Priming: why your mouth answers before your mind
Hearing S, I, L, K wakes up every word that sounds like silk, so 'milk' jumps out before thinking starts.
Each word you see or hear wakes up its neighbours in memory, before you choose anything.
A fast question grabs the most awake word, not the correct one.
A half-second pause lets the correct answer catch up. That pause is trainable.
Then and now
Priming grew from a lab effect into the System 1 and System 2 account of everyday thinking; the training target today is the deliberate pause.
Meyer, D. E. and Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971)
Where it began“Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations”
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227-234
People recognise a word faster right after a related word: the first word pre-activates the second.
Kahneman, D. (2011)
State of the art“Thinking, Fast and Slow”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (book)
The modern synthesis: fast automatic associations (System 1) supply the first answer; slow deliberate checking (System 2) can overrule it.
What we do and do not claim
Priming is about speed of access, not intelligence. Falling for a prime says nothing about how smart anyone is.