You can achieve whatever you want, if you just believe it enough! Isn’t that what we always heard growing up?

Let’s assume the above statement holds some truth and that if you believe in something very strongly and that if you focus on specific things, your brain subconsciously picks up all sorts of clues from your surroundings and helps you achieve your goals.

Let’s propose you want to buy a new car. You go to the dealership and you fall in love with a yellow VW Golf, but you don’t have the money right now to buy it, so you leave empty handed and decide to start saving for this super hot yellow Golf. From the moment you leave the shop, all you see is yellow Golfs everywhere. On the parking lots, on the roads, in back yards – everywhere. Why? They weren’t there before!
Yes, they were, you just didn’t notice them. Now that your subconscious helps you focus on them, you notice them everywhere.

In connection to this little trick that our subconscious plays on us, I have been wondering about something.

A lab scientist spends hours, days, weeks, and months reading and studying one very specific topic and looks for a solution to a clearly defined problem. In most cases, the scientist has a clear hypothesis as to what the solution could (should) be and what the results to individual experiments should look like. If this every day routine is not priming a scientists mind to seek the desired solutions, then what is? These thoughts and plans are not the slow beginnings of scientific misconduct – they are every day lab-reality! As a result, many lab scientists become obsessed with the expected outcomes of results. “I am doing this experiment to demonstrate that!” Instead of: “I am doing this experiment to see if my idea is correct.”

If lab scientists are trying so hard to support their starting hypotheses, what kind of tricks is their subconscious playing on them then? Can scientists still carry out valid experiments, or does the subconscious of the scientist make the experiment succeed?

Appear certain aspects of the result data more obvious to the scientist, because the subconsciousness of the scientist is pointing them out? Just like all the yellow Golfs that suddenly appeared! And does the scientist then subconsciously pick selected parts of the data that support their hypothesis and neglect other results?
Unfortunately it is a fact of scientific publishing, that scientists never publish ALL their results, but only the data that supports their story.
I am not suggesting that scientist manipulate their data intentionally! Naturally there are also some individuals in the science community who manipulate their data on purpose, but I am not referring to those cases here.

I am raising the question, whether scientists can control that subconscious desire to find supporting data for their hypotheses?

Regardless of whether the answer to the above question is “Yes” or “No”, there is probably not much scientist can do about it…

…it was just a thought…from the subconscious.