After the boom and bust, the
mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members
didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big
financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in
school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies,
medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them
gradually, like a gentle snow.

You can see a paragon of the
Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or
Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate
board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support
the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a
little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs,
you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t
really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another.
His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like
Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where
they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support
bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between
them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s
high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work
on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on
the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and
forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks
with their bare hands.

A few times a year, members of this class
head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations
tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that
actually closes). Once there, they play with hundred-and-sixty-pound
dogs, for it has become fashionable to have canines a third as tall as
the height of your ceilings. They will reflect on the genetic miracle
they have achieved. (Their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein, but
their granddaughters look like Uma Thurman.) In the evenings, they will
traipse through resort-community pedestrian malls licking interesting
gelatos, while passersby burst into spontaneous applause.

Occasionally,
you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as
he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate
selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by
an anxiety. Many members of this class, like many Americans generally,
have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant
cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of
career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that
matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique
and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important
decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to
despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they
understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement.
Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t
correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding
accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly
understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the
tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read
situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting
relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine
alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are
shallower than they need to be.

Help
comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a
revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists,
neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others
have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human
mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the
rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They
are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings,
predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those
things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps
fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

A
core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of
our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making
sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more
supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a
different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative
importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over
individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness
over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an
inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

To
give a sense of how this inner story goes, let’s consider a young member
of the Composure Class, though of course the lessons apply to members
of all classes. I’ll call him Harold. His inner-mind training began
before birth. Even when he was in the womb, Harold was listening for his
mother’s voice, and being molded by it. French babies cry differently
from babies who’ve heard German in the womb, because they’ve absorbed
French intonations before birth. Fetuses who have been read “The Cat in
the Hat” while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again
after birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.

As a
newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He
gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a
rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic
connections it has). Harold’s mother, in return, read his moods. A
conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell,
rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about eleven months old, his
mother realized that she knew him better than she’d ever known anybody,
even though they’d never exchanged a word.

Harold soon developed
models in his head of how to communicate with people and how to use
others as tools for his own learning. Thanks to his mom’s attunement, he
became confident that if he sent a signal it would be received. Later
in life, his sense of security enabled him to go out and explore the
world. Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment
patterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with
seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who will graduate from high school.
People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends
at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through
life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in others’ eyes. According
to work by Pascal Vrticka, of the University of Geneva, people with
what scientists call “avoidant attachment patterns” show less activation
in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. Men who had
unhappy childhoods are three times as likely to be solitary at age
seventy. Early experiences don’t determine a life, but they set
pathways, which can be changed or reinforced by later experiences.

For
several months when he was four, Harold insisted that he was a tiger
who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede
that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave
and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy
thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the
complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity. As Harold grew, he was
able to use his imagination to blend disparate ideas, in the same sort
of way that Picasso, at the height of his creative powers, could combine
the concept “Western portraiture” with the concept “African masks.”

Throughout
his life, Harold had a superior ability to feel what others were
feeling. He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but,
even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends
with whom; he was aware of social networks. Scientists used to think
that we understand each other by observing each other and building
hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we
are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the
responses we see in them. When Harold was in high school, he could walk
around the cafeteria and fall in with the unique social patterns that
prevailed in each clique. He could tell which clique tolerated drug use
or country-music listening and which didn’t. He could tell how many guys
a girl could hook up with and not be stigmatized. In some groups, the
number was three; in others seven. Most people assume that the groups
they don’t belong to are more homogeneous than the groups they do belong
to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When he sat down with,
say, the Model U.N. kids, he could guess which one of them wanted to
migrate from the Geeks and join the Honors/Athletes. He could sense who
was the leader of any group, who was the jester, who played the role of
peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, or self-effacing audience member.

One
of Harold’s key skills in school was his ability to bond with teachers.
We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them
better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love. In
eleventh grade, Harold developed a crush on his history teacher, Ms.
Taylor. What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much
as the way she thought, the style of learning she fostered. For
instance, Ms. Taylor constantly told the class how little she knew.
Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J.
Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in
order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in
the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent
confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per
cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they
thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact,
eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the
respondents overestimated their success.

Ms. Taylor was always
reminding the class of how limited her grasp of any situation was.
“Sorry, I get distracted easily,” she’d say, or, “Sorry, sometimes I
jump to conclusions too quickly.” In this way, she communicated the
distinction between mental strength (the processing power of the brain)
and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom).
She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information
before making up one’s mind, of calibrating one’s certainty level to the
strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as
an answer became clear, of correcting for one’s biases. As Keith E.
Stanovich, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, writes in his
book “What Intelligence Tests Miss” (2009), these “thinking
dispositions” correlate weakly or not at all with I.Q. But, because Ms.
Taylor put such emphasis on these virtues and because Harold admired her
so much, he absorbed and copied her way of being.

By the time
Harold was in his mid-twenties, he was well on his way toward a happy
and fulfilling life, and the building blocks of his happiness had little
to do with the lines on his résumé. There’s a debate in our culture
about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one
hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a
Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and
adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections. Research over
the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really
wants is connection. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was right. Joining a group
that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as
doubling your income. According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B.
Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with
happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having
dinner with friends. Many of the professions that correlate most closely
with happiness are also social—a corporate manager, a hairdresser.

Young
American men are not exactly famous for being in touch with their
emotions. But Harold sensed that he was a social animal, not a laboring
animal or a rational animal, and one day he went on a blind date with
the woman—let’s call her Erica—who would someday be his wife. Given the
stakes, we might pause over this incident, to show in slightly more
detail how the inner processes of the mind interact with the conscious
ones.

Harold and Erica got their first glimpse
of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as
they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked
what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all
indicative of health and fertility. He enjoyed the smile that spread
across Erica’s face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her
eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis-oculi muscle, which controls this
part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so, when the tip
of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine, not fake.

Erica
was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have
symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than
they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was.
That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on
the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women
faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become
self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather
enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a
man not only for insemination but for continued support. That’s why men
leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have
conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and
ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they
have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero
per cent say yes.

So Erica was subconsciously looking for signs of
trustworthiness. Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman, of York University,
have conducted research suggesting that women are sixty to seventy per
cent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene. In
the previous few years, Erica had used her powers of observation to
discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her
choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because
she couldn’t see herself looking at the same pattern on scarves and
raincoats for the rest of her life. She viewed fragranced men the way
Churchill viewed the Germans—they were either at your feet or at your
throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related
jewelry, because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than
her.

She looked furtively at Harold as he approached. Janine
Willis and Alexander Todorov, of Princeton, have found that we make
judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness,
and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first
glimpses are astonishingly reliable in predicting how people will feel
about each other months later. Erica noticed that Harold was
good-looking but not one of those men who are so good-looking that they
don’t need to be interesting. He was tall, which tends to inspire
confidence; one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to
six thousand dollars of annual salary in contemporary America. Then he
walked up and said hello.

Despite the saying about opposites
attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves.
There’s even some evidence that people tend to pick partners with noses
of similar breadth to their own and eyes about the same distance apart.
At lunch, Harold and Erica quickly discovered that they had a lot in
common. They both affected connoisseurship regarding prosaic things such
as muffins, hamburgers, and iced tea. They both exaggerated their
popularity in high school, and had the same opinions about the
characters in “Mad Men.” People generally overestimate how distinct
their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them a series of
miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny.

The
server came to their table and took their orders. The restaurant seemed
to specialize in hard-to-eat salads. Erica, anticipating this, chose an
appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t
require cutlery expertise. But Harold went for a salad, composed of
splayed green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without
brushing salad dressing on both of his cheeks. None of it mattered,
because Harold and Erica clicked. Most emotional communication is
nonverbal. Gestures are a language that we use not only to express our
feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help
produce an internal state. Harold and Erica licked their lips, leaned
forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of
their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious
choreography that people do while flirting. Erica did the head cant
women do to signal romantic interest, a slight tilt of the head that
exposes the neck. Then, there was the hair flip: she raised her arms to
adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view. She would have been
appalled if she had seen herself in a mirror at that moment.

And
through it all the conversation flowed. You’d think, if you listened to
cultural stereotypes, that women are the more romantic of the sexes. In
fact, there’s evidence that men fall in love faster and are more likely
to believe that true love lasts forever. Though men normally spend twice
as much time talking about themselves as women do, in this conversation
Harold was actually talking about Erica’s problems. Surveys by the
evolutionary psychologist David Buss suggest that, for both men and
women, kindness is one of the most important qualities desired in a
sexual partner. Courtship consists largely of sympathy displays, in
which potential partners try to prove how compassionate they can be, as
anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can attest.

Of
course, there are less noble calculations going on as people choose
their mates. Like veteran stock-market traders, people respond in
predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of the social
marketplace. The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to
mate with. A man’s job status is an outstanding predictor of his wife’s
attractiveness. Without being aware of it, Harold and Erica were doing
these sorts of calculations—weighing earnings-to-looks ratios,
calculating social-capital balances. Every signal suggested that they
had found a match.

“The greatest happiness love can offer is the
first pressure of hands between you and your beloved,” Stendhal
observed. Harold and Erica left the restaurant and walked down the
sidewalk past a high-end stationery store unaware that they were already
doing the lovers’ walk—bodies close to each other, smiles beaming out
at the space in front of them. Harold actually shivered as he escorted
Erica back to her car. He felt that he had been extraordinarily witty
over lunch, encouraged by her flashing eyes.

As Erica and Harold
semi-embraced, they took in each other’s pheromones. Smell is a
surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their
sense of smell eventually suffer greater emotional deterioration than
people who lose their vision. In one experiment conducted at the Monell
Center, in Philadelphia, researchers asked men and women to tape gauze
pads under their arms and then watch either a horror movie or a comedy.
Research subjects, presumably well compensated, then sniffed the pads.
They could somehow tell, at rates higher than chance, which pads had the
smell of laughter and which pads had the smell of fear, and women were
much better at this test than men.

Harold and Erica both sensed
that this had been one of the most important interviews of their lives.
In fact, it turned out to be the most important two hours of their
lives, for there is no decision more important to lifelong happiness
than the decision about whom to marry. During that early afternoon, they
had begun to make a decision. The meal was delightful, but it was also a
rigorous intellectual exam that made the S.A.T. seem like tic-tac-toe.
Both of them had spent a hundred and twenty minutes performing delicate
social tasks. They had demonstrated wit, complaisance, empathy, tact,
and timing. They had measured their emotional responses with
discriminations so fine that no gauge could quantify them. Every few
minutes, each had admitted the other one step closer toward his or her
heart.

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an
alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of
normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense
versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our
existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue.
Living is an inherently emotional business.

Harold and Erica were
never more alive than in the first weeks of being in love. If Harold
was walking down the street alone, he kept thinking that he saw her face
in the crowd. Things that used to bore him he now found charming. When
he was out running, he would concoct elaborate fantasies in which he
heroically saved her from harm. (Something about the act of running, and
the chemicals it releases in the brain, brought out these Walter Mitty
imaginings.) According to research by Faby Gagné, of Yorkville
University, and John Lydon, of McGill, ninety-five per cent of people in
relationships believe that their partner is above average in looks,
intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor. (Other research shows that
people describe former lovers as closed-minded, emotionally unstable,
and generally unpleasant.) Harold now understood why the pagans had
conceived of love as a god. It really felt as if some supernatural
entity had entered his mind, reorganizing everything and lifting him to
some higher realm.

But, in the first few months of their
relationship, Harold and Erica were also engaged, as new couples must
be, in a sort of map-meld. Each of them had come into the relationship
with a mental map of how day-to-day life worked. Once their lives were
permanently joined, they discovered that their maps did not entirely
cohere. It was not the big differences they noticed but the little
patterns of existence that they had never even considered.

Erica
thought that dishes should be rinsed and put in the dishwasher right
after they were used. Harold left them in the sink for the day and then
put all of them in the dishwasher in the evening. For Harold, reading
the morning paper was a solitary activity done in silence by two people
who happened to be sitting together. For Erica, the morning paper was an
occasion for conversation and observations about the state of the
world. When Harold went to the grocery store, he bought meal products—a
package of tortellini, a frozen pizza, a quiche. Erica bought
ingredients—eggs, sugar, flour. Harold was amazed that she could spend
two hundred dollars and there was still nothing for dinner.

Gradually,
they entered the second stage of map-melding: pre-campaign planning. A
house divided against itself cannot stand. Both Harold and Erica
subliminally understood that the quirks that seemed charming and lovable
in the early stages of love—Erica’s tendency to fire up the laptop in
bed at 6 A.M., Harold’s feigned
helplessness in the face of any domestic chore—would eventually cause
the other to harbor homicidal urges. And so they began to make mental
checklists of Things That Would Have to Change. Harold considered
himself a neat man, but neatness consisted of taking things that were
cluttering the countertops and shoving them into the nearest available
drawers. He was apparently smarter than every football coach he had ever
watched, but he lacked the foresight to see why you might not want to
leave your shoes in the path that leads from the bed to the bathroom.

While
they were negotiating these issues, something deeper was going on. It
had to do with the familiar pleasure one feels when the internal
networks of the mind and the outer patterns of reality suddenly match.
Friends who are having a conversation begin to replicate each other’s
vocal patterns. People in conversations begin to mimic the body language
of the other person, and, the more closely they mimic the body
language, the more perceptive they are about the other person’s
emotions. As the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni notes, “vicarious” is not
a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mental processes.
The brain exists within the skull, but the mind extends outward and
arises from the interactions between people or between a person and the
environment.

A year or so after they were
married, Harold and Erica spent a week with Harold’s parents at their
house in Aspen. They went riding and rafting and they attended an ideas
festival. They sat through panel discussions on green technology and on
how to adopt a charter school, and they spent a few hours immersed in
the “China: Friend or Foe?” debate. One morning, they attended a talk by
a neuroscientist. He was a young man in black jeans and a leather
jacket, and he came to the session carrying a motorcycle helmet, as if
he’d just escaped from a Caltech revival of “Grease.” He greeted a
Finnish TV crew that was making a documentary about his work, mounted
the stage, and gave a slide presentation that started with a series of
optical illusions, like two tabletops that seem totally different but
are actually the same size.

Then he displayed a series of
colorful brain-scan pictures and threw out some startling statistics: we
have a hundred billion neurons in the brain; infants create as many as
1.8 million neural connections per second; a mere sixty neurons are
capable of making ten to the eighty-first possible connections, which is
a number ten times as large as the number of particles in the
observable universe; the ability to distinguish between a “P” and a “B”
sound involves as many as twenty-two sites across the brain; even
something as simple as seeing a color in a painting involves a
mind-bogglingly complex set of mental constructions. Our perceptions,
the scientist said, are fantasies we construct that correlate with
reality.

At first, Harold found the talk a little chilling: it
seemed that the revolution the scientist was describing was bound to
lead to cold, mechanistic conclusions. If everything could be reduced to
genes, neural wiring, and brain chemistry, what happened to the major
concepts of life—good and evil, sin and virtue, love and commitment? And
what about the way Harold made sense of his life as he lived it, the
everyday vocabulary of morals, moods, character, aspirations,
temptations, values, ideals? The scientist described human beings as
creatures driven by deep mechanisms, almost like puppets on strings, not
as ensouled human beings capable of running their own lives.

During
the question-and-answer period, though, a woman asked the
neuroscientist how his studies had changed the way he lived. He paused
for a second, and then starting talking about a group he had joined
called the Russian-American Folk Dance Company. It was odd, given how
hard and scientific he had sounded. “I guess I used to think of myself
as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain
alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see
things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a
flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes
from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information
passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information
passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information
offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that
flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and
exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly
molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in
isolation from it.

“And though history has made us self-conscious
in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses
to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the
river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself
in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused
with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you
are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes
one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re
playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some
people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when
we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t
really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of
how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with
other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much
information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

As
the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from riding his
motorcycle in the mountains, Harold was gripped by the thought that,
during his lifetime, the competition to succeed—to get into the right
schools and land the right jobs—had grown stiffer. Society had responded
by becoming more and more focussed. Yet somehow the things that didn’t
lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of
the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been passed
along to him by teachers and parents inadvertently, whereas his official
education was mostly forgotten or useless.

Moreover, Harold had
the sense that he had been trained to react in all sorts of stupid ways.
He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and
rational, and to avoid sentimentality. Yet maybe sentiments were at the
core of everything. He’d been taught to think vertically, moving ever
upward, whereas maybe the most productive connections were horizontal,
with peers. He’d been taught that intelligence was the most important
trait. There weren’t even words for the traits that matter most—having a
sense of the contours of reality, being aware of how things flow,
having the ability to read situations the way a master seaman reads the
rhythm of the ocean. Harold concluded that it might be time for a
revolution in his own consciousness—time to take the proto-conversations
that had been shoved to the periphery of life and put them back in the
center. Maybe it was time to use this science to cultivate an entirely
different viewpoint.

After the lecture, Harold joined his family
and they went downtown to their favorite gelato shop, where Harold had
his life-altering epiphany. He’d spent years struggling to dazzle his
Mandarin tutors while excelling in obscure sports, trying (not too
successfully) to impress admissions officers with S.A.T. prowess and
water-purification work in Zambia, sweating to wow his bosses with not
overlong PowerPoints. But maybe the real action was in this deeper
layer. After all, the conscious mind chooses what we buy, but the
unconscious mind chooses what we like. So resolved, he boldly surveyed
the gelato selections before him and confidently chose the cloudberry. ♦