Non-conscious Numbskulls We all know the feeling of mindlessness. You get it when you drive the same roads as usual and get out at the end not remembering anything about the journey, or when you eat a meal without tasting it, or leave a meeting without the faintest idea what just happened. Yet to everyone around us we’ve behaved just the same way we always do. There’s something really odd about this, because it suggests that we don’t need to be conscious of what we’re doing to achieve what we want to do. Whether that’s a good thing or not is debateable, because being mindless with money is likely to cause results that might be best described as “unfortunate”. Mindlessness/Mindfulness The modern idea of mindlessness as a problem in everyday life originated by Ellen Langer, who is one of the more interesting personalities in the psychology community. Langer’s interests bridge the scientific with the esoteric, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense: she believes...