Observations on free will and personal choices, Part 1

Free will is this unique thing only humans seem to have, the ability to choose what you want to do based on your desires and needs, using rational skills to mediate it all.

It’s so wonderful we are independent and that our every action follows through a set of ideals and goals that only belong to us, doesn't it?

...

Something in that optimistic sentence doesn't feel right for most readers, and there's good reason!

It’s nice to think we are not influenced by the outside, but many decisions and even some subconscious things like personal taste, are touched by the environment and our perception of it within it. They push the powerful associative machine that is our brain in directions we don’t notice, but just follow.

Surprise Quiz

Philosophers and writers from centuries ago were already tackling the powers of this machine to achieve understanding and success. It only takes a meager offering of words to create a barrage of results: stories, explanations, emotions and ideas are born in an instant, without any effort, as it is the nature of the mind to try to explain it’s reality.

And when something as intimate and personal as the interpretation of the written word happens, an ocean of connections awaken to turn those words into coherent reality. And the body will react accordingly to this new reality, usually in a dampened form.

It happened with the words in the title. Upon reading “Surprise Quiz” you likely became more alert of the text, heart rate increased slightly, the facial muscles imperceptibly adopted an expression of concentration or disbelief, all in preparation to catch the question.. or question the catch. And this doesn’t happen because you just willed it; everything was a reaction of your body thinking.

A single thought evokes hundreds or even thousands of links to memories, that in turn trigger emotions and ready possible reactions for the future. A context and meaning is created for the situation, an explanation for the sudden appearance of a quiz manifests and finally even a list of possible questions is already forming in your head along with the intention to answer or gloss over them.

All of this happened within a second, a mix of the disposition of your current self with the experiences gathered by your past self. 

In the next minutes you’ll be more likely to identify and associate words and feelings related to surprise quizzes, such as PROFESSOR or GRADES, because your mind was recently focused on such a topic, and thus many links to the original idea, the original stimuli, are “fresh”.

The phenomenon of using stimuli to influence the response to subsequent stimuli, without active guidance or intention, is known as priming. 

Dotted lines indicate association due to sounding similar. 

Solid lines association due to sharing context.

They are examples semantic and associative priming.

Credit to Wikipedia

Priming can be semantic, affective, perceptual, conceptual, positive, negative...  

And it has so many implications in our daily, worry fueled and advertisement saturated modern lives.

Can you guess what type of priming was the "Surprise Quiz" bit? Comment below!

Photo by Negative Space from Pexels