How do we know?

I spent last weekend working a marathon in Little Rock, AK. While overseeing the "tag scan" station of Saturday's expo/packet pick-up, I heard a song blasting from the room's PA system that made me stop and tap my foot to its beat. It was prominently country but with a strong influence of modern pop, making it appealing to most in the room. The teen-aged girls, of course, had all the lyrics memorized. I struggled to decipher the catchy refrain. Nevertheless, I was soon joining the room in the mass singalong, our voices oscillating between two notes of basic words, "Whoa-oh, whoa-oh, stuck like glue.."

I should have known about Sugarland's Top 40 hit. They were supposed to perform the dreadful day the stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair. I guess my attention was attuned to the technical details of the stage, the legal implications, and the proposed amendments to public policy. My heart reached out to the families of the victims, but I never thought about the band. How did they fare? Would they ever come back? What made them so special to the Fair's music lineup?

In looking up history on the band, particularly its talented lead singer Jennifer Nettles, I was drawn to the page that listed the song's full lyrics. It is an obvious love song easily read from a girl's perspective. It does, however, contain an aspect that I believe we all can relate to and is the impetus of this entry. The chorus leads in with a couple powerful emotions that no one can deny as joyous: "There you go making my heart beat again, heart beat again, heart beat again. There you go making me feel like a kid, won't you do it, and do it one time." Now, I'm usually not one to draw prophetic conclusions from song lyrics, and I surely am not here to write a literary interpretation of the chorus with respect to its musical elements. Not only would you be bored out of your gourd, but it would be a disservice to this blog's intent.

I was rather reminded of a book I read about four years ago called Blink written by Malcolm Gladwell. Its chief premise is that our subconscious works so efficiently in identifying our feelings that it can make a decision before we can even bat an eye. The best explanation he gives involves a study done some years ago whose objective was to determine how long it took the participant to become aware of a hunch. A large stack of cards, colored either red or blue, were shuffled and then revealed one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participant, one color dominated the deck by a ratio of about 3:1. The participant was to alert the scientist the second a hunch about what card was expected next. The average was about after the 20th card. The more interesting aspect was that the participant's pulse, which was being monitored, made a clear delineated increase after about the 13th card. Our body had made a connection 7 cards prior to our brain.

Which leads me to the title of this entry: why aren't we more aware of these early signs of hunch? Why aren't we better dialed in to what our subconscious is telling us? Is rational decision-making influenced by our hunches or do many of these signals go unnoticed?

As declared in my last post, I enjoy psychoanalysis. My interest began at a young age in my search for identity. I suffered from indecision and I guess I looked to theory for remedy. I figured science had the answer. I took all the personality tests, read many stupid self-help books, and asked myself a billion introspective questions. The deeper I searched, the more questions emerged. I created list after list after list of preferences, abilities, and goals. I definitely discovered some truths, and I probably could double as a pretty good counselor. Does it mean that I can identify my own subconscious. Haha - No.

Dad couldn't elucidate on these theories either. I always looked to him as the perfect male role model, as do, at least initially, many sons of their fathers. Sometimes he would sit with me as I went through the rigmarole of a complete rational thought. Othertimes (and later I learned was his preferred method), he wouldn't change any body language and would simply say, "For-geht ab-aht it." Oh boy would that frustrate me! The easiest way to irk a golfer about to tee off is to steal his driver. Maybe Dad foresaw the imminent duck hook into the woods, where I'd be spending the next five minutes looking for a lost ball. Or maybe he knew that I was the kind of kid who would spend about 5 minutes looking for a cheap, replaceable ball. Perhaps he had similar, juvenile tendencies and this was his way of teaching me a lesson. Succinct yet indirect wouldn't be how I would describe Steve Cochran, but a teacher nonetheless.

Speaking of succinct, political columnist David Brooks, at my college graduation in May 2003, ended his speech with 8 words, half of which are germane to this topic: "Read widely, marry wisely, and trust your own instincts." I wonder how much DePauw paid him per word?

Whether it comes to experiment, introspection, or literature, the identification of our true feelings isn't easy to execute without some help. We fill our days with so many appointments, games, and faces that it consumes our attention. The gurus told me to come to understand biology and the components of my personalities DNA. Dad had another solution: stop thinking and just be. I think both hold water, but each held in moderation. Only after you play a game of cards multiple times can you act on hunches and still win. Only after mastering a skill can one rely on muscle memory to carry out the task. Our instincts exist because many a human helped to ingrain them into our condition.

Nevertheless, a simple increased heartbeat tells quite a lot. It's probably the most palpable signal that our subconscious gives us about innate preference. What person hasn't spent minutes perusing the menu only to choose the one that makes us sit up a little straighter? Who doesn't remember picking a book from the library just because our hand seemed to quiver upon recognition of its title? At the extreme, when is the memory burned more permanently than when we feel that quasi-painful feeling of a intensely thumping heartbeat as our teenage crush approached us in the hallway? Not to be denied.

Before going to bed that evening I played "Stuck Like Glue" on YouTube. One's preference in music can't be explained with rationale. That's probably why people identify so well with songs. This song was one of those. And I knew it about the same time as my foot started tapping the ground.