Although your brain's factory settings are like Word's out-of-the-box defaults in that "Darwinian algorithms" will automatically execute unless you change them, your brain and Microsoft Word differ in several crucial respects.

The most important difference is that Microsoft actually does a better job, in many cases, of picking the right default settings for Word than your brain does for defining if-then contingencies. For example, Microsoft knows that 12 point fonts and 1" margins are correct for most documents. But your brain often guesses wrong about which if-then rules will produce the best results. Consider what happens when you walk into a business meeting and see two types of food laid out for the participants: fresh cut veggies on one platter and donuts on the other. Your brain's default program is "if presented a choice between two foods, pick the one with the most calories." Evolution etched this "Darwinian algorithm" deep into our brains at a time when our hunter-gatherer ancestors fought a never-ending battle with starvation. So, unless you‘ve worked really hard to toggle off these default desires for calorie-rich food, you'll go for the donuts every time.

Your brain's factory settings are also hidden much better than Microsoft's. With Word or Power Point, all you have to do is click on a pull down menu, find the desired new setting, put your cursor over it and click. But where are the controls for changing the default settings in your brain?

Finally, most of us would never think to look for our brain's factory settings in the first place because we learned in school that, unlike animals, humans have no factory settings (instincts). Humans are unique, so we were taught, because we learn all our behaviors. It's very hard to get rid of something-such as a factory setting-that we don't admit having in the first place!

Taken together, these three differences between software factory settings and your brain's factory settings cause many of modern society's most troubling problems.

Obesity, for example, which results from our brain's default preference for calorie-rich food, has reached epidemic proportions,with the World Health organization estimating that roughly 1 in 6 of the world's 6 billion people are overweight.
And the low success rates of most diets underscores just how hard it can be to find and change the brain's default preferences for rich, sweet foods.

Human violence, whether in the home or between nation states (i.e. wars) is another modern ill with ancient roots. Evolutionary Psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University assert that intra-species violence was probably adaptive (helped our ancestors propagate their genes) in our far distant past. In exploring the evolutionary underpinnings of domestic violence, they wrote:

In addition to the utility of violent prowess in vanquishing enemies and in acquiring food, assaults and threats are effective coercive tactics more generally, whether in the context of helping oneself to another's property, in the pursuit of sexual access
or in any other area in which interests are not consonant.

Wilson and Daly go on to speculate that modern husbands, operating on ancient, Darwinian algorithms, use violence, or the threat of violence, to make sure that their wives do not mate with rival males and propagate someone else's genes at the expense of their own.

As with obesity, changing the default preference (of many humans, especially males) for using violence to solve problems is extraordinarily difficult. Is there even such a thing as a pull down menu for changing the brain's settings for violence, and if so, where is it?

The answer might be found in recent research into a question with a seemingly obvious answer: what is the function of consciousness? I say "seemingly obvious" because our own subjective experience of consciousness-thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, ideas and intentions-suggests an obvious answer: consciousness is the vehicle by which we think, decide and act

This "obvious" explanation would in turn suggest that before a man hits his wife, he consciously decides to use violence as a way of controlling her behavior. Thus the answer to eliminating domestic violence is for men to assert conscious control of their behavior.

But this obvious answer turns out to be wrong. Neuroscientists have discovered that consciousness is more of a reflection of our behavior than a cause of it. For example, Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco discovered that, when he asked test subjects to randomly move their hands, the electrical activity in his subjects' brains, that initiated hand movements, occurred well before subjects were consciously aware they had decided to move.

Similarly, when I worked as a domestic violence counselor at a community mental health center in the 1980's, I noticed surprising consistency in the stories of men who battered their partners. When asked "what was going on in your head before you struck your wife?" almost all of these violent men said something like "Well, it was as if I watched my hand reach out and slap my wife on its own...like I was watching a movie of myself hit her."

In other words, some neural process other than consciousness, that operated much faster than thought, drove behavior both of Libet's lab subjects and my violent patients.

The implication for changing mens' violent behavior is clear: it's not enough to get abusive men to think " I won't hit my wife," because, by the time they have thought this thought, the non-conscious part of their brain that really controls their behavior--a Darwinian algorithm if you will-- would have already decided to strike out.

Put another way, if there is a "pull down menu" in violent men's brains that can be used to change the factory setting for domestic violence, this "menu" is not directly accessible through conscious thought. Rather, to change such a deeply entrenched "automatic" behavior it is necessary to reach deep below the level of consciousness to somehow unconsciously change the problematic factory setting.

The notion of making unconscious changes to unconscious behaviors immediately raises a paradox. How is it possible to change unconscious behaviors if consciousness--the presumed vehicle by which we would try to make these changes--is a useless afterthought of behavior, not an initiator of behavior?

The work of John Bargh, who runs the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion (ACME) Lab at Yale University may supply an answer. Bargh's research indicates the role of human consciousness is not to directly change our behaviors, because conscious processes operate too slowly to compete with much faster, unconscious processes. Rather, Bargh believes that consciousness initiates a multi-step process by which new "slow" behaviors that we want to adopt, get repeated and reinforced enough times  that these behaviors eventually get faster and more automatic, until ultimately, the behaviors occur automatically without any conscious effort.