>> rose: welcome to our program, tonight, david brooks, the "new york times" columnist in, writes in a new book called "the social animal" about the power of the unconscious mind. >> the research shows us we don't have one core self, we have multiple selfs that are aroused by different stuff. i think the president has had more core selves. >> rose: he's many them? >> many people aroused by different things and i think the strength is he always has the ability to look at his other selves and they're all authentic i'm not saying it's fake, and sort of judge and... >> rose: which one is appropriate for this moment? >> or just did that one screw up? >> rose: david brooks for the hour next.

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captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: david brooks is here. he has been an op-ed columnist in for the "new york times" since 2003. every friday he appears on the pbs newshour to put washington in perspective. but his career started because william f. buckley thought he was funny. a parody he wrote led to a job at "national review" at the "new york times" his columnist in is a moderate brand of conservatism founded on thinkers of the british enlightenment. some like to call him the liberals' favorite conservative. he says being the conservative of the times is like being the chief rabbi of mecca. he's also the author of books that tell us things we don't know about ourselves and culture. about "bobos in paradise, the new upper class and how they got there. " in recent years, his interest

in neuroscience has crept into his columns. we know the feeling that when we begin to open the paper and see that today david brooks is writing about what really interests him. what he calls the enchanted realm of the unconscious mind. he has a new book out that reflect this is passion. it is called "the social animal: the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement." i am very pleased to have david brooks back at this table. welcome. >> great to be with you again. >> rose: "the social animal." >> we're not rational animals. >> rose: this is an assault on rationality? >> we're both rational and emotional. but i live a world... i live in the most motionly avoidant city on earth in washington, d.c. >> rose: yes indeed. >> so i covered the soviet union and we sent economists there and we were oblivious to the lack of social trust that was a real problem. covered iraq, oblivious to the culture. cover education. for the last 30 years we've been

rearranging the schools but never in the way that touches the real subject, which is the emotional bond between the teacher and the student. and so for all this time we've had a bunch of policies based on a false and shallow view of human nature. then i look at this other world, neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral economics and they're giving us something deeper so i said i want to figure out what they're saying about who they are so we can understand something deeper about ourselves. >> rose: at first imblaegs are they telling us? >> three things. first, that most of the action in our mind is happening unconsciously. so the human mind can take in 12 million pieces of information in a minute, it can be consciously aware of 40. some of that is shallow. so if you go out to dinner, if you're alone you'll eat this much. if you're with one other person you'll eat on average 35% more and if you're with three other people you'll eat 75% more. so that's sort of shallow. then there's stuff unconsciously that's kind of important and so that stuff includes how we see the world, how we learn to relate to people. that shapes your destiny. the second thing we're learning is that reason is not separate

from emotion. emotion tells us what to value. emotion is the foundation of reason. the two are intertwined and so i'm a middle aged white guy, not that comfortable talking about emotion. there's a famous brain scan experiment apocryphal but i love it, they take middle age guys, put hem in a brain scan machine, have them watch a horror movie and then describe their feelings towards their wives and it's the same. the here is terror in both circumstances. but emotion is who you have to pay attention to. the final thing is that we're not individuals who make relationships, we're in relation first and our individuality emerges. we're intertwine it had way we think with each other's minds. so emotion, the fact that we're deeply social in relationships and how much is going on down here. it gives you a different way of

human nature. >> rose: sense the subtitle "the hidden source of love and character and achievement." >> we're the children of the french enlightenment, descarte of reason is first but i think what this research... it doesn't invent new philosophies but confirms old ones and i think it confirms the wisdom of the british or scottish enlightenment. and they said reason is weak but the sentiments-- what they call the sentiments-- are strong, trustworthy. that's one of the lessons here. we tend to think emotions are... if we get carried away by emotion we'll be ruined and to some extent that's true but our emotions or our unconscious are surprisingly wise. so just trivially if you have trouble making a decision, flame coin. and then look at the coin and don't go by what the coin tells you, go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails. >> rose: so if you're know that you're happy it came up tails your instinct that it ought to

be heads? >> unconsciously you've processed. you've made a decision. when it comes up heads and you say "i'm happy" you know secretly you wanted it to come up that way. so another famous illustration, there's a guy, a dutch scientist he studied one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, which is buying furniture. it's hard to go in a furniture store, look at a sofa there and figure out "how is that going to look at home?" so what he discovers is you shouldn't make a list, you should study the furniture, let it simmer in your mind, get distracted and then maybe a day later go with your instinct because unconsciously you'll process it. now, not all decisions should be made in this way, just the testimony of the fact that we thought-- and freud encouraged us to think-- that the unconscious is this tangled weapon of sexual urges. but in reality what we seemed to discover is that the unconscious is a way of processing the world like the conscious mind, just a different way. >> rose: let me connect you and

this subject of neuroscience. was there one thing that led you to say "i want to go on this journey"? >> it started by happenstance. you've done so much on the show and i think once you get into it it's exciting and because it opens up vistas, you see yourself in a different way. i really see the whole world in a different way. and it's not my research, i didn't do it. i just report on what other people are doing. but i guess specific issue was high school dropouts. why do 30% of kids drop out? completely irrational decision. so when i tried to look into that a lot of those factors which lead them to drop out are formed in the first couple years. do they know how to make relationships with teachers? if you ask... go into a high school class and ask your kid "who's your favorite teacher?" if they give you an answer to that we they won't drop out. if they look at you as if the question is insane because they will never have a favorite teacher, they will probably drop out. and so a lot of what's important

in getting through school is can you control your impulses and a lot of that is studied by walter michelle and is established in the first couple years. a lot of it is can you relate to teacher? do you know how to build a relationship to a teacher? there's a vast body of research that you've covered called attachment theory. some kids-- 55% of american kids have had a secure communication channel with mom and dad and they know how to do it, 20% are called avoidantly attached. they've sent signals and something's come back so one of the teachers in up with of the the books i read divide a kid who's avoidantly attached walking into the class like a sailboat into the wind, wanting to get close-to-teacher but not knowing how to do it and finally standing with his back to teacher, wanting the teacher to connect but not knowing how to do that. and avoidantly attached kids later in life, the ward area in their brains are less active during social encounters and at 70 they'll have many fewer friends. now the things that happen in

the first 18 months of life don't establish a life. they don't determine, but they open pathways that can be either confirmed or changed by later experience. >> rose: how did you go about informing your own mind about the field? >> well, first of all, if you have... if you go to my basement, you'll see bookshelves you'll see about five or six bookshelves just filled with books on this stuff. so i read. i just read and read and read and let it marinate. because i'm a journalist i talk to people. i went to conferences and just slowly the way auto didacts work you accumulate things and then finally you've got enough so you basically it's a search like i think a lot of people go on. it's not... i'm not great at science and i'm not a science writer. my goal in writing this book was not have the word "amygdala" appear. i say that. the amygdala is a small prompt innocent part of the brain involved in emotion and a lot of other things but i'm not writing a book about where things are happening in the brain.

i'm not telling you how it's happening. i'm not doing the science. i'm trying to tease out because i thought there were so many important social implications i'm trying to tease out what should the rest of us know about what this is reminding us about human nature. >> rose: you do cite studies up one side and down the other. >> oh, yeah. >> rose: that inform every decision that your novelistic concept meets. >> and i'm not a researcher. i'm not a scientist, i'm a journalist. so i'm covering science, or i'm covering these fields, really, a lot of different fields, the way i might cover the white house. i'm trying to learn as much as i can and then the thing i add is a sympathize a lot and try to tease out a few implications for the rest of us. for the world of politics, business, education. newspaper is neuroscience in the mainstream today? >> i really think it is. you can't turn on charlie rose without seeing it. >> rose: that's true. >> we have a great section in our newspaper "science times." and i really think it's become the field. when freud hit the scene he had

an effect on literary culture and everything. i remember looking at the knew republic they had a freudian columnist in who would analyze world events from a freudian perception so he'd say the soviet union was in its age sdaj this is week. stuff like that. but now it's filling in because i think a lot of what's happened is a lot of the fields that told us who we are have receded a little: theology, philosophy. they're doing important work in those fields. >> rose: why have they receded? >> i'm not sure why. i think they've had less of a public impact, let's say, than maybe they did in the 1950s when you d reinhold niebuhr, real big public theologians. now for whatever reason i'd say we have big public scientists or neuroscientists. wilson was on this show many times and other people like that. and their work, antonio di mazzio has been on this show. their work really informs us so di mazzio, for example, told me in 1995 there were no panels on

emotion at the big neuroscience convention. now they're everywhere. and so that's a real intellectual shift. >> rose: you say we're in the middle of this consciousness revolution. what's the consciousness electrocution? it is in part what we're saying but what is it? >> literally i meant revolution in that we... you know, the conscious mind writes the autobiography so we tell ourselves stories based on what the voice in our head is telling us. but we're learning that voice in our head sometimes is accurate and sometimes is just making up stories to try to explain what is going on below the level of awareness. so a lot of the work that's being done is on how we react below the level of... in ways we're not aware of. so in some ways people have known about this through observation. read aristotle and they knew about this. a smart retailer knows about it: if you walk into a grocery store, you go to the fruit section first. they know if you buy fruit you

feel so happy with yourself you buy crackers later. so these things are... we're aware of and retailers are aware of this. if they want to experiment, if you... which i said in the book where they take some people into a... they're buying pool tables and one day they took the customers to the most extensive table first and then down the next day to the least expensive and when they took them to the most expensive first they spent about 55% more. >> rose: i'm not surprised by that. >> because you have a frame of reference. if you go into a wine store-- many scientists say this-- there are bottles that most of us buy, $20, $30, then a couple bottles, $150, $200. they're there not to be bought but the fact that they're there means most of us... what you end up buying is going to be closer to those guys. >> rose: you chose two characters and created a novel of their life from birth to death. >> right. >> rose: why? >> i did it for a couple reasons. one, i think best examples are when i can see in the concrete

situations. so by creating these characters you can see in the concrete situations. you can take the stuff being explored in the lab and sort of see it more vividly, i think, in actual situations. second, i thought it would be more fun. i can tell jokes. >> rose: yes. between them. >> and third one of the themes of the story is that the information hits us in so many different levels consciously, unconsciously. and the unconscious mind... the conscious minds thinks in essay form. the unconscious mind thinks in terms of stories. so i thought the book should match the subject and hit on various levels. so i make the distinction between the allegory and the novel. in the novel characters are distinct and unique and vivid. in an allegory, the characters are meant to represent things. so these characters are meant to exemplify what the research shows. so it's more of an allegory. just to give concrete existence so you can see someone feels an

upsurge of emotion. someone as a child is relating to mom or not relating to mom learning how to develop self-control. you can see it more concretely. or there's one case where the girl, a young girl grows up in poverty situation, her mom is suffering from depression and she has the right instinct which a lot of this research shows is that if you're in a troubled situation you probably don't have the facultys to change it yourself. what you have to do is get yourself into a different environment and let that environment's cues change you. >> rose: in this case it's school. >> right. she know there is's a school in her neighborhood which i call the academy which is based on a few academies and she demands to get into that school. and through the structure of that school the discipline, the organization, she goes from a situation which is chaotic and undermining her to a situation where she has the potential for the future. >> rose: and she is of asian and hispanic heritage?

>> right. and that was so i could get into the cultural things. there are many rivers into the mind, the unconscious. many tributaries into the unconscious river and some are genetic from centuries ago. so famous one is that men tend to prefer women who have a 0.7 waist-hip ratio. that's a famous one. >> rose: (laughs) yes. >> but some are social norms and some are culture. we're formed by our cultures in ways we're not vaguely aware of. so one of the experiments is a guy... if you bump into a northern man on the street in a way that seems vaguely threatening, a northern american his cortisol levels will not rise. but if you bump into a southern man-- i say this to you as ason of north carolina-- you're more likely to get his cortisol to rise because... another famous experiment was done in new york years ago. diplomats could park illegally for free. >> rose: this is a great one. >> and so they measured...

somebody had the brilliant idea of saying which country did the diplomats who broke the rules more often come from? it turns out the ones who came from nations that ranked very high in what they call the transparency international corruption index. when they got here they carried those social norms with them in their head. so the kuwaitis, people from corrupt countries got the parking tickets. diplomats from sweden and canada zero because they're swedes, they're not going to park in front of the fire entrance. >> rose: so harold is... >> harold is a middle-class kid from a middle-class background and harold has social charm as a young man... or young boy, but what he lacks is some depth. and so through the process of his life, he's not the most ambitious person, but he comes to see certain things that deepen him. and one of the... one of my favorite parts of the book is the chapter where he meets a teacher who teaches him how to learn. and we think of learning, i think, too much as a filling

novel to an empty brain but it's clearly not that. it's a series of exchange. she gives him a book, a middle brow book in the '50s and he discovers the world of ancient greece. so it's a four-step process. the first step is downloading information. so the brain can begin to work on it. the second is repeating it so it becomes automatic. the third is sort of playing with it. journal entries, games. so the unconscious mind is stimulated. then the fourth is the rigorous paper writing where he has to bring it all to a point. and he has a moment where scientists have described that ah-ha moment, that moment of certainty when you're struggling with a problem and it can't make sense and then something pops into your mind that makes it clear. and that moment is such a delicious moment that a lot of people chase that moment all their lives, they become scholars. so what i'm trying to do there is show the interplay between conscious learning, unconscious

processing, to show how education involves all this stuff. that's how learning happens. >> rose: and their parents? >> their parents... well, harold's parents are sort of shallow commercial people. you know, they have a scene in aspen where i have this perfect affluent and shallow cup where will they're so tall and slender they don't have ties, just one elegant cast on top of the other. and they have dogs in certain superrich circles it's now fashionable to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling height so they have these giant furry vessel los raptors all with jane austen names. and so i just... there's social comedy in there through them. and then erica's parents are one... the father is mexican american, the mother is chinese. and you get to see a little of the mental illness and the effects of mental illness which actually as events in tucson have shown us we're just beginning to come to terms with a lot of that stuff.

it's funny, i was at national institute of health not long ago with a bunch of neuroscientists and in a lot of these fields they a mountain and think "we're about to understand this" and then they realize "it's more complicated than we thought. there's a shape to the learning curve. the mind is endlessly complicated. incredible numbers of connections, so much going on. >> rose: and we're just beginning to understand. >> and that's what's exciting. when i started the book i thought i'll use all these great brain images from the m.r.i. machines and i think the future is there in that stuff, but so far i think we're just so early on that it's hard to take stuff in this f.m.r.i. images and translate into that into behavior. so we should be cautious about trying to translate brain imagery to behavior. but someday we'll learn a lot more.

>> rose: it's called "the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement." let me talk about love, achievement and then back to character. there is a moment in which harold and erica feel something and you describe that as an unconscious thing. >> yes. well, the mind... when we fall in love... and one of the things we slern that love is not a separate decision making, it's a normal but more powerful sort. it's rational and unrational. when we fall in love and meet somebody, we're making all sorts of rational connections. we're evaluating each other's status on the first date and one of the famous experiments shows that this is... online date offers and this is jermaine to short guys like me, a guy who's 5'6 can get as many online date offers as a guy who's six feet so long as me makes $172,000 a year. women are not conscious they're making the choice but status comes into it. but when things begin to match-- and this is true in my life--

when you meet someone it's amazing, my wife and i had the same posters on our wall. so you think there... >> rose: what were those posterss? >> this is embarrassing. it was a hubert humphrey poster. >> rose: for both of you? >> yes. and the poster said "some talk change others cause it" because even as a young man i knew i only wanted to talk change. >> rose: (laughs) >> hers was autographed, her father worked for humphrey. so hers was... we had that on our walls. >> rose: and their life turned out to be reflected... your characters' life turned out to be reflective of those two ambitions. harold wrote about change, he was a scholar, and she was active and moved from business into politics. >> into politics. but when we fall in love, a lot of it i say is rational, so people marry people with nose width of similar width, the immune systems tend to be complementary.

but sendall had a great concept called crystalization, these austrian miners who take sticks, put them a mine and come back weeks later and they'd pull the sticks out and crystals had formed on the sticks and they'd glimmer and this is what we do to our beloved. we imagine them as enchanted. and that's the way the research meshs with the literature. and it shows how love is a need, a motivational state, not an emotion, a need for the other person. i think one of the strings that illustrates is consciously we want money, prestige, but unconsciously i think the primary goal is... i use the world deliverance. it's the lose the line and to merge somewhere w something larger than ourselves. to merge with another. >> rose: we want a connection. >> rose: we want such a total connection we forget ourselves. so whether a craftsman is lost in a craft, a naturalist is lost in nature, a believer in god's love. we want to be dissolved and there's a hunger to have... we

have all these internal models of the mind so what reality should be and when the internal and external models match, that's the bliss to feel hold. >> rose: so you're a public intellectual and columnist in and journalist. what have you dissolved into? what's the larger connection for you? >> there are certain moments at a baseball game when you're in a crowd. >> rose: but that's not what you do. that euphoria, you talk about god, too. >> for me it's writing. i've known i wanted to be a writer since second grade. in high school there was a woman who wanted to date somebody else instead of me and i remember thinking what does she see in that guy? i'm a way better writer than that guy." >> rose: (laughs) >> and in moments of writing sometimes you forget who you are you're just writing. doesn't happen often enough. but for me that's the goal. >> rose: did you want to write fiction or non-fiction? >> i wanted to write fiction and then i wanted to be a

playwright. once i got into reporting, i'm not good at thinking abstractly. >> rose: "i'm not good at thinking abstractly." but is part of what you're talking about here abstractions? >> but i understand them through concrete situations. this is why quote experiments about nose widths because it helps me understand the concept. so a philosopher can talk about abstractions and do a logical structure but i just need to see it. and the i think the neuroscience is valuable for doing that, the social science, i should say is useful because they're trying it out and yielding data. and they're trying things and you can see the experiments, some of the experiments are phenomenally clever to illustrate various things. so, for example, talk about the importance of emotion. one of di mazzio's early and famous experience, there's a patient that suffered a stroke, can't experience emotion the way we do. and he says to the patient "come back next week, we'll schedule an appointment."

and the guy spends 20 minutes or so deciding the merits of tuesday or wednesday. he can't make up his mind because his emotions can't value one over the other. it's just an endless circle. >> rose: because they'd been damaged by... >> he had a stroke in this case. so the lesson is without emotion we can't assign value to things. we don't know what we want and we can't make decisions and so there's a concrete example where i can understand sort of what he's talking about. >> rose: what does the unconscious have to do with achievement? >> well, it has... >> rose: rather than some meritocracy that we've grown up with. >> right. i think we have this giant distortion in our culture where we talk about things we can measure. there's a great distinction between clouds and clocks. clouds are things we can count... clocks are things that we can take apart, clouds are dynamic. we're good at talking about clocks not clouds baug we can take it apart. so with childhood we emphasize grades and s.a.t. scores and

professional skills. and these things matter, obviously. but a lot of what matters to lifetime achievement are these other traits. can you detect patterns in an environment? can you attune to others so you can learn what they have to teach you? are you open minded? can you weigh the strength of your belief to the evidence? these are things that are hard to count but are tremendously important how we succeed. also how you perceive the future gary mcpherson started research. he took kids who were just started violin and he wanted to figure out who was going to get good and who was not. so he measured their aural ability to music. that was not a great predictor. he measured other stuff that was not great predictors. the thing that was a great predictor when they started the violin, he asked them "how long are you going to play?" some kids said "i may fool around for a couple years." some kids said "i think i'll do this steadily." a few kids said "i'm a violinist

i'm going to play the rest of my life." those kids who walked in with that identity, they did really well. so a lot is who do you think you are? and that comes through in many different forms. >> rose: i heard a story about how do you find the people who have the passion for it? he said when they do an audition they say "sit down and listen to me play." there's nothing about... they know who they are. they want you to hear them. and that internal confidence and pax. >> right. and they'll do what it takes. >> rose: but that suggests hard work. >> right. >> rose: and that's an emotional thing? the dedication to work is... comes from emotion? >> well, one of the things that a lot of... we have these categories, emotion, reason. i think in 50 years we'll have different categories. i don't think they make sense. because emotion refers to a lot... the word is used in so many different ways but some people have the ability to...

andre agassi can play tennis eight hours a day. one of the things i cite in the book... a lot of it is the 10 hour stuff. and there's... >> rose: gladwell and otherings. >> right. and there's a famous tennis academy where they play tennis for the starters without a ball. they just swing the racket and you just have to doggedly work on your form, work on your form. or a music camp where they play the music but they play each piece so slowly that if you can perceive what song it is, you're going to fast. and the thing is to make you doggedly learn the form. and that takes... >> rose: and rhythm. >> and the reputation. and what you're doing is you're taking something that was conscious and you're taking it so deep that you don't have to think about it which is what we do when we drive. >> we don't realize what we're doing. >> rose: so in terms of achievement and hard work and all of that, how do you find

those that have the here is drive to excel? to be the best? where does that come from? >> well, it comes from many different places. one of the studies i mention in the book is an amazinglying number of people who lost their fathers at age 10 to 12 are incredible achievers, for good and bad. stalin to many of our founding fathers. and one of the theories is they grew up with a sense of vulnerability that it could be taken away very rapidlyment and there's a hunger to establish oneself. but that doesn't apply to everybody. i don't think there's one rule that applies to everybody. but i do think what great achievers have is that hunger for... just to be lost in the craft. actually, i loved the movie "the social network," i thought it was a fine movie. but one of the nice points zuckerberg made in reaction was the movie... >> rose: in talking about "the social network"? >> right. >> rose: not zuckerberg, his character in the movie? >> no, the real guy.

he said "they treated as if it was trying to get girls. the movie doesn't understand how much fun it is to get the code right." and that hunger for that moment. that's just... >> rose: but i don't know where that comes from. that's what i'm asking. that hunger to get the code right >> well, i would say it's the hunger to be what you are. >> rose: to be... >> what you are. not the best, not what everybody else wants. to be what you are. >> rose: in other words you're running against yourself? >> you're running against this model in your head. we have these maps or neural nets or whatever you want to call it and they're... we don't really know the physiology of it. but when it's matched, when our predictions for the world, when our vision for the world is fulfilled and we get a surge of pleasure and there starts with animal life where when a monkey is looking at a little juice pellet in his cage and he expects the juice pellet and then it comes, my expectation is

fulfilled. i get a little surge of whatever of pleasure, juice. and so we have models where anticipation machine is the way... we're anticipation machines. we anticipate. so we have in our head what we want to be doing and we're chasing that and when it fulfills, you get that surge of pleasure. so, for example, one of the things i mention in the book is people are extremely sensitive when somebody like themselves achieves something great. something i have in common with. so in the book, erica, my woman who's half hispanic half chinese american, she's in high school and a hispanic... a woman business person comes. and she's... >> rose: immediately attracted to her. "that's like me, i could be that." and so there are famous cases that andrew jones... because he made it from this little island, right? it's a line like that and i can be that. and so we sort of see the model.

>> rose: so erica has married to harold and then has an affair. what does the subconscious tell us about that? >> right. that's my chapter where i'll do with a lot of research on morality. and so she has an affair. we have this folk wisdom about how we make moral principles, derives ultimately... we think through our... we have these intellectual principles of what justice and fairness is and then we think through moral quandaries and arrive at rational conclusions about what's moral and just and that's the conscious mind making itself the star. but in reality that's not how we experience morality. we have these moral intuitions so one of the experiments is they put on a sweater that they say "this was hitler's sweater, would you put it on?" nobody wants to put on hitler's sweater because they would feel contaminated. we have immediate moral intuitions. we have immediately... most people immediately have a moral

revulsion at the thought of insist. you don't have to teach a three-year-old kid what unfairness is. they know what unfairness is. so we are born with this moral... >> rose: born with? >> well, yeah, think i think we are born with. in early form a sense of fairness, a sense of purity. >> rose: do we know where it comes from? >> i don't know where it comes from in the brain. i try to stay away from that. that's the scientists job. but various other people have tried to define what these are and they have various experiences involving trolleys. >> rose: we know that experiment. we talked about that on this show. >> so but the lesson is... and i use that about adultery to illustrate the wave of shame that sweeps over her. to show how the moment of the adultery was not the passion, it was the moment of regret afterwards that's more emotion. so we see the world differently one second to another.

and i think we are born with a certain... and it would make evolutionary sense to have a very strong sense of fairness, to have a very good strong sense of in group and out group. and this they've measured, various neuroscientists. when we see somebody of our own group suffering pain, there's sharp reactions. when we see somebody of an out group suffering pain, it's much less. much less. and this is where a lot of problems in the world come in. >> rose: about this point in this conversation, someone is listening to the two of us and they're saying the following thing: i hear you, mr. brooks, talk about the power of the unconscious. tell me how the power of the unconscious can be influenced and what influence do i have on it? >> i'm glad you asked that because i never want to leave the impression that it's beyond our control. we have free will. it may be more bounded than we thought, but we certainly have the ability to change who we are. but we do it in... sometimes in indirect ways.

you have the ability to choose your environment. so if you can choose going into the marine corps or going to berkeley, those would be different environments and they will influence you in different ways. you have the ability to choose what... >> rose: but that's like understanding the impact culture can have on you and choosing one over the other. >> right. and once you go into the marine corps, you'll be influenced in ways you may not understand. but you will be influenced. >> rose: because you have made a decision. >> a decision to go one way or the other. the other thing you can do is change your behavior. one of the lessons of this research, one of the foundations of what i learned was a guy named timothy wilson from the university of virginia. he emphasizes that to change your mind, you change your behavior. and the alcoholics anonymous have the saying "fake it till you make it." so if you change your behavior, then slowly that will rewire the way you think. and so somebody recently asked me about who is the real me? i behave in a certain way but the real me is different. i'm not sure i believe that. the second thing is you have the

power to influence who you're surrounded by. and one of the... another powerful and across many spheres is the tremendous power of our peers to influence us in ways we don't understand. so our obesity, our fitness very powerfully influenced by. this is a controversial concept but the concept of mirror neurons. that when i see you pick up a glass, my brain acts as if it is picking up the glass. it's reenacting. so when you watch a porn movie, it's acting as if we're having sex... but hopefully not quite the same way. and so if i pick up the glass to drink, your brain reacts one way. if i pick it up to wash it, to put hit in the dishwasher, it reacts in different ways. so you're instantly observing but also judging the intention behind the action. and that's one of the ways we show how deeply interpenetrated we are. so when we look at people, we absorb what they have to teach us. that's what... it's very simply

early on alan meltsoff, in 1979 or' 1908 he leans over a baby at 43 minutes old, wags his tongue at the baby, the baby wags her tongue back. we're born with a desire to connect. we need to borrow those models. so we can do that with people around us but we can do it with people who died hundreds of years ago and one of the things... the book is about social animals but you don't have to be a gregarious party animal. a lot of us have more social interaction with people who died hundreds of years ago whose books we cherish, they can affect us powerfully in ways that maybe a teddy roosevelt or one of my characters rhetts to pericles. >> rose: who would be that be for you, david brooks? the characters you connect with. >> well, edmund burke. but we all have so many characters flowing in. woody allen would be in there.

bruce springsteen. tom seaver. so you have a great teacher. you learn the content and a way of being so if you study... if you were around, if you admire teddy roosevelt. there's a certain rooseveltian way of being. often you can't put that into words but it's dare greatly or. >> rose: physicality. >> rose: >> and if there's a woody allen... you want to be a funny or neurotic. so there's certain ways of being. i took a class... i didn't take it but i sat in on a class by a guy who became famous later, alan bloom from chicago. i would go periodically because he was such a great character and in the beginning of the term everyone looked like normal students. by the end may wear the same shoes, they smoke the same marlboroughs, he just had this affect and strong personality. >> rose: i've read one observation of your book who compared this to that. >> i didn't quite get that. alan bloom was a super high

intellectual. i'm not quite sure i'm like that. but it is a book... >> rose: but i think they were talking about what he wrote. >> yeah, he didn't like rock music. i really like rock music. but i guess one of the things... >> rose: but he clearly had an influence on you. or not? >> well, i think his book... actually, a book that didn't make a big splash was called "love and friendship" and that's a beautiful book. this book is a pale imitation. >> rose:... >> rose: but everybody who looks at this and sees how you done it they have looked at russo and emile and say "there's the model he chose to present what he wanted to tell us about the brain. >> i stole the form. but there's another book that i didn't put in the book. i found this in my folk's house. an 1890s guidebook to new york

and it's told through a young woman walking through new york and seeing what it looked like in the 1890s and she's walking down columbus avenue or the upper west side of new york and she sees a guy drinking a beer and a cop goes up to the guy and says "if you want to drink that beer, go over to amsterdam avenue, we don't drink beer on columbus avenue." and i remember that little story was so real that that's what i was sort of trying to recap dmur my book. >> rose: when you sat out to do this, you had one problem, i would assume. tell me whether you dealt with this issue. you want to have all the current science, right? you want to view these characters through everything we know today. on the other hand, you want to take them from birth to death. how do you solve that problem? >> it's always... they're born and they go through their lives, it's always 2001. >> rose: right. (laughs) it's always today because you want to be at the cutting edge of knowledge. >> and that's why i say this is an allegory.

i'm just using characters to illustrate the research if it was a novel they'd be idiosyncratic. but they're there to teach you or help you see what the research tells us. >> rose: where is spirituality? >> and one of the nice things about the research is it seems science would be cold and mechanistic but it's really enchanted. it opens you up to spiritual experience. it doesn't solve the question of whether god exists. we don't know how this three pounds of meat creates emotion or how emotion rewire it is meat. but that's a divine act of creation. >> rose:'s why we've just begun. >> right. so there's a scientist named andrew neuroburg who studies people under trances and they have different brain functions depending on the theology. but some people when they're in a meditative trance they achieve

a sense of oneness. according to his research, the parts of the brain that allows us to be aware of where our body is, that becomes less active. so you see the mechanism. a lot of the neuroscientists... a lot of them are materialistic, maybe atheists. but they have a respect for medication, for the dalai lama and they go to tibet. >> rose: it's almost how to... they look at it, i think, in terms of some process to unleash >> so some people say it's like traveling through the city in the flashlight. you can see part of the reality very brightly and you turn off the flashlight and you can see everything dimly. when you shut down your conscious mine you turn down the flashlight, you're aware of a lot more. it may not be as bright but your

awareness broadens. it may be-- we don't know this-- what early childhood is like. also son gopnik who's been on this program talk about it. senate judiciary committee speaking of childhood, there used to be childhood adolescents adulthood and... those were the four stages. you have added to the odd dissoy years as well as something that comes before retirement years which comes before death. so what's that about? >> odyssey years is a thing a lot of people are writing about. it used to be say in the '70s most people had achieved the basic... what we would call the elements of adulthood-- having a job, being financeable self-supporting, having kids-- by 27. most americans. now a very small minority have achieved that by 27, maybe 30. people are pushing that out. and so now people are marrying

later, having kids later. so there's a long period in the 20s where people are flitting around searching for stuff while their parents are slowly going crazy. settle down, do something! but i think they're doing the right thing because the world is more complicated. there are a lot of complicated jobs out there and it's best toe go through life trying to figure out what you want. and in the book one of the things i use for that section is trying to figure out what happiness is. and the characters try to use that, what is happiness? and we have a debate in this society over what happiness is. there's the "on the road" theme which is oh, just be free. then there's the "it's a wonderful life" themes which have family, settle down. and the research i think suggests the "it's a wonderful lifesettle down. the deeper your connections. >> rose: those are the happy... >> marriage famously the people... and then the activities, the daily activities which contribute to happiness--

others have done this research-- is like eating out with friends. >> rose: so it's connections. >> it's very simply that. >> rose: >> money helpss to degree though it levels off then the daily activity-- according to their research-- which is most harmful to happiness is commuting, being alone and commuting in your car. >> rose: what does this loneliness to do you? what is the consequence >> people have done a variety of research on this. stress, illness. >> rose: being alone and loneliness, are they the same thing? >> absolutely not that's a good point. but you're safer to be around others. >> rose: (laughs) exactly. what did you do when there were conflicting studies? how did you decide? (laughs) >> well, i tried to play it safe.

so i get on those e-mail lists and i tried to not use individual studies. i tried to rely on books and things like that the giants in the field had written to sort of sort the field out and i tried to be safe. there were times when this was frankly impossible. the field was so disputatious and there were so many different things about the role of i.q. and other things. it's often hard to find one thing everyone will agree on and there are times when i'm sure people will say i hired a fact checker, i hired someone to red read through it so i wouldn't make gross errors but i'm sure they're in there. i've done my best. i'm covering so many different fields that i didn't capture where the mean of the field. is maybe i was off to one side or another. and that's just the nature of the beast but they're generally what you try to do is play it safe, not do the cutting edge research but do the basic fundamentals. >> and people who are

credentialed not so much because they have a ph.d. from harvard but because they have in the community of people who are wise about this some credibility? >> and the things you take away, i think, are basically elemental. the power of emotion. i think they would all agree on these foundations. >> rose: so if you walk into the oval office-- you know where i'm going-- and president obama said to you "i hear you've written a new book, david, tell me about it and you say "yes, mr. president. it's all about the unconscious and how much more powerful it is." and he says so how is it relevant to my presidency? you would say? >> i would say, well, you remember mr. president when you told me about the marshmallow experiment? we were having a meeting and he started talking to me about the experiment. >> rose: is this the first time you knew about it? >> no, but he wanted me to know he knew about it. >> rose: but did he want you to know about it because he knew about it from you... >> i think he knew about it otherwise but he knew i cared about it because it was my

avenue into... >> rose: what does that say about him? that he knew something you knew? what does that say about him? because this whole damn book is about emotion! >> well, for somebody who's emotions are hard to read, i'd say that's barack obama. >> rose: but go ahead. >> rose: so the research shows us we don't have one core sell, we have multiple selves. i think the president has more core selves than even most of us. >> rose: he's many people? >> many people aroused by different contexts. and i think his strength is he always has the ability to look at his other selves and they're all authentic, i'm not saking he's fake. and he can judge... >> rose: which one is appropriate for this snoplt >> or just did that one screw up? that sort of thing. but i do think... and, again, this is armchair psychology. that it makes it harder for him to totally commit than somebody who might have less self-observation. ronald reagan or...

>> george w.. total commit. "i'm all in." it's harder to do that. >> rose: because he's aware of... >> he's seeing the different angles. but when he told me about the marshmallow experiment, which is about the ability to control impulses before age four we were talking about education and he was talking about testing. i was asking... you know, really important stuff happens early in life and you're reforming k-12 education, frankly a lot of this stuff 0-preis getting short shift because the big guns are with k-12. and he said "yes, i understand that. we try to work on that." so one stupid political thing is we should be spending our time in government trying to take the people who are living in disorganized neighborhoods and giving them structures every second everyday. whether it's a nurse family partnership, a visit to mom.

early childhood education, social and emotional education. boys and girls clubs there should be plenty of institutions we should be focusing on way more than we are and in the realm of count terrorism policy we've learned the importance of establishing what they call coin establishing levels of trust so people can trust you in egypt we just saw an emotional contagion. we just saw something people's totally changed. >> rose: as you have said and i have said... >> swept through this region. so that's... the research was very concert with what happened. or conversely in the financial panel. we had a financial regime based on the notion that we're rational self-interested creatures who won't do anything stupid en masse. but if you understand the power but if you become aware of how our financial bubble really

looks... >> rose: define yourself as an emotional... >> you want my wife's definition? >> yes. >> it's the mood of the day. >> rose: so why is that? why? >>. >> i'm not the only man in the world who has trouble expression emotion. hopefully i'm not too stone like >> what's the problem with expressing emotion? >> well, you're good at this. but i would say you know the book has really spent... i've spent years on this on the field. it's really made me see it. the things that have been wired in me for whatever reason it's still hard for me to express what i'm feeling. i see it but it's hard for me to come out. and i don't think i'm the only guy on earth with this

particular... the. >> rose: is it some definition of what it is to be tough? >> or just how guys should be. >> rose: how guys should be? >> i think it's more... i do think it's gender, at least in our culture. there's a famous experiment about... one of my favorite experiments done in germany. they had a bunch of people where gauze pads under their arms, watch a horror movie and then watch a comedy. then they got other research subjects-- who i hope were paid a lot-- to sniff the gauze pads. and so everyone can sniff can sort of sniff the fear or the laughter. people way above average can predict who went to what movie but women are much better at this. just more perceptive. i don't know whether that's genes or culture, i don't want to answer that question. >> i think the power to express yourself and have an emotional intelligence serves you well. >> very much so. it helps you learn. so we shouldn't separate squish yee motion from hard. it's all the same.

there's a phrase that a philosopher and educator says you have to do it through art and literature. when you move with a literary character you're experiencing their emotion and if it's powerful it's adding to your internal repertoire. your piece of music will add to your internal repertoire. one of the reasons i cherish springsteen is that he's sort of a manly jersey guy, not like me demographically, but he showed how sort of a working class guy can be emotional in a very honorable way and i think that's a great model. and there are many other models like art and music and things like that. >> rose: the book is called "the social animal" david brooks. captioning sponsored by rose communications

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