What does it feel like to be you right now? It probably feels as though you are somewhere inside your head, looking out at the world through your eyes. You can feel your hands on this book, perhaps, and notice the position of your body or the sounds in the room when you orient yourself toward them. If you shut your eyes, you may be able to imagine things in your mind, even though all the while thoughts and feelings come and go, passing through your imagination. But where are “you,” really? And how is it that this theatre of consciousness gives you a view of some things in your world and your mind but not others? The theatre in your mind does not have seating for more than one, making it difficult to share what is on your mental screen with your friends, a researcher, or even yourself in precisely the same way a second time. We will look first at the difficulty of studying consciousness directly, examine the nature of consciousness (what it is that can be seen in this mental theatre), and then explore the unconscious mind (what is not visible to the mind’s eye).

Other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, have the great luxury of studying objects, things that we all can see. Psychology studies objects, too, looking at people and their brains and behaviours, but it has the unique challenge of also trying to make sense of subjects. Physicists are not concerned with what it is like to be a neutron, but psychologists hope to understand what it is like to be a human; that is, they seek to understand the subjective perspectives of the people whom they study. Psychologists hope to include an understanding of phenomenology how things seem to the conscious person, in their understanding of mind and behaviour. After all, consciousness is an extraordinary human property. But including phenomenology in psychology brings up mysteries pondered by great thinkers almost since the beginning of thinking. Let us look at two of the more vexing mysteries of consciousness: the problem of other minds and the mind–body problem.

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One great mystery is called the problem of other minds, the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others. How do you know that anyone else is conscious? They tell you that they are conscious, of course, and are often willing to describe in depth how they feel, how they think, what they are experiencing, and how good or how bad it all is. But perhaps they are just saying these things. There is no clear way to distinguish a conscious person from someone who might do and say all the same things as a conscious person but who is not conscious. Philosophers have called this hypothetical nonconscious person a zombie, in reference to the living-yet-dead creatures of horror films (Chalmers, 1996). A philosopher’s zombie could talk about experiences (“The lights are so bright!”) and even seem to react to them (wincing and turning away) but might not be having any inner experience at all. No one knows whether there could be such a zombie, but then again, because of the problem of other minds, none of us will ever know for sure that another person is not a zombie.

Even the consciousness meter used by anesthesiologists falls short. It certainly does not give the anesthesiologist any special insight into what it is like to be the patient on the operating table; it only predicts whether patients will say they were conscious. We simply lack the ability to directly perceive the consciousness of others. In short, you are the only thing in the universe you will ever truly know what it is like to be.

The problem of other minds also means there is no way you can tell if another person’s experience of anything is at all like yours. Although you know what the colour red looks like to you, for instance, you cannot know whether it looks the same to other people. Maybe they are seeing what you see as blue and just calling it red in a consistent way. If their inner experience “looks” blue, but they say it looks hot and is the colour of a tomato, you will never be able to tell that their experience differs from yours. Of course, most people have come to trust each other in describing their inner lives, reaching the general assumption that other human minds are pretty much like their own. But they do not know this for a fact, and they cannot know it directly.

How do people perceive other minds? Researchers conducting a large online survey asked people to compare the minds of 13 different targets, such as a baby, a chimp, a robot, a man, and a woman, on 18 different mental capacities, such as feeling pain, pleasure, hunger, and consciousness (see FIGURE 5.1) (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). Respondents who were judging the mental capacity to feel pain, for example, compared pairs of targets: Is a frog or a dog more able to feel pain? Is a baby or a robot more able to feel pain? When the researchers examined all the comparisons on the different mental capacities with the computational technique of factor analysis (see the Intelligence chapter), they found that people judge minds according to two main capacities: the capacity for experience (such as the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger, consciousness, anger, or fear) and the capacity for agency (such as the ability for self-control, planning, memory, or thought). As shown in Figure 5.1, respondents rated some targets as having little experience or agency (the dead woman), others as having experiences but little agency (the baby), and yet others as having both experience and agency (adult humans). Still others were perceived to have agency without experiences (the robot, God). The perception of minds, then, involves more than just whether something has a mind. People appreciate that minds both have experiences and lead us to perform actions.

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Ultimately, the problem of other minds is a problem for psychological science. As you will remember from the Methods chapter, the scientific method requires that any observation made by one scientist should, in principle, be available for observation by any other scientist. But if other minds are not observable, how can consciousness be a topic of scientific study? One radical solution is to eliminate consciousness from psychology entirely and follow the other sciences into total objectivity by renouncing the study of anything mental. This was the solution offered by behaviourism, and it turned out to have its own shortcomings, as you saw in the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter. Despite the problem of other minds, modern psychology has embraced the study of consciousness. The astonishing richness of mental life simply cannot be ignored.

Another mystery of consciousness is the mind-body problem, the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body. French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) is famous for proposing, among other things, that the human body is a machine made of physical matter but that the human mind or soul is a separate entity made of a “thinking substance.” He suggested that the mind has its effects on the brain and body through the pineal gland, a small structure located near the centre of the brain (see FIGURE 5.2). In fact, the pineal gland is not even a nerve structure but is rather an endocrine gland, and so is poorly equipped to serve as a centre of human consciousness. We now know that, far from the tiny connection between mind and brain in the pineal gland that was proposed by Descartes, the mind and brain are connected everywhere to each other. In other words, “the mind is what the brain does” (Minsky, 1986, p. 287).

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But Descartes was right in pointing out the difficulty of reconciling the physical body with the mind. Most psychologists assume that mental events are intimately tied to brain events, such that every thought, perception, or feeling is associated with a particular pattern of activation of neurons in the brain (see the Neuroscience and Behaviour chapter). Thinking about a particular person, for instance, occurs with a unique array of neural connections and activations. If the neurons repeat that pattern, then you must be thinking of the same person; conversely, if you think of the person, the brain activity occurs in that pattern.

One telling set of studies, however, suggests that the brain’s activities precede the activities of the conscious mind. The electrical activity in the brains of volunteers was measured using sensors placed on their scalps as they repeatedly decided when to move a hand (Libet, 1985). Participants were also asked to indicate exactly when they consciously chose to move by reporting the position of a dot moving rapidly around the face of a clock just at the point of the decision (FIGURE 5.3a). As a rule, the brain begins to show electrical activity around half a second before a voluntary action (535 milliseconds [ms], to be exact). This makes sense because brain activity certainly seems to be necessary to get an action started.

What this experiment revealed, though, was that the brain also started to show electrical activity before the person’s conscious decision to move. As shown in FIGURE 5.3b, these studies found that the brain becomes active more than 300 ms before participants report that they are consciously trying to move. The feeling that you are consciously willing your actions, it seems, may be a result rather than a cause of your brain activity. Although your personal intuition is that you think of an action and then do it, these experiments suggest that your brain is getting started before either the thinking or the doing, preparing the way for both thought and action. Quite simply, it may appear to us that our minds are leading our brains and bodies, but the order of events may be the other way around (Haggard & Tsakiris, 2009; Wegner, 2002).

Consciousness has its mysteries, but psychologists like a challenge. Although researchers may not be able to know exactly how consciousness arises from the brain, this does not prevent them from collecting people’s reports of conscious experiences and learning how these reports reveal the nature of consciousness.

How would you describe your own consciousness? Researchers examining people’s descriptions suggest that consciousness has four basic properties (intentionality, unity, selectivity, and transience), that it occurs on different levels, and that it includes a range of different contents. Let us examine each of these points in turn.

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The first property of consciousness is intentionality, the quality of being directed toward an object. Consciousness is always about something. Psychologists have tried to measure the relationship between consciousness and its objects, examining the size and duration of the relationship. How long can consciousness be directed toward an object, and how many objects can it take on at one time? Researchers have found that conscious attention is limited. Despite all the lush detail you see in your mind’s eye, the kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and feelings and thoughts, the object of your consciousness at any one moment is just a small part of all of this (see FIGURE 5.4). To describe how this limitation works, psychologists refer to three other properties of consciousness: unity, selectivity, and transience.

The second basic property of consciousness is unity, which is the ability to integrate information from all of the body’s senses into one coherent whole. As you read this book, your five senses are taking in a great deal of information. Your eyes are scanning lots of black squiggles on a page (or screen) while also sensing an enormous array of shapes, colours, depths, and textures in your periphery; your hands are gripping a heavy book (or computer); your butt and feet may sense pressure from gravity pulling you against a chair or floor; and you may be listening to music or talking in another room, while smelling the odour of freshly made popcorn (or your roommate’s dirty laundry). Although your body is constantly sensing an enormous amount of information from the world around you, your brain—amazingly—integrates all of this information into the experience of one unified consciousness (or two in the case of the split-brain patients described in the Neuroscience and Behaviour chapter).

The third property of consciousness is selectivity, the capacity to include some objects but not others. While binding the many sensations around you into a coherent whole, your mind must make decisions about which pieces of information to include, and which to exclude. Inattentional blindness, which you learned about in the Sensation and Perception chapter, is an example of selectivity. Selectivity is also shown through studies of dichotic listening, in which people wearing headphones hear different messages in each ear. Research participants were instructed to repeat aloud the words they heard in one ear while a different message was presented to the other ear (Cherry, 1953). As a result of focusing on the words they were supposed to repeat, participants noticed little of the second message, often not even realizing that at some point it changed from English to German! So, consciousness filters out some information. At the same time, participants did notice when the voice in the unattended ear changed from a man’s to a woman’s. Participants in another study were especially likely to notice if their own name was spoken into the unattended ear (Moray, 1959). This suggests that the selectivity of consciousness can also work to tune in other information. Perhaps you, too, have noticed how abruptly your attention is diverted from whatever conversation you are having when someone else within earshot at a party mentions your name. Selectivity is not only a property of waking consciousness: the mind works this way in other states. People are more sensitive to their own name than others’ names, for example, even during sleep (Oswald, Taylor, & Triesman, 1960). This is why, when you are trying to wake someone, it is best to say the person’s name.

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The fourth and final basic property of consciousness is transience, or the tendency to change. Consciousness wiggles and fidgets like a toddler in the seat behind you on an airplane. The mind wanders not just sometimes, but incessantly, from one “right now” to the next “right now” and then on to the next (Wegner, 1997). William James, whom you met way back in the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter, famously described consciousness as a stream: “Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it. … It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 239). Books written in the “stream of consciousness” style, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, illustrate the whirling, chaotic, and constantly changing flow of consciousness. Here is an excerpt with Molly Bloom speaking:

I wished I could have picked every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty and browned and as tender as anything only for I did not want to eat everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be noticed the way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I do not know what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think did not he say yes and half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them that Andalusian singing her Manola she did not make much secret of what she hadnt yes and the second pair of silkette stockings is laddered after one days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this morning and kicked up a row and made that one change them only not to upset myself and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole thing and one of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have but thats no good what did they say they give a delightful figure line 11/6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to reduce flesh my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it… (1922/2013, p. 625).

The stream of consciousness may flow in this way partly because of the limited capacity of the conscious mind. We humans can hold only so much information in mind, after all, so when more information is selected, some of what is currently there must disappear. As a result, our focus of attention keeps changing. The stream of consciousness flows so inevitably that it even changes our perspective when we view a constant object like a Necker cube (see FIGURE 5.5).

Consciousness can also be understood as having levels, ranging from minimal consciousness to full consciousness to self-consciousness. These levels of consciousness would probably all register as “conscious” on that wakefulness meter for surgery patients you read about at the beginning of the chapter. The levels of consciousness that psychologists distinguish involve different qualities of awareness of the world and of the self.

In its minimal form, consciousness is just a connection between the person and the world. When you sense the sun coming in through the window, for example, you might turn toward the light. Such minimal consciousness is a low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behaviour (Armstrong, 1980). This kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness could even happen when someone pokes you during sleep and you turn over. Something seems to register in your mind, at least in the sense that you experience it, but you may not think at all about having had the experience. It could be that animals or, for that matter, even plants can have this minimal level of consciousness. But because of the problem of other minds and the notorious reluctance of animals and plants to talk to us, we cannot know for sure that they experience the things that make them respond. At least in the case of humans, we can safely assume that there is something it “feels like” to be them and that when they are awake, they are at least minimally conscious.

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Human consciousness is often more than minimal, of course, but what exactly gets added? Consider the glorious feeling of waking up on a spring morning as rays of sun stream across your pillow. It is not just that you are having this experience: Being fully conscious means that you are also aware that you are having this experience. The critical ingredient that accompanies full consciousness is that you know and are able to report your mental state. That is a subtle distinction: Being fully conscious means that you are aware of having a mental state while you are experiencing the mental state itself. When you have a hurt leg and mindlessly rub it, for instance, your pain may be minimally conscious. After all, you seem to be experiencing pain because you have acted and are indeed rubbing your leg. It is only when you realize that it hurts, though, that the pain becomes fully conscious. Have you ever been driving a car and suddenly realized that you do not remember the past 15 minutes of driving? Chances are that you were not unconscious, but instead minimally conscious. When you are completely aware and thinking about your driving, you have moved into the realm of full consciousness. Full consciousness involves not only thinking about things but also thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things (Jaynes, 1976).

Full consciousness involves a certain consciousness of oneself; the person notices the self in a particular mental state (“Here I am, reading this sentence.”). However, this is not quite the same thing as self-consciousness. Sometimes consciousness is entirely flooded with the self (“Not only am I reading this sentence, but I have a blemish on the end of my nose today that makes me feel like guiding a sleigh.”). Self-consciousness focuses on the self to the exclusion of almost everything else. William James (1890) and other theorists have suggested that self-consciousness is yet another distinct level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object (Morin, 2006). Most people report experiencing such self-consciousness when they are embarrassed; when they find themselves the focus of attention in a group; when someone focuses a camera on them; or when they are deeply introspective about their thoughts, feelings, or personal qualities.

Self-consciousness brings with it a tendency to evaluate yourself and notice your shortcomings. Looking in a mirror, for example, is all it takes to make people evaluate themselves—thinking not just about their appearance, but also about whether they are good or bad in other ways. People go out of their way to avoid mirrors when they have done something they are ashamed of (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). Self-consciousness can certainly spoil a good mood, so much so that a tendency to be chronically self-conscious is associated with depression (Pyszczynski, Holt, & Greenberg, 1987). However, because it makes people self-critical, the self-consciousness that results when people see their own mirror images can make them briefly more helpful, more cooperative, and less aggressive (Gibbons, 1990). Perhaps everyone would be a bit more civilized if mirrors were held up for them to see themselves as objects of their own scrutiny.

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Most animals cannot follow this path to civilization. The typical dog, cat, or bird seems mystified by a mirror, ignoring it or acting as though there is some other critter back there. However, chimpanzees that have spent time with mirrors sometimes behave in ways that suggest they recognize themselves in a mirror. To examine this, researchers painted an odourless red dye over the eyebrow of an anesthetized chimp and then watched when the awakened chimp was presented with a mirror (Gallup, 1977). If the chimp interpreted the mirror image as a representation of some other chimp with an unusual approach to cosmetics, we would expect it just to look at the mirror or perhaps to reach toward it. But the chimp reached toward its own eye as it looked into the mirror—not the mirror image—suggesting that it recognized the image as a reflection of itself.

Versions of this experiment have now been repeated with many different animals, and it turns out that, like humans, animals such as chimpanzees and orangutans (Gallup, 1997), possibly dolphins (Reiss & Marino, 2001), and maybe even elephants (Plotnik, de Waal, & Reiss, 2006) and magpies (Prior, Schwartz, & Güntürkün, 2008) recognize their own mirror images. Dogs, cats, crows, monkeys, and gorillas have been tested, too, but do not seem to know they are looking at themselves. Even humans do not have self-recognition right away. Infants do not recognize themselves in mirrors until they have reached about 18 months of age (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). The experience of self-consciousness, as measured by self-recognition in mirrors, is limited to a few animals and to humans only after a certain stage of development.

What is on your mind? For that matter, what is on everybody’s mind? One way to learn what is on people’s minds is to ask them, and much research has called on people simply to think aloud. A more systematic approach is the experience-sampling technique, in which people are asked to report their conscious experiences at particular times. Equipped with electronic beepers or called on cell phones, for example, participants are asked to record their current thoughts when asked at random times throughout the day (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003).

Experience-sampling studies show that consciousness is dominated by the immediate environment—what is seen, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled—all are at the forefront of the mind. Much of consciousness beyond this orientation to the environment turns to the person’s current concerns, or what the person is thinking about repeatedly (Klinger, 1975). TABLE 5.1 shows the results of a Minnesota study where 175 undergraduate students were asked to report their current concerns (Goetzman, Hughes, & Klinger, 1994). The researchers sorted the concerns into the categories shown in the table. Keep in mind that these concerns are ones the students did not mind reporting to psychologists; their private preoccupations may have been different and probably far more interesting.

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Think for a moment about your own current concerns. What topics have been on your mind the most in the past day or two? Your mental “to do” list may include things you want to get, keep, avoid, work on, remember, and so on (Little, 1993). Items on the list often pop into mind, sometimes even with an emotional punch (“The test in this class is tomorrow!”). People in one study had their skin conductance level (SCL) measured to assess their emotional responses (Nikula, Klinger, & Larson-Gutman, 1993). SCL sensors attached to their fingers indicated when sweat appeared on their skin—a good indication that they were thinking about something distressing. Once in a while, SCL would rise spontaneously, and at these times the researchers quizzed the participants about their conscious thoughts. These emotional moments, compared to those when SCL was normal, often corresponded with a current concern popping into mind. Thoughts that are not emotional all by themselves can still come to mind with an emotional bang when they are topics of current concern.

We discussed thinking about our current concerns before, but what is our subjective experience when actually carrying out the events of our daily lives? We are, of course, each engaged in our daily lives, but rarely examine what our moment-by-moment experiences are like, or make cross-experience comparisons. Researchers are now using experience-sampling methods to record the emotions people experience during everyday activities with interesting results. One recent study collected data from over 900 working women by asking them to reflect on the events of the past day and record how they felt while engaging in each activity (Kahneman et al., 2004). Some of the results are as expected. For instance, as shown in TABLE 5.2, people score lowest on positive affect when commuting, working, and doing housework, and unfortunately this is how we spend a large part of our day. The women in this study reported having the most positive affect while being intimate with another person, although they only did this for 12 minutes of the day. Some less intuitive findings are the activities that fell in between the two. In survey studies parents often report that they are happiest when spending time with their children but, when asked about actual events of the prior day, being with their children ranked just two ticks above housework and well below other activities like shopping, watching TV, and making more children.

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Current concerns do not seem all that concerning, however, during daydreaming, a state of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind. When thoughts drift along this way, it may seem as if you are just wasting time. The brain, however, is active even when there is no specific task at hand. This mental work done in daydreaming was examined in an fMRI study of people resting in the scanner (Mason et al., 2007). Usually, people in brain scanning studies do not have time to daydream much because they are kept busy with mental tasks—scans cost money and researchers want to get as much data as possible for their bucks. But when people are not busy, they still show a widespread pattern of activation in many areas of the brain—now known as the default network (Gusnard & Raichle, 2001). The study by Mason and her colleagues revealed that this network became activated whenever people worked on a mental task that they knew so well that they could daydream while doing it (see FIGURE 5.6). The areas of the default network are known to be involved in thinking about social life, about the self, and about the past and future—all the usual haunts of the daydreaming mind (Mitchell, 2006).

The current concerns that populate consciousness can sometimes get the upper hand, transforming daydreams or everyday thoughts into rumination and worry. Thoughts that return again and again, or problem-solving attempts that never seem to succeed, can come to dominate consciousness. When this happens, people may exert mental control, the attempt to change conscious states of mind. For example, someone troubled by a recurring worry about the future (“What if I can’t get a decent job when I graduate?”) might choose to try not to think about this because it causes too much anxiety and uncertainty. Whenever this thought comes to mind, the person engages in thought suppression, the conscious avoidance of a thought. This may seem like a perfectly sensible strategy because it eliminates the worry and allows the person to move on to think about something else.

Or does it? The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1863/1988, p. 49), remarked on the difficulty of thought suppression: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Inspired by this observation, Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (1987) gave people this exact task in the laboratory. Participants were asked to try not to think about a white bear for 5 minutes while they recorded all their thoughts aloud into a tape recorder. In addition, they were asked to ring a bell if the thought of a white bear came to mind. On average, they mentioned the white bear or rang the bell (indicating the thought) more than once per minute. Thought suppression simply did not work and instead produced a flurry of returns of the unwanted thought. What is more, when some research participants later were specifically asked to change tasks and deliberately think about a white bear, they became oddly preoccupied with it. A graph of their bell rings in FIGURE 5.7 shows that these participants had the white bear come to mind far more often than did people who had only been asked to think about the bear from the outset, with no prior suppression. This rebound effect of thought suppression, the tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression, suggests that attempts at mental control may be difficult indeed. The act of trying to suppress a thought may itself cause that thought to return to consciousness in a robust way.

Similar to thought suppression, other attempts to steer consciousness in any direction can result in mental states that are precisely the opposite of those desired. How ironic: Trying to consciously achieve one task may produce precisely the opposite outcome! These ironic effects seem most likely to occur when the person is distracted or under stress. People who are distracted while they are trying to get into a good mood, for example, tend to become sad (Wegner, Erber, & Zanakos, 1993), and those who are distracted while trying to relax actually become more anxious than those who are not trying to relax (Wegner, Broome, & Blumberg, 1997). Likewise, an attempt not to overshoot a golf putt, undertaken during distraction, often yields the unwanted overshot (Wegner, Ansfield, & Pilloff, 1998). The theory of ironic processes of mental control proposes that such ironic errors occur because the mental process that monitors errors can itself produce them (Wegner, 1994a, 2009). In the attempt not to think of a white bear, for instance, a small part of the mind is ironically searching for the white bear.

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This ironic monitoring process is not present in consciousness. After all, trying not to think of something would be useless if monitoring the progress of suppression required keeping that target in consciousness. For example, if trying not to think of a white bear meant that you consciously kept repeating to yourself, “No white bear! No white bear!” then you have failed before you have begun: That thought is present in consciousness even as you strive to eliminate it. Rather, the ironic monitor is a process of the mind that works outside of consciousness, making us sensitive to all the things we do not want to think, feel, or do so that we can notice and consciously take steps to regain control if these things come back to mind. As this unconscious monitoring whirs along in the background, it unfortunately increases the person’s sensitivity to the very thought that is unwanted. Ironic processes are mental functions that are needed for effective mental control—they help in the process of banishing a thought from consciousness—but they can sometimes yield the very failure they seem designed to overcome. Ironic effects of mental control arise from processes that work outside of consciousness, so they remind us that much of the mind’s machinery may be hidden from our view, lying outside the fringes of our experience.

Many mental processes are unconscious, in the sense that they occur without our experience of them. When we speak, for instance, “We are not really conscious either of the search for words, or of putting the words together into phrases, or of putting the phrases into sentences. … The actual process of thinking … is not conscious at all … only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 41). Just to put the role of consciousness in perspective, think for a moment about the mental processes involved in simple addition. What happens in consciousness between hearing a problem (what is four plus five?) and thinking of the answer (nine)? Probably nothing—the answer just appears in the mind. But this is a piece of calculation that must take at least a bit of thinking. After all, at a very young age you may have had to solve such problems by counting on your fingers. Now that you do not have to do that anymore (please tell me you do not have to do that anymore), the answer seems to pop into your head automatically, by virtue of a process that does not require you to be aware of any underlying steps and, for that matter, does not even allow you to be aware of the steps. The answer just suddenly appears.

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In the early part of the twentieth century, when structuralist psychologists, such as Edward Titchener, believed that introspection was the best method of research (see the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter), research volunteers trained in describing their thoughts tried to discern what happens when a simple problem brings to mind a simple answer (e.g., Watt, 1905). They drew the same blank you probably did. Nothing conscious seems to bridge this gap, but the answer comes from somewhere, and this emptiness points to the unconscious mind. To explore these hidden recesses, we can look at the classical theory of the unconscious introduced by Sigmund Freud and then at the modern cognitive psychology of unconscious mental processes.

The true champion of the unconscious mind was Sigmund Freud. As you read in the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory viewed conscious thought as the surface of a much deeper mind made up of unconscious processes. Far more than just a collection of hidden processes, Freud described a dynamic unconscious—an active system encompassing a lifetime of hidden memories, the person’s deepest instincts and desires, and the person’s inner struggle to control these forces. The dynamic unconscious might contain hidden sexual thoughts about one’s parents, for example, or destructive urges aimed at a helpless infant—the kinds of thoughts people keep secret from others and may not even acknowledge to themselves. According to Freud’s theory, the unconscious is a force to be held in check by repression, a mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps them in the unconscious. Without repression, a person might think, do, or say every unconscious impulse or animal urge, no matter how selfish or immoral. With repression, these desires are held in the recesses of the dynamic unconscious.

Freud looked for evidence of the unconscious mind in speech errors and lapses of consciousness, or what are commonly called Freudian slips. Forgetting the name of someone you dislike, for example, is a slip that seems to have special meaning. Freud believed that errors are not random and instead have some surplus meaning that may appear to have been created by an intelligent unconscious mind, even though the person consciously disavows them. For example, when reporting on the news that members of the United States military had killed Osama bin Laden, several reporters and commentators at Fox News, a conservative American news outlet, independently reported that Obama bin Laden was dead. This slip even appeared as a printed announcement on one of its news shows.

Did the Fox News slip mean anything? One experiment revealed that slips of speech can indeed be prompted by a person’s pressing concerns (Motley & Baars, 1979). Research participants in one group were told they might receive minor electric shocks, whereas those in another group heard no mention of this. Each person was then asked to read quickly through a series of word pairs, including shad bock. Those in the group warned about shock more often slipped in pronouncing this pair, blurting out bad shock.

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Unlike errors created in experiments such as this one, many of the meaningful errors Freud attributed to the dynamic unconscious were not predicted in advance and so seem to depend on clever after-the-fact interpretations. Such interpretations can be wrong. Suggesting a pattern to a series of random events is not the same as scientifically predicting and explaining when and why an event should happen. Anyone can offer a reasonable, compelling explanation for an event after it has already happened, but the true work of science is to offer testable hypotheses that are evaluated based on reliable evidence. Freud’s (1901/1938) book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, suggests not so much that the dynamic unconscious produces errors but that Freud himself was a master at finding meaning in errors that might otherwise have seemed random.

Modern psychologists share Freud’s interest in the impact of unconscious mental processes on consciousness and on behaviour. However, rather than Freud’s vision of the unconscious as a teeming menagerie of animal urges and repressed thoughts, the current study of the unconscious mind views it as the factory that builds the products of conscious thought and behaviour (Kihlstrom, 1987; Wilson, 2002). The cognitive unconscious includes all the mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behaviour even though they are not experienced by the person.

One indication of the cognitive unconscious at work is when a person’s thoughts or behaviours are changed by exposure to information outside of consciousness. This happens in subliminal perception, when thought or behaviour is influenced by stimuli that a person cannot consciously report perceiving. Worries about the potential of subliminal influence were first provoked in 1957, when a marketer, James Vicary, claimed he had increased concession sales at a New Jersey theatre by flashing the words “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” briefly on-screen during movies. It turns out his story was a hoax, and many attempts to increase sales using similar methods have failed. But the very idea of influencing behaviour outside of consciousness created a wave of alarm about insidious “subliminal persuasion” that still concerns people today (Epley, Savitsky, & Kachelski, 1999; Pratkanis, 1992).

Although the story above was a hoax, factors outside our conscious awareness can indeed influence our behaviour. For example, one classic study reported that exposure to information about getting old can make a person walk more slowly. John Bargh and his colleagues had undergraduate students complete a survey that called for them to make sentences with various words (1996). The students were not informed that most of the words were commonly associated with aging (Florida, grey, wrinkled), and even afterward they did not report being aware of this trend. In this case, the “aging” idea was not presented subliminally, just not very noticeably. As these research participants left the experiment, they were clocked as they walked down the hall. Compared with those not exposed to the aging-related words, the participants walked more slowly! Just as with subliminal perception, a passing exposure to ideas can influence actions without conscious awareness.

The unconscious mind can be a kind of “mental butler,” taking over background tasks that are too tedious, subtle, or bothersome for consciousness to trifle with (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh & Morsella, 2008; Bower, 1999). Psychologists have long debated just how smart this mental butler might be. Freud attributed great intelligence to the unconscious, believing that it harbours complex motives and inner conflicts and that it expresses these in an astonishing array of thoughts and emotions, as well as psychological disorders (see the Psychological Disorders chapter). Contemporary cognitive psychologists wonder whether the unconscious is so smart, however, and point out that some unconscious processes even seem downright “dumb” (Loftus & Klinger, 1992). For example, the unconscious processes that underlie the perception of subliminal visual stimuli do not seem able to understand the combined meaning of word pairs, although they can understand single words. To the conscious mind, for example, a word pair such as enemy loses is somewhat positive—it is good to have your enemy lose. However, subliminal presentations of this word pair make people think of negative things, as though the unconscious mind is simply adding together the unpleasantness of the single words enemy and loses (Greenwald, 1992). Perhaps the mental butler is not all that bright.

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In some cases, however, the unconscious mind can make better decisions than the conscious mind. Participants in an experiment were asked to choose which of three hypothetical people with many different qualities they would prefer to have as a roommate (Dijksterhuis, 2004). One candidate was objectively better, with more positive qualities, and participants who were given 4 minutes to make a conscious decision tended to choose that one. A second group was asked for an immediate decision as soon as the information display was over, and a third group was encouraged to reach an unconscious decision. This group was also given 4 minutes after the display ended to give their answer (as the conscious group had been given), but during this interval their conscious minds were occupied with solving a set of anagrams. As you can see in FIGURE 5.8, the unconscious decision group showed a stronger preference for the good roommate than did the immediate decision or conscious decision groups. Unconscious minds seemed better able than conscious minds to sort out the complex information and arrive at the best choice. You can sometimes end up more satisfied with decisions you make going with your gut than with the decisions you consciously agonize over.

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