. When someone reads a novel and becomes immersed in that fictional world, the outside world begins to fade. Another person can talk to the reader and the reader does not hear that person. When a student finds a teacher boring, the student’s mind begins to wander and the teacher’s voice fades from conscious awareness. Often a teacher has to call loudly on the student to attract notice. Tice (1989) seems to be the first one to articulate how the filtering function of the RAS acts like an executive secretary, filtering out the thousands of sensory inputs happening in a given moment, “screening out the junk mail” and allowing you to focus on what’s important, what’s of value (p. 59). And like an executive secretary, the RAS allows you to focus on your goals. Tice provides many examples of how understanding the adaptive nature of the RAS can aid how one sets goals: “The goal comes first, and then you see. You do not see first” (p. 61, italics in original). In other words, if you base goal setting on what you see now, your current resources, you limit the ability of the RAS to work in your favor. But when you set goals without knowing how you will acquire the resources to achieve those goals, the RAS opens up and lets through what is now valuable. According to Tice, you should not set goals only when you can see how to fulfill them (1995, pp. 137-140). Because of the nature of the RAS, you begin to see the resources once you set the goal. What you value gets through the executive secretary. This automatic processing is apparently so much a part of people that behavioral goals can be activated unconsciously and can continue to operate unconsciously. Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, and Trotschel proposed this phenomenon and published research demonstrating how it can work in relatively simple environments (2001). The researchers concluded that since only so much conscious attention can be applied to the present moment, the unconscious activates unconscious goals so the conscious mind can “ponder the past or plan for the future (p. 1025). Ferguson and Bargh confirmed that setting goals triggers an automatic unconscious evaluation of goal-relevant objects as valuable, aligning behavior toward those objects as opposed to those that are evaluated as non-relevant (2004). Adaptive Unconscious If we are unhappy with our self-views, there are things we can do to change both our story and our adaptive unconscious. It is not easy. But little steps can lead to big changes, however, and all of us have the ability to act more like the person we want to be. (Wilson, 2002, p. 221) There’s more to what cognitive science calls the adaptive unconscious (AU). According to Wilson, cognitive and social psychology has pulled back the veil on the extent to which we can operate unconsciously, automatically processing our environment, generating automatic perceptual and behavioral responses, and often operating in ways quite different from the old psychoanalytical point of view of the unconscious (2002, pp. 4-5). Wilson defines the adaptive unconscious as the “ability to size up our environments, disambiguate them, interpret them, and initiate behavior quickly” (p. 23). Our senses take in 11 million pieces of data in each moment, but we can only consciously process up to 40 pieces per second (p. 24). The remainder gets filtered out by the RAS, what Wilson and others call “selective attention” (p. 26). But the AU in a fuller sense goes beyond mere filtering of information; abundant research shows that it also interprets information, acting both as a gatekeeper and a spin doctor (p. 31). Anderson points out how the subconscious is known for being a kind of repository for repeated behaviors, turning those behaviors into automatic actions, like driving a car (2005, p. 99). One can focus on others things and drive for minutes or miles forgetting about consciously driving the car. Anderson discusses some of the dramatic demonstrations of such parallel processing that relieves the conscious mind of habitual behaviors, including one study showing how people could learn to read silently for comprehension while also writing oral dictation, and another demonstrating triple processing involving transcription typing (p. 100). Furthermore, the AU generates feelings that can help us make wiser decisions. Wilson cites a series of studies involving gambling with different decks of cards, where some decks paid off well and others did not. As the gambling progressed, participants tended to place larger bets on the decks that paid better. They could not articulate why they did this, but based their actions on a “gut feeling” (p. 32-33). Essentially, these studies among others demonstrate how the AU “gathers information, interprets and evaluates it, and sets goals in motion, quickly and efficiently” (p. 35). But the AU does not necessarily perform this executive role accurately. The AU tends to regulate perception and action in order to make us “feel good” (pp. 38-40). Whatever we unconsciously define as our comfort zone, whatever we are conditioned to perceive as our self-image and our picture of the way the world works, is regulated by the AU so that when we wander outside our comfort zone, the AU kicks in and aligns both our inner and outer world to our inner picture. Tice—who explicitly bases his curriculum on the discoveries of cognitive science (The Pacific Institute, n.d., websource), including the work of Bandura, Beck, and Seligman, among others—likens this process to a thermostat, which automatically regulates the environmental temperature via heating and air conditioning in order to keep us within a comfortable range. Once we become aware of this automatic process, according to Tice, we can use proven techniques to influence it by changing or expanding our comfort zone, just like changing the setting or expanding the temperature range on a thermostat (1989, pp. 122-140). Tice notes how when we lock on to something our mind naturally begins to lock out everything else. This action applies not only to sensory perceptions, but also to what we believe to be true about ourselves, about others, and about the nature of the world (1995, pp. 84-86). If we strongly believe something to be true, we “lock out” being able to see alternatives to that truth, or evidence contradicting that truth. Clarkson, Tormala, and Rucker have conducted extensive research showing how increased attitude certainty increases resistance to persuasion (2008). Wilson cites research on how habitual thoughts and attitudes—about ourselves, other people, and the world—get stored in the unconscious, and how the AU begins to regulate our perceptions and behaviors according to those stored “pictures,” even to the point of stereotyping other people and shaping our perception of them (pp. 29-30, 52-54). Not only do these unconsciously held pictures influence our perception of others, the AU can regulate our actions in such a way as to influence how others perceive themselves and how they behave (Wilson, 2002, pp. 54-46). The classic “Pygmalion” study by Babad, Inbar, and Rosenthal demonstrated how teachers holding a biased perception of students influenced how they treated the students, affecting the students’ actual academic performance (1982). This study revealed that people who hold strong pictures of others and are perceived as authorities to the others, could strongly influence how those others perceived themselves. For example, a teacher who thinks a student is innately weak in mathematics can instill in that student an unconscious picture of inadequate mathematical performance, and then the student will behave (self-regulate) according to that picture. Self-Efficacy and Goal Attainment Unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act. Efficacy belief, therefore, is a major basis of action. People guide their lives by their beliefs of personal efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy refers to beliefs in ones capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments. (Bandura, 1997, p. 3, italics in the original) Bandura notes how self-efficacy beliefs play an important role in influencing the goals one sees as attainable, and consequently what goals one actually sets (1997, p. 136). His research demonstrates that people construct personal standards that guide, regulate, and motivate their behavior; that when people hold to these standards, they achieve a sense of self-satisfaction and self-worth; and that this “[s]elf-influence affects not only choices but the success with which chosen courses of action are executed” (p. 8). He cites research demonstrating how real-world skills can be overruled by self-doubt, while extraordinary accomplishments can result from applying those same skills when one has a resilient sense of self-efficacy (p. 37). In other words, whatever the skills one may have, perceived self-efficacy contributes strongly to performance. Low self-efficacy affects thought processes, lowers motivation, and creates avoidance behavior to some tasks, while high self-efficacy increases sociocognitive functioning, influencing people to “approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided” (p. 137). Bandura’s research also demonstrates that people who exercise control over their own consciousness, who regulate what they think, can increase their personal sense of well-being (p. 145). The aim is not to repress wrong thinking. He cites research by Wegner that demonstrates how efforts to suppress wrong thinking can actually increase the problem a person is trying to solve. Wegner shows that the better approach is for the person to become absorbed in positive trains of thought (p. 146). Critics of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory tend to apply their critiques in light of their own theories. For example, Biglan (1987) critiques self-efficacy theory from a behavior-analytic point of view. However, Bandura’s research over the decades has proven so strong that he ranks as the fourth most-cited psychologist behind Skinner, Freud, and Piaget (Bandura, n.d., websource). Collective Efficacy, Positive Psychology, and Mindfulness Cultural awareness, then, is understanding states of mind, your own and those of the people you meet (Trompenaars & Hampden-Tuner, 1998, p. 201). Self-efficacy is a natural starting point for strengthening collective efficacy in teams and communities (Fernández-Ballesteros, Díez-Nicolás, Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Bandura, 2002), and in the case of global companies today, cross-geographical and cross-cultural teams. Bandura also sees self-efficacy theory as a natural fit with positive psychology (2008). He argues that how people think about problems is key to solving personal, professional, communal, and global problems. Peterson’s Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths⎯including creativity, persistence, social intelligence, fairness, self-regulation, and appreciation of beauty and excellence⎯provides specific virtues to focus on in building self-efficacy (2006, pp. 32-33). Furthermore, the relatively recent emergence of mindfulness as a means of integrating brain research with inner awareness, and an understanding of the AU, is now enhancing humanistic psychology by helping with the development of what Ryback calls the coherent brain leading to an awakened state (2006, 489). The integration of mindfulness with emerging brain research leads to the possibility of modifying brain structure through conscious awareness, thereby restoring self-determination to its proper role (p. 474). Mindfulness also seems a natural fit with self-efficacy theory and positive psychology. All of these combine with an understanding of the RAS and the AU to strongly suggest that a properly designed program⎯focused on developing self-efficacy and applying specific self-empowering tools and techniques that positively change behavior by changing how goals are set and what gets stored in the AU⎯will effectively increase the self-efficacy and change adaptability of individuals and teams. Wilson argues that self-knowledge matters, and that we can better ourselves by becoming objective observers of our own behavior, trying to see ourselves through the eyes of other people, and learning about ourselves by assimilating the findings from psychological science (2009, p. 387). References Anderson, J. (2005). Cognitive psychology and its implications. (6th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. Bandura, A. (2008). An agentic perspective on positive psychology. In S. J. 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