5.1 Conscious and Unconscious: The Mind’s Eye, Open and Closed

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).

The Mysteries of Consciousness

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.

phenomenology

How things seem to the conscious person.

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.

problem of other minds

The fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others.

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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.

Luckily these zombies have the standard zombie look. But how do you know those around you are really conscious the same way that you are?
Renee Keith/Getty Images

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.

How does the capacity for experience differ from the capacity for agency?

Figure 5.1: FIGURE 5.1 Dimensions of Mind Perception When participants judged the mental capacities of 13 targets, two dimensions of mind perception were discovered (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). Participants perceived minds as varying in the capacity for experience (such as abilities to feel pain or pleasure) and in the capacity for agency (such as abilities to plan or exert self-control). They perceived normal adult humans (male, female, or “you,” the respondent) to have minds on both dimensions, whereas other targets were perceived to have reduced experience or agency. The man in a persistent vegetative state (“PVS man”), for example, was judged to have only some experience and very little agency. (Information from Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007.)

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).

mind–body problem

The issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body.

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.

Figure 5.2: FIGURE 5.2 The Timing of Conscious Will (a) Participants were asked to move fingers at will while watching a dot move around the face of a clock to mark the moment at which the action was consciously willed. Meanwhile, EEG sensors timed the onset of brain activation and EMG sensors timed the muscle movement. (b) The experiment showed that brain activity (EEG) precedes the movement of the finger (EMG), but that the reported time of consciously willing the finger to move follows the brain activity. (Information from Libet, 1985.)

What comes first: brain activity or thinking?

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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The Nature of Consciousness

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.

  1. Consciousness has intentionality, which is the quality of being directed toward an object. Consciousness is always about something. 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 5.3).
  2. Consciousness has unity, which is resistance to division. 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, colors, 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 odor of your roommate’s dirty laundry. Your brain—amazingly—integrates all of this information into the experience of one unified consciousness.
  3. Consciousness has 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. For example, in what has come to be known as the cocktail-party phenomenon, people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby. In dichotic listening situation tests, in which people wearing headphones hear different messages in each ear, participants directed to pay attention to messages in one ear are especially likely to notice if their own name is spoken into the unattended ear (Moray, 1959). Perhaps you, too, have noticed how abruptly your attention is diverted from whatever conversation you are having when someone else within earshot at the party mentions your name.

    What are the properties of consciousness that are involved in integrating lots of information and filtering some out?

  4. Consciousness has transience, or the tendency to change. 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” (James, 1890). 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 our minds at any one moment, 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 5.4).

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Figure 5.3: FIGURE 5.3 Bellotto’s Dresden and Close-up (left) The people on the bridge in the distance look very finely detailed in View of Dresden with the Frauenkirche by Bernardo Bellotto (1720–1780). However, when you examine the detail closely (right), you discover that the people are made of brushstrokes merely suggesting people. Consciousness produces a similar impression of “filling in,” as it seems to consist of extreme detail even in areas that are peripheral (Dennett, 1991).
North Carolina Museum of Art/Corbis

cocktail-party phenomenon

A phenomenon in which people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby.

dichotic listening

A task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear.

Participants in a dichotic listening experiment hear different messages played to the right and left ears.
Image Source Plus/Alamy
Figure 5.4: FIGURE 5.4 The Necker Cube This cube has the property of reversible perspective in that you can bring one or the other of its two square faces to the front in your mind’s eye. Although it may take a while to reverse the figure at first, once people have learned to do it, they can reverse it regularly, about once every 3 seconds (Gomez et al., 1995). The stream of consciousness flows even when the target is a constant object.

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.

  1. Minimal consciousness is a low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior (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 can’t know for sure that they experience the things that make them respond.

    What aspect of full consciousness distinguishes it from minimal consciousness?

  2. Full consciousness occurs when you know and are able to report your mental state. 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. It is only when you realize that your leg hurts, though, that the pain becomes fully conscious. Have you ever been driving a car and suddenly realized that you don’t remember the past 15 minutes of driving? Chances are that you were not unconscious but were 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; see the Hot Science box).

    When do people go out of their way to avoid mirrors?

  3. 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. Looking in a mirror, for example, is all it takes to make people evaluate themselves—thinking not just about their looks, but also about whether they are good or bad in other ways. People go out of their way to avoid mirrors when they’ve done something they are ashamed of (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). 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).

self-consciousness

A distinct level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object.

minimal consciousness

A low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior.

full consciousness

Consciousness in which you know and are able to report your mental state.

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Hot Science: The Mind Wanders

The Mind Wanders

Yes, the mind wanders. You’ve no doubt had experiences of reading and suddenly realizing that you have not even been processing what you’ve read. Even while your eyes are dutifully following the lines of print, at some point, you begin to think about something else—and only later catch yourself having wandered, perhaps thinking, “Where was I?” Or, “Why did I come into this room?”

New research suggests that mind wandering can improve creative problem-solving. As a real-world example of this, Einstein is said to have come up with some of his greatest breakthroughs not while sitting at his desk, but while going for walks. Here he is hard at work.
Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York

Mind wandering, or the experience of “stimulus-independent thoughts,” occurs most often when we are engaged in repetitive, undemanding tasks (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). This happens a lot. A recent study revealed that we engage in mind wandering during nearly half of our daily activities (46.9%) (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). Indeed, mind wandering occurred at least 30% of the time in every activity recorded (with the one exception being making love, during which it is apparently rare to have stimulus-independent thoughts). Although the mind often wanders, this study found that people are significantly less happy when mind wandering compared to when they are thinking about what they are currently doing.

Learning about the connection between mind wandering and unhappiness might lead you to feel … unhappy. But as it turns out, mind wandering may also have its benefits. For thousands of years, some of the world’s greatest thinkers have noted that their most important breakthroughs came during periods of daydreaming or mind wandering. For instance, Einstein is said to have made major breakthroughs in his relativity theory while going for a walk (rather than sitting at his desk). In one recent study, participants completed a creative problem-solving test in which they were asked to generate as many uses as they could for everyday objects (e.g., brick, feather) both before and after engaging in either a demanding or undemanding task (Baird et al., 2012). The authors hypothesized—and found—that engagement in the undemanding task would facilitate higher levels of mind wandering (which it did), and also would in turn lead to improvements in their performance on the previously worked-on tests (which it did), but not on new tests (correct again). These findings suggest that allowing our minds to wander, while remaining active, can enhance our ability to think creatively and solve difficult problems.

Full consciousness involves a consciousness of oneself, such as thinking about the act of driving while driving a car. How is this different from self-consciousness?
Photomondo//Photodisc/Getty Images

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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A chimpanzee tries to wipe off the red dye on its eyebrow, suggesting it can recognize itself in the mirror.
Dr. Daniel Povinelli/Monkey Images

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).

How do researchers study subjective experience?

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.

Table : Table 5.1 What’s on Your Mind? College Students’ Current Concerns

Current Concern Category

Example

Frequency of Students Who Mentioned the Concern

Family

Gain better relations with immediate family

40%

Roommate

Change attitude or behavior of roommate

29%

Household

Clean room

52%

Friends

Make new friends

42%

Dating

Desire to date a certain person

24%

Sexual intimacy

Abstaining from sex

16%

Health

Diet and exercise

85%

Employment

Get a summer job

33%

Education

Go to graduate school

43%

Social activities

Gain acceptance into a campus organization

34%

Religious

Attend church more

51%

Financial

Pay rent or bills

  8%

Government

Change government policy

14%

Source: Information from Goetzman, E.S., Hughes, T., & Klinger, E., 1994.

One concern on many students’ minds is diet and exercise to keep in shape.
Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis

What part of the brain is active during daydreaming?

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).

Figure 5.5: FIGURE 5.5 The Default Network Activated during Daydreaming An fMRI scan shows that many areas, known as the default network, are active when the person is not given a specific mental task to perform during the scan (Mason et al., 2007).
Mason et al., 2007

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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.

mental control

The attempt to change conscious states of mind.

thought suppression

The conscious avoidance of a thought.

Go ahead, look away from the book for a minute and try not to think about a white bear.
Larry Williams/Corbis

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.

rebound effect of thought suppression

The tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression.

Figure 5.6: FIGURE 5.6 Rebound Effect Research participants were first asked to try not to think about a white bear, and then they were asked to think about it and to ring a bell whenever it came to mind. Compared to those who were simply asked to think about a bear without prior suppression, those people who first suppressed the thought showed a rebound of increased thinking. (Data from Wegner et al., 1987.)

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Is consciously avoiding a worrisome thought an effective strategy?

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.

ironic processes of mental control

Mental processes that can produce ironic errors because monitoring for errors can itself produce them.

The Unconscious Mind

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.

There are no conscious steps between hearing an easy problem (what’s 4 + 5?) and thinking of the answer—unless you have to count on your fingers.
Fuse/Getty Images

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 unconsciousan 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.

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.

repression

A mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps them in the unconscious.

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After the death of Osama bin Laden, several staff members at the conservative Fox News channel slipped and reported on the death of Obama bin Laden.
Newsies Media/Alamy

What might Freudian slips tell us about the unconscious mind?

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

Would subliminal messages make people in a movie theater more likely to eat popcorn? Maybe, but not much.
Walter Daran/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

How can unconscious processes be measured?

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.

cognitive unconscious

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).

subliminal perception

Thought or behavior that is influenced by stimuli that a person cannot consciously report perceiving.

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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SUMMARY QUIZ [5.1]

Question 5.1

1. Which of the following is NOT a basic property of consciousness?
  1. intentionality
  2. disunity
  3. selectivity
  4. transience

b.

Question 5.2

2. Currently, unconscious processes are understood as
  1. a concentrated pattern of thought suppression.
  2. a hidden system of memories, instincts, and desires.
  3. a blank slate.
  4. unexperienced mental processes that give rise to thoughts and behavior.

d.

Question 5.3

3. The _____________ unconscious is at work when subliminal and unconscious processes influence thought and behavior.
  1. minimal
  2. repressive
  3. dynamic
  4. cognitive

d.