To what extent are our conscious intentions and strategies in control of our choices and decisions, our feelings and actions? The 20th century provided three different answers to this basic existential question: Freud’s psychodynamic theory placed a hidden and self-destructive unconscious mind in charge; Skinner and the behaviourists put control instead with the outside stimulus environment. Finally, cognitive science threw out the behaviourists and reinstated the conscious mind at the helm.

When I started out in the 70s, these three camps were arguing but with hardly any actual evidence, so I began to study these issues scientifically. Before You Know It is the culmination of more than three decades of such research, from labs around the world, on the variety of unconscious influences in everyday life. These 10 books were my signposts along the way.



1. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing by Adam Crabtree (1993)

It all starts with Freud, right? Except it didn’t. Here, Crabtree details the 120 years of psychologically based treatments of physical ailments that occurred before Freud, starting with Mesmer’s “magnetic healing” and leading eventually to the “talking cure” of Freud and Pierre Janet. This historical context shows that Freud’s work was the culmination of such efforts, rather than their starting point. Even in the late 19th century, many people believed that mental illness was caused by evil demons. Freud turned this supernatural explanation into a natural one by locating this “demon” inside the patient’s body as a separate “unconscious mind”.

2. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner (1971)

The book that got me started in psychology, a bestseller when I was taking a high-school psychology class. Skinner’s last-gasp appeal to the general public, following the “cognitive revolution” in psychology of the 60s, arguing that we had no actual freedom of will, that our conscious thoughts were not causal at all. But we so wanted to believe otherwise that we persisted in the illusion. However, Skinner was not entirely wrong. Subsequent research (on humans) showed that events in the outside world can indeed affect us directly and unconsciously – but only through activating internal cognitive mechanisms that he had long insisted were irrelevant.

3. Face Value by Alexander Todorov (2017)

The power of a person’s face over our impressions of their personality is a case in point. We feel so sure that we know someone’s personality from just their face, but we are wrong. We mistake the features of their resting face for a temporary emotional expression instead. Take Grumpy Cat, for instance, who isn’t really grumpy – it’s just the way her face was made. In Todorov’s most dramatic demonstrations, ratings of the trustworthiness and competence of political candidates based on their photographs alone predicted the outcome of elections in the US with better than 70% accuracy.

4. The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler (1967)

Koestler’s impassioned case for human freedom was the coup de grâce for behaviourism. The existential novelist who fought in the Spanish civil war against fascism and was a prisoner of the Nazis, focused on behaviourism’s attempt (based on studies of rats and pigeons) to account for complex human social interaction, and lampooned it so mercilessly that everyone could finally see that the emperor was naked.



5. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

What consciousness is not. This surprise bestseller of 1976 arrived at a time when conscious intents and awareness were assumed to underlie all of human thought and behaviour. Jaynes begged to differ, building his argument on evolutionary and anthropological grounds. To better understand what consciousness was, he used the method of subtraction: “Where something is so resistant to even the beginnings of clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining what that something is not.”

How did they choose each other? … Juliet Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis as Teresa and Tomas in the 1988 film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

6. The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders (1998)

And now for something completely different. A Danish science writer deduces the severe limitations of conscious thought from the basic laws of Newtonian physics, with a dash of computer science and economic theory. Norretranders starts from the fact that our conscious minds deal with a vastly limited subset of the information coming through our senses – 16 bits per second (conscious) compared to 11m bits (unconscious) – despite the powerful illusion that we are aware of everything that is going on around us.

7. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness by Merlin Donald (2001)

Given such limitations, the conscious mind cannot possibly be in charge of everything going on in our lives. So what are its unique and special properties? Donald was a true pioneer of the study of the brain. Long before the invention of brain-imaging technology, he would string electrodes through people’s noses to get near their frontal brain cortexes in order to record the electrical activity there while the person did various tasks. But his quest also took him to the Harvard University library archives to spend a year studying the files of 1919 valedictorian Helen Keller, a brilliant mind operating without any visual or auditory input; and to ponder in the reverse direction just what it would take to make a statue consciously aware of its surroundings.



8. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1984)

In a quite different take on the existential question of personal control, Kundera explores the impact that chance events have on the courses of our lives. The central incident, how Teresa and Tomas first met in the Zurich train station, is a love story “born of six improbable fortuities” that could so easily not have happened at all. Kundera’s existential point reaches deeply – even into those mundane spheres of life where we feel free from other forms of control, by government or police, for example. Even here, he shows, our lives are still significantly shaped by chance factors equally out of our control.



9. The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner (2002)

And yet we persist in the belief that we are the captains of our souls. How come? Wegner focuses on one key reason – our seemingly direct experience of willing ourselves to act – and shows that this direct experience is a mirage. Through clever experimental manipulations, he is able to induce feelings of will over events the person had no role in causing. Wegner applies this analysis to several historical examples, such as the 19th-century fad of holding seances, in which the reverse effect occurred: thousands of people strongly but erroneously believed they played no role in producing apparently supernatural events. Our own habits leave us no less fooled.

10. Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson (2001)

But if we were constantly guiding our choices and behaviour with consciously made intentions, then shouldn’t we be able to report accurately on the reasons for those choices? Wilson was the co-author, with Richard Nisbett, of one of the landmark papers of 20th-century psychology, which demonstrated how we typically do not know the reasons we think and do what we do. In his book, Wilson explores the consequences for self-understanding of being so out of touch, underscoring the deep wisdom of the ancient Delphic advice: “Know Thyself.”