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Chayce Hayman

ENG 101E-14

Dr. Cassel

2 November 2018

Annotated Bibliography

Whitney, Willis R. “How Does Your Subconscious Work?” Saturday Evening Post, vol.

218, no. 15, Oct. 1945, p. 6. EBSCOhost,

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1. Willis R. Whitney in his article “How the Subconscious Works” say the way your memory

works is like when you see something like a dog and don’t remember its name so you

think dog, then cat, then rabbit, then remember his name is O’Hare. So it’s like a chain

effect that leads you to what you want to remember. The author says that he started

jotting down his memory words to trace the chain back, and he says for some reason

the words go in fours. He says one day he tried to think of a certain senator and the first

though wasn’t even close but he wrote it down anyway. Then he thought of another

one and again, wasn’t even close. Then it just came to him out of nowhere and he

remembered the name of the senator. He says that the names he was thinking of had

some sort of similarity or connection between the people and writing the names down

led him to remembering the answer he wanted. A Yale professor visited Willis in his

laboratory one day and was interested in the study so he said he would give it a try and
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report the results. The professor remembered he had to buy a gift for his granddaughter

who they called a “pet name” or nickname and he couldn’t think of it at the time so he

wrote down what came to him. He said that, like Willis, it came to him on the fourth.

With analysis of what the professor wrote down it shows a connection between each

animal name he wrote down and leads to what he was wanting to remember. He

thought of two names with one set of double letters each which is difficult for the

conscious mind to let go of. So on the third name that came to the professor the

subconscious came up with a name that had two sets of double letters. In the process of

thinking of the name he went from bird through an animal to an insect. Willis was trying

to think of a name of a person in his own company. He wrote down three names before

getting the right one on the fourth. He wondered how he got there. Then he

remembered about 60 years back when he learned his three R’s in a little red school

house, that the names he thought of were the names of the four farmers that bounded

the little red schoolhouse. He hadn’t consciously thought of them since way back then

until now but they were stored away in his subconscious to be used when he would

need them.

2. The writer’s purpose for writing this article is to explain how the subconscious works

and how his has affected him. The audience for this piece is a general audience.

3. The writer is Whitney R. Willis. I know he is credible because he was an American

chemist and founder of the research laboratory of the General Electric Company. I know

he has the adequate information to write the article because he was knowledgeable
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about it. I know the source is reliable because it is well known and has been around for

a while.

4. I will use this information in paper to show how the subconscious works and what it can

do for us as people. It answers my “fat” question because it explains how the

subconscious works. It also gives real life experiences that the author had of his

subconscious in use.

Carey, Benedict. “Who’s Minding the Mind?”. The New York Times 31 July 2007

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31subl.html Accessed 29 October

2018.

1. Psychologists at Yale did a study where they altered someone’s judgement of a stranger based on if

they handed them a cup of hot coffee or a cup of iced coffee. There are studies like this are pouring

out of psychological research. Studies show that people tidy up more when there is faint smell of

cleaning liquid in the air, people become more competitive if there is a briefcase in sight, and

become more cooperative if they catch a glimpse of words like “dependable” and “support”. These

are demonstrations of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can activate goals and motives

people already have. Studies show the subconscious brain is more active than previously known

before. When some people, for example, run to their car to avoid the rain end up driving too fast.

The brain appears to use the same neural circuits to execute an unconscious act as it does a

conscious one. Some studies suggest the brain uses a “bottoms up” decision making process where

the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that weighs the reward first then decides then is interacts

with the higher level conscious regions later if at all. Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint

the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness. The bottom up decision making process
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makes sense in an evolutionary perspective because the subcortical areas of the brain evolved first

which would have helped individuals fight, flee, and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly

human layers were added later in evolutionary history. Dr. Bargh argues that unconscious goals can

be seen as open ended adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad encoded aims. In several

studies researchers have shown that when covertly activated an unconscious goal persists with the

same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits. What some people don’t know is that

using subtle cues for self improvement is like trying to tickle yourself. Priming yourself doesn’t work

if you’re aware of it. Manipulating others is possible but also dicey. As soon as people feel they’re

being manipulated they do the opposite so it backfires.

2. The writers purpose for writing this article is to give information on the subject of the conscious

and the unconscious mind. The audience for this piece is a general audience.

3. The writer is Benedict Carey. I know the author is credible because he is a writer for The New York

Times. . I know he has the adequate information to write the article because he was knowledgeable

about it. I know the source is reliable because it is well known and has been around for a while.

4. I will use this information in my paper to give me information about my topic and to help me

answer my “fat” question. It gives a lot of good information I could use in my paper.

Surugue, Lea. “Subconscious Cues Can Make Us Forget Things.” New Scientist, vol. 239,

no. 3197, Sept. 2018, p. 15. EBSCOhost,

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1. We can forget things when told to even if it is a subliminal instruction. People can consciously

suppress memories when asked to. One experiment used visual cues to tell volunteers to

remember or forget words while trying to remember a variety of word pairs and if told to

forget, they were less likely to remember it later on. Raphael Gaillard and his colleagues have

shown that this works subliminally as well. The team trained a group of 44 volunteers to

remember or forget in response to clear visual cues. The volunteers recalled the second word in

a pair 83% of the time when given the remember cue but only 77% of the time when given the

forget cue. Next the team ran the same experiment but flashed the forget and remember cues

on a screen for periods of time that were too short for anyone to consciously notice them. The

researchers found that the subconscious cues to forget lowered the average recall rate to 75%

and the subconscious cues to remember lowered the average recall rate to 81%.

2. The writers purpose for writing this article is to explain how we can forget things when

subliminally instructed to. The audience for this piece is a general audience.

3. The writer is Lea Surugue. I know the author is credible because she is a known journalist. I

know she has the adequate information to write the article because she has good sources of

information. I know the source is reliable because it is a published piece.

4. I will use this information in my paper to give me information about my topic and to help me

answer my “fat” question. It gives a lot of good information I could use in my paper.

Bruinius, Harry. “Facebook’s Secret Experiment on Users Had a Touch of ‘Inception.’” Christian Science

Monitor, 30 June 2014, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost,


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1. In the movie “Inception” a crew of people sneak into someone’s subconscious dreamscape and

incept an action inducing emotion and watch as they make a wide awake “free choice” based on it.

This is kind of like Facebook’s secret experiment that they conducted where they used the user’s

emotions to gauge the “emotional contagion” of its personally tailored newsfeed. For a week in

2012 a trio of scientists were allowed to tinker with nearly 700,000 user’s newsfeeds. They

measured whether a mostly positive or mostly negative newsfeed would influence the users own

posts. The data suggested that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional

contagion causing people to have the same emotions without their awareness. People were not

happy about the secret experiment performed on them. Facebook didn’t add to the newsfeeds but

reduced negative headlines from one sample of users and reducing positive headlines from another

sample of users. This could mean that Facebook could have a powerful emotion and behavior

shaping aspect due to it being viewed by some 130 million Americans who sign on to Facebook

each day.

2. The writers purpose for writing this article is to inform people of the experiment that Facebook

conducted. The audience for this piece is a general audience.

3. The author is Harry Bruinius. I know the author is credible because he is a known author. I know he

has the adequate information to write the article because he has good sources of information. I

know the source is reliable because it is a published piece.


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4. I will use this information in my paper to explain how the subconscious could be used to direct

people and potentially manipulate them without them knowing. It’s a good example I can use for

evidence in my paper.

Douglas, Kate. “8 How Powerful Is the Subconscious? (Cover Story).” New Scientist, vol. 206, no. 2754, Apr.

2010, p. 32. EBSCOhost,

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1. The subconscious is thought of as the brains autopilot but it also plays a crucial role in learning

and memory, and is better at making tough decisions than rational analysis is. In the 1980s the

late neuroscientist Benjamin Libet discovered a spark of brain activity 300 milliseconds before a

conscious subject chose to twitch a finger. In 2008 John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center

for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, discovered brain activity up to 10 seconds

before a conscious decision to move. Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive

Neuroimaging Unit at INSERM, France did an experiment where he flashed a word on a screen

in front of a volunteer followed, almost immediately after, by a picture, which made a

conscious perception of the word. As time between the two increased the word slowly came

into consciousness accompanied by characteristic activity on a brain scan. This usually

happened when the interval reached around 50 milliseconds, but when emotional words such

as "love" or "fear" were used, it happened a few milliseconds earlier, like the subconscious

made a tough decision on the words importance and attention worthiness. Experiments like

these have changed people’s views about the relationship between the conscious and

subconscious thought.
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2. The writers purpose for writing this article is to inform on the topic of the subconscious. The

audience for this piece is a general audience.

3. The author is Kate Douglas. I know the author is credible because she is known and has other

published pieces. I know she has adequate information to write this because she uses good

information in it. I know the source is reliable because it is a published pice from “New

Scientist”.

4. I will use this information in my paper for good supporting information and a good example.

This information can help me answer my “fat” question as well.

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