Impulse: Our Best and Worst Trait

By Adam Murphy

When we talk about the mind, discourse usually comes in two forms. Either we are talking about its incredible features, predicting the future with mathematics, making someone laugh or cry with just words, our immense ability for hope, or it is the exact opposite. How is it possible that the same being capable of such empathy can kill, torture, and destroy without a second thought? 

Of course you might say, those who do these things are in the small minority, but time and time again this has proven untrue. You are not immune to propaganda, and the mind's ability for conditioning is both its best and worst aspect. In the military, you are trained in shooting on targets shaped like humans, you are stripped of your individuality with uniform and haircuts, rewarded for thinking and acting fast in crises with medals, all to embed these impulses into your brain. When these things become second nature, your need to fit in with those around you becomes externalised, shooting people feels the same as shooting targets, your conscious mind is never called in to question what is happening, to question authority. In the same way, in the famous Milgram experiment, the need to conform and submit to authority strips the individual of free thought and responsibility, they are simply “following orders” and so there isn’t a need to question them. This thinking is very easy to fall into and is the cause of many seemingly normal people doing atrocious things. On the other hand, however, we have stories of great bravery.

Stories of people running into burning buildings to save someone, risking their lives or futures for others. How can these normal people rise to the occasion so quickly? Paradoxically, it is the same way. When you ask these saviours what they were thinking when they acted, the common response is “I wasn’t”. They simply saw what needed to be done and did it, and any time for thinking would have stopped them. It is because of this that they become heroes. How is it that by not thinking for ourselves we can become capable of things we would never have imagined, both good and bad? To answer that question, I will ask another. Have you ever been in a “flow state”? It happens quite often in sports, where your body just knows what to do and it is as if you skipped forward in time, with everything working without need for thought. Players often perform at their best in this state, and many sports psychologists will teach how to enter the flow state. 

The reason for this is simple: your unconscious mind (or system 1, as Daniel Kahnemann, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” would call it) is much more efficient than your conscious mind (or system 2). It is much faster and uses less energy, making it the preferred system of your body. This does come at a cost however. System 1 is susceptible to all kinds of pitfalls, prejudices and fallacies, called heuristics, they are mental shortcuts based on experience used to save time and energy. These potentially incorrect assumptions, if not overridden by system 2, can cause actions normally unthinkable. While I personally would not kill a man, being trained to shoot at a dark figure would make pulling a trigger a lot easier in that situation. Similarly, I would not risk my own life for a stranger, but if I forget my own mortality for a second, running into the building seems a lot simpler. The power of the unconscious mind is far greater than we like to think, and is the root cause of many extraordinary acts.