This is part of the transcript from a high school leadership workshop Dr. Lauber conducted in Indiana, PA in 2011.

What do we learn from trying out the Stroop Task?  Well, we start off by saying that we’re going to learn a new task; we’re going to learn a task we’ve never done before.  But then what developed is we had a second task introduced that’s already automatic – something we already do, and it interfered with the first task.  Correct?  You understand that interpretation?

Now let’s break this down a little bit – that second task – that reading task that interfered with the color-naming task.  First of all, are you born able to read?  No, that’s not a genetic skill that you havt, “Yeah, I just read automatically, I can’t help it.”  It’s something that took years for you to develop – years.

Think back – if you have little siblings – how long it takes them to learn how to read. Hours and hours of intense study:  letters and shapes and sounds and words and spellings, et cetera – hours and hours and hours.  And then at some point, it becomes automatic.  They can read.  You can read.  You now read automatically.

In fact, the department of transportation counts on you reading automatically because they just put signs beside the road.  They’re counting on the fact that you automatically read those signs.  As soon as they get in your field of vision, your mind is going to read them.  It tells you speed limits and things like that.

It’s so automatic that you can’t stop it.  It’s so overlearned that you can’t stop that task from happening.  I give you something to read, you read it.  Anybody sit at breakfast and just read the cereal box?  Yeah? And the milk carton?  I can’t help it.  I’m just sitting there.  I’m not looking at anything.  I’ve got to read the cereal box.  It’s like a compulsion or something.

These are things that we have overlearned, and they become automatic.  Fortunately, reading is usually a good thing  – except when I come up with strange tasks like this Stroop Task, and they suddenly get in the way.  Lots of behaviors that you’re going to have over your life become automatic because they’ll be repeated enough that they’ll be part of your repertoire of behaviors.  They’ll be ingrained – things that you’re going to do all the time.

Has anybody ever driven back and forth the same way, every single day over and over and over and then one day it becomes, “I don’t know how I got here.  I don’t remember getting here, but I got here.”  All of us who are older have had that experience, right?  Absolutely.  I make the commute to work; one day I show up at work and I go, “I don’t remember even getting here. I don’t know how…”  You’re on autopilot.  Your mind said, “This task is so easy for me I don’t have to think about it.”

But wait a minute – I’m not even thinking while I’m driving?  This might be scary for you.  You have to drive, but yeah, driving gets so automatic that you can even navigate and turn and flip on your signal and not hit other cars and not even really be concentrating on your driving.  I don’t want you to do that right now.  Don’t try it.  Keep your music down.  I’ve got a 14, 15 and 16-year-old; I’m giving them lessons right now.  But it will happen to you at some point.