His book, The Hidden Brain, is about how to "take back the controls." Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode - as long as you are aware of when it is on. I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself. Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways." "Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality. In American society, colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. "And it's these hidden associations that essentially determine what happens in the unconscious minds of these children," Vedantam says. He says that for every 50 times a year a teacher talks about tolerance, there are many hundreds of implicit messages of racial bias that children absorb through culture - whether it's television, books or the attitudes of the adults and kids around them. "We tend to think of the conscious messages that we give children as being the most powerful education that we can give them," Vedantam says - but the unconscious messages are actually far more influential.
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