Let’s not reject new learnings about human behaviour

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• A paper titled ‘The Nervous System in the Context of Information Theory’ by M. Zimmerman went few steps further. He pointed out that of the human brain’s 16 million bits of processing capacity, only 77 bits work at a conscious level. More than 99.99% of brain processes, according to the paper, occur at a non-conscious level, and so consciousness has a very small role to play in human decision making.

• While human consciousness deals with a tiny proportion of all incoming stimuli, the rest is processed at the non-conscious level, which is more than 200,000 times the capacity of the conscious.

• Many interesting results from recent studies of the brain’s non-conscious processes have emerged from the field of sports. Neuroscientists have figured out that decisions, whether it’s while playing cricket, baseball or tennis, are made in a matter of milliseconds, and thus below our thresholds of consciousness.

• " New knowledge about human behaviour is not just an incremental change to our existing knowledge base. It is a paradigm shift. So ideally, all our existing research methodologies must change. Our existing communication strategies have to change, and not just incrementally, but fundamentally.

• Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science who spawned the trendy term ‘paradigm’, reminds us that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." This is just a reminder how difficult it is to get people to accept new knowledge, even if it is a well-established biological reality.