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 theater of consciousness gives you a view of some things in your world and your mind but not others? The theater in your mind doesn’t have seating for more than one, making it difficult to share what’s on your mental screen with your friends, a researcher, or even yourself in precisely the same way a second time. We’ll look first at the difficulty of studying consciousness directly, then examine the nature of consciousness (what it is that can be seen in this mental theater), and finally 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 behaviors, but it has the unique challenge of trying to make sense of subjects. A physicist is 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. Let’s look at two of the more vexing mysteries of consciousness: the problem of other minds and the mind–body problem.

The Problem of Other Minds

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? People tell you that they are conscious, of course, and are often willing to describe in depth how they feel, 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 could 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.

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Even the consciousness meter used by anesthesiologists falls short. It certainly doesn’t 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 color red looks like to you, for instance, you cannot know whether it looks the same to other people, or how 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 don’t know this for a fact, and they can’t 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, chimp, robot, man, and woman, on 18 different mental capacities, such as feeling pain, pleasure, hunger, and consciousness (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). Respondents 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? The researchers found that people judge minds according to two dimensions: 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.

As you’ll remember from the Methods in Psychology 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 aren’t 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 behaviorism, 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.

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The Mind–Body Problem

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.” We now know that the mind and brain are connected everywhere to each other. In other words, “the mind is what the brain does” (Minsky, 1986, p. 287).

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 & Behavior 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 5.2a). As a rule, the brain begins to show electrical activity around half a second before a voluntary action (535 milliseconds, to be exact). This makes sense because brain activity certainly seems to be necessary to get an action started.

But, as shown in FIGURE 5.2b, the brain also started to show electrical activity before the person reported a conscious decision to move. 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).

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How would you describe your own consciousness? Research suggests 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’s examine each of these points in turn.

Four Basic Properties

Researchers have identified four basic properties of consciousness, based on people’s reports of conscious experience.

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Levels of Consciousness

Consciousness can also be understood as having levels. The levels of consciousness are not a matter of degree of overall brain activity, and so they would probably all register as “conscious” on that wakefulness meter for surgery patients you read about at the beginning of the chapter. Instead, the levels of consciousness involve different qualities of awareness of the world and of the self.

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Most animals don’t appear to have self-consciousness. 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 phenomenon, researchers painted an odorless 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, suggesting that it recognized the image as a reflection of itself. A few other animals, such as 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 they don’t seem to know they are looking at themselves. Even humans don’t have self-recognition right away. Infants don’t recognize themselves in mirrors until they’ve 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.

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Conscious Contents

What’s on your mind? For that matter, what’s 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—and that 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 study where 175 college students were asked to report their current concerns (Goetzman, Hughes, & Klinger, 1994). Keep in mind that these concerns are ones the students didn’t mind reporting to psychologists; the private preoccupations of these students may have been different and probably far more interesting.

Although current concerns often dominate our thoughts, we also sometimes experience daydreaming, a state of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind. The brain, however, is active even when there is no specific task at hand. Daydreaming was examined in an fMRI study of people resting in the scanner (Mason et al., 2007). Usually, people in brain-scanning studies don’t 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). This default network became activated whenever people worked on a mental task that they knew so well that they could daydream while doing it (see FIGURE 5.5). 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).

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The current concerns that populate consciousness can sometimes get the upper hand, transforming daydreams or everyday thoughts into rumination and worry. 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? Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (1987) asked research participants to try not to think about a white bear for 5 minutes while they recorded each participant’s thoughts aloud into a tape recorder. In addition, participants 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 didn’t work and instead produced a flurry of returns of the unwanted thought. What’s more, when research participants were later asked to deliberately think about a white bear, they became oddly preoccupied with it. A graph of their bell rings in FIGURE 5.6 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 the act of trying to suppress a thought may itself cause that thought to return to consciousness in a robust way.

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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. 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 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 other mental processes are unconscious, too, in the sense that they occur without our experience of them. For example, think for a moment about the mental processes involved in simple addition. What happens in consciousness between hearing a problem (what’s 4 + 5?) and thinking of the answer (9)? It may feel like nothing happens—the answer just appears in the mind. Nothing conscious seems to bridge the gap; rather, the answer comes from the unconscious mind.

Freudian Unconscious

As you read in the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter, Sigmund 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.

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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 has been created by an intelligent unconscious mind, even though the person consciously disavows the thoughts and memories that caused the errors in the first place. For example, when reporting on the news that members of the U.S. military had killed Osama bin Laden, several reporters and commentators at Fox News, a conservative news outlet, independently reported that Obama bin Laden was dead. Did the Fox News slip mean anything? 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. 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.

A Modern View of the Cognitive Unconscious

Modern psychologists share Freud’s interest in the impact of unconscious mental processes on consciousness and on behavior. 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 behavior (Kihlstrom, 1987; Wilson, 2002). The cognitive unconscious includes all the mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior even though they are not experienced by the person.

One indication of the cognitive unconscious at work is when a person’s thoughts or behaviors are changed by exposure to information outside of consciousness. This happens in subliminal perception, when thought or behavior 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 claimed he had increased concession sales at a movie theater 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 behavior outside of consciousness created a wave of alarm about insidious “subliminal persuasion” that still concerns people (Epley, Savitsky, & Kachelski, 1999; Pratkanis, 1992).

Although the story above was a hoax, factors outside our conscious awareness can indeed influence our behavior. For example, one classic study had college students complete a survey that called for them to make sentences with various words (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). The students were not informed that most of the words were commonly associated with aging (Florida, gray, wrinkled), and even afterward they didn’t report being aware of this trend. In this case, the “aging” idea wasn’t presented subliminally; instead, it was just not very noticeably presented. 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.

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