The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German philosophy German philosophy, here taken to mean either philosophy in the German language or (2) philosophy by Germans, has been extremely diverse, and central to both the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Leibniz through Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, to contemporary philosophers romantic philosopher Sir Christopher Riegel and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as for his major prose work Biographia.^[1] The unconscious mind might be defined as that part of the mind which gives rise to a collection of mental phenomena that manifest in a person's mind but which the person is not aware of at the time of their occurrence. These phenomena include unconscious feelings, unconscious or automatic skills, unnoticed perceptions, unconscious thoughts, unconscious habits and automatic reactions, complexes In psychology a complex is a group of mental factors that are unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject or connected by a recognizable theme and influence the individual's attitude and behavior. Their existence is widely agreed upon in the area of depth psychology at least, being instrumental in the systems of both Freud, hidden phobias and concealed desires.

The unconscious mind can be seen as the source of night dreams and automatic thoughts (those that appear without apparent cause); the repository of memories that have been forgotten but that may nevertheless be accessible to consciousness at some later time; and the locus of implicit knowledge, i.e. all the things that we have learned so well that we do them without thinking. One familiar example of the operation of the unconscious is the phenomenon where one fails to immediately solve a given problem and then suddenly has a flash of insight that provides a solution maybe days later at some odd moment during the day.

Observers throughout history have argued that there are influences on consciousness Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note : from other parts of the mind Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness. These observers differ in the use of related terms, including: unconsciousness Unconsciousness, more appropriately referred to as loss of consciousness or lack of consciousness, is a dramatic alteration of mental state that involves complete or near-complete lack of responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli. Being in a comatose state or coma is an illustration of unconsciousness. Fainting due to a drop in as a personal habit Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously, without one being conscious about them. Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habituation is an extremely simple form of learning, in; being unaware Self-awareness is the awareness of the self as separate from the thoughts that are occurring at any point in time. Without self awareness the self perceives and believes the thoughts that are occurring to be who the self is. Self awareness gives one the option or choice to choose thoughts being thought rather than simply thinking the thoughts that and intuition Intuition is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. “The word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning ‘to look inside’ or ‘to contemplate’." Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify. For this reason, it. Terms related to semi-consciousness include: awakening Wakefulness is a daily recurring brain state in which an individual is conscious and engages in coherent cognitive and behavior responses to the external world such as communication, ambulation, nutritional ingestion and procreation. Being awake is the opposite of being asleep in which most external inputs to the brain are excluded from neural, implicit memory Implicit memory is a type of memory in which previous experiences aid in the performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences. Evidence for implicit memory arises in priming, a process whereby subjects show improved performance on tasks for which they have been subconsciously prepared. Implicit memory also leads to, subliminal messages Subliminal stimuli , contrary to supraliminal stimuli or above threshold, are any sensory stimuli below an individual's absolute threshold for conscious perception. Visual stimuli may be quickly flashed before an individual may process them, or flashed and then masked, thereby interrupting the processing. Audio stimuli may be played below audible, trances The term "trance" may be associated with meditation, magic, flow, and prayer. It may also be related to the earlier generic term, altered states of consciousness, which is no longer used in "Consciousness Studies" discourse, hypnagogia Hypnagogia , often misspelled hypnogogia, is a term coined by Alfred Maury for the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, and hypnosis Hypnosis is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment (non-state theory) usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. Hypnotic suggestions may be delivered by a hypnotist in the presence of the subject, or may be self-administered (". Although sleep Sleep is a naturally recurring state of relatively suspended sensory and motor activity, characterized by total or partial unconsciousness and the inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles. It is distinguished from quiet wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, and it is more easily reversible than hibernation or coma. Sleep is a, sleep walking Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is a sleep disorder belonging to the parasomnia family. Sleepwalkers arise from the slow wave sleep stage in a state of low consciousness and perform activities that are usually performed during the day. These activities can be as benign as sitting up in bed, walking to the bathroom, and cleaning, or as, dreaming A dream is a succession of images, sounds or emotions which the mind experiences during sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology, delirium Delirium is a common and severe neuropsychiatric syndrome with core features of acute onset and fluctuating course, attentional deficits and generalized severe disorganization of behavior. It typically involves other cognitive deficits, changes in arousal (hyperactive, hypoactive, or mixed), perceptual deficits, altered sleep-wake cycle, and and coma In medicine, a coma is a profound state of unconsciousness. A person in a coma cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to pain, light or sound, does not have sleep-wake cycles, and does not take voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma can be described as comatose may signal the presence of unconscious processes, these processes are not the unconscious mind. Science is in its infancy in exploring the limits of consciousness Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note :.

Historical overview

The idea of an unconscious mind originated in antiquity^[2] and has been explored across cultures Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavour to communicate across cultures. It was recorded between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas The Vedas are a large body of texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, found today in Ayurvedic Ayurveda Ayurvedic medicine is a system of traditional medicine native to the Indian subcontinent and practiced in other parts of the world as a form of alternative medicine. In Sanskrit, the word ayurveda consists of the words āyus, meaning "longevity", and veda, meaning "related to knowledge" or "science". Evolving medicine.^[3][4][5][6] In the Vedic worldview, consciousness is the basis of physiology^[7][8] and pure consciousness is "an abstract, silent, completely unified field of consciousness"^[9] within "an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind".^[10]

Paracelsus Paracelsus was a Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist. "Paracelsus", meaning "equal to or greater than Celsus", refers to the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus from the first century known for his tract on medicine. He is also credited for giving zinc its name, calling it zincum is credited as providing the first scientific mention of the unconscious in his work Von den Krankheiten (translates as "About illnesses", 1567), and his clinical methodology created an entire system that is regarded as the beginning of modern scientific psychology.^[11] Shakespeare William Shakespeare [a] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".[b] His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,[c] 154 sonnets, two long explored the role of the unconscious^[12] in many of his plays, without naming it as such.^[13][14][15] Western philosophers such as Spinoza Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy,, Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (German pronunciation: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈvɪlhɛlm fɔn ˈlaɪpnɪts]; born 1 July 1646 in Leipzig [OS: 21 June] – died in Hannover 14 November 1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. Leibniz wrote primarily in Latin and French, Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the fundamental question of whether reason alone can unlock answers about the world, Kierkegaard Søren Åbye Kierkegård (English pronunciation: /ˈsɔrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/ or /ˈkɪərkəɡɔr/; Danish: [ˈsœːɐn ˈkʰiɐ̯kəˌɡ̊ɒˀ] ) (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of, and Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; in English UK: /ˈniːtʃə/, US: /ˈniːtʃi/) was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a, developed a western view of mind which foreshadowed those of Freud Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology. Schopenhauer was also influenced by his reading of the Vedas.

Articulating the idea of something not conscious or actively denied to awareness with the symbolic constructs Culture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: of language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of has been a process of human thought and interpersonal influence for millennia.

The resultant status of the unconscious mind may be viewed as a social construction Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena develop in social contexts. Within constructionist thought, a social construction is a concept or practice that is the construct (or artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially constructed, we are—that the unconscious exists because people agree to behave as if it exists.^[16] Symbolic interactionism Symbolic interactionism is a major sociological perspective that places emphasis on micro-scale social interaction, which is particularly important in subfields such as urban sociology and social psychology. Symbolic interactionism is derived from American pragmatism, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. Herbert Blumer, a goes further and argues that people's selves (conscious and unconscious) though purposeful and creative are nevertheless social products.^[17]

Unconscious processes and the unconscious mind

Neuroscience supports the proposition In logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to both (a) the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or (b) the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence. The meaning of a proposition includes that it has the quality or property of being either true or false, of the unconscious mind.^[18] For example, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have found that fleeting images of fearful faces—images that appear and disappear so quickly that they escape conscious awareness—produce unconscious anxiety that can be detected in the brain with the latest neuroimaging machines.^[19] The conscious mind Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note : is hundreds of milliseconds behind the unconscious processes.

To understand this type of research Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of, a distinction has to be made between unconscious processes and the unconscious mind: they are not the same. Neuroscience is more likely to examine the former than the latter. The unconscious mind and its expected psychoanalytic contents^{[20][21][22][23][24][25]} are also different from unconsciousness Unconsciousness, more appropriately referred to as loss of consciousness or lack of consciousness, is a dramatic alteration of mental state that involves complete or near-complete lack of responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli. Being in a comatose state or coma is an illustration of unconsciousness. Fainting due to a drop in, coma In medicine, a coma is a profound state of unconsciousness. A person in a coma cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to pain, light or sound, does not have sleep-wake cycles, and does not take voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma can be described as comatose and a minimally conscious state A minimally conscious state is a condition distinct from coma or the vegetative state, in which a patient exhibits deliberate, or cognitively mediated, behavior often enough, or consistently enough, for clinicians to be able to distinguish it from entirely unconscious, reflexive responses. The differences in the uses of the term can be explained, to a degree, by different narratives A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events about what we know. One such narrative is psychoanalytic theory Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work.^[26]

Freud and the psychoanalytic unconscious

Probably the most detailed and precise of the various notions of 'unconscious mind'—and the one which most people will immediately think of upon hearing the term—is that developed by Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology and his followers. It lies at the heart of psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it can also be applied to societies. Psychoanalysis has three applications:.

Consciousness Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note :, in Freud's topographical Topography is the study of Earth's surface shape and features or those of planets, moons, and asteroids. It is also the description of such surface shapes and features (especially their depiction in maps) view (which was his first of several psychological models of the mind Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness), was a relatively thin perceptual In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses." aspect of the mind. The unconscious was considered by Freud throughout the evolution of his psychoanalytic theory a sentient force of will influenced by human drive and yet operating well below the perceptual conscious mind. For Freud, the unconscious is the storehouse of instinctual desires, needs, and psychic actions. While past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness, they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious.

Freud divided mind into the conscious mind or ego and two parts of the unconscious: the id or instincts and the superego. He used the idea of the unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior.

In this theory, the unconscious refers to that part of mental functioning of which subjects make themselves unaware.^[27]

Freud proposed a vertical and hierarchical architecture of human consciousness: the conscious mind, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind—each lying beneath the other. He believed that significant psychic events take place "below the surface" in the unconscious mind,^[28] like hidden messages from the unconscious—a form of intrapersonal communication out of awareness. He interpreted these events as having both symbolic and actual significance.

For psychoanalysis, the unconscious does not include all that is not conscious, rather only what is actively repressed from conscious thought or what the person is averse to knowing consciously. In a sense this view places the self in relationship to their unconscious as an adversary, warring with itself to keep what is unconscious hidden. The therapist is then a mediator trying to allow the unspoken or unspeakable to reveal itself using the tools of psychoanalysis. Messages arising from a conflict between conscious and unconscious are likely to be cryptic. The psychoanalyst is presented as an expert in interpreting those messages.

For Freud, the unconscious was a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents did not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects—it expresses itself in the symptom.

Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but are supposed to be capable of being "tapped" and "interpreted" by special methods and techniques such as meditation, random association, dream analysis, and verbal slips (commonly known as a Freudian slip), examined and conducted during psychoanalysis.

Freud's theory of the unconscious was substantially transformed by some of his followers, among them Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan.

Jung's collective unconscious

Carl Jung developed the concept further. He divided the unconscious into two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed.

The collective unconscious is the deepest level of the psyche containing the accumulation of inherited psychic structures and archetypal experiences. There is a considerable two way traffic between the ego and the personal unconscious. For example, your attention can wander from this article to a memory of something you did yesterday.

Lacan's linguistic unconscious

Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory contends that the unconscious is structured like a language.

The unconscious, Lacan argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but rather, a formation every bit as complex and linguistically sophisticated as consciousness itself.

If the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan argues, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or "identity crisis". In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology of Anna Freud and her American followers.

Lacan's idea of how language is structured is largely taken from the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, based on the function of the signifier and signified in signifying chains. This may leave Lacan's entire model of mental functioning open to severe critique, since in mainstream linguistics, Saussurean models have largely been replaced.

The starting point for the linguistic theory of the unconscious was a re-reading of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. There, Freud identifies two mechanisms at work in the formation of unconscious fantasies: condensation and displacement. Under Lacan's linguistic reading, condensation is identified with the linguistic trope of metaphor, and displacement with metonymy.

Lacan applied the ideas of de Saussure and Jakobson to psychoanalytic practice. For example, while de Saussure described the linguistic sign as a relationship between a signified and an arbitrary signifier, Lacan inverted the relationship, putting in first place the signifier as determining the signified, and so being closer to Freud's position that human beings know what they say only as a result of a chain of signifiers, a-posteriori. Lacan began this work with the case of Emma (1895) from Freud, whose symptoms were disenchained in a two-phase temporal process^{[clarification needed]}. Lacan allowed many young people, by this bias, to begin re-reading Freud as more akin to modernity than cognitive psychology.^{[citation needed]} For Lacan, modernity is the era when humans begin to grasp their essential dependence on language.

Controversy

Today, there are still fundamental disagreements within psychology about the nature of the unconscious mind. It may simply stand as a metaphor that ought not to be refined. Outside formal psychology, a whole world of pop-psychological speculation has grown up in which the unconscious mind is held to have any number of properties and abilities, from animalistic and innocent, child-like aspects to savant-like, all-perceiving, mystical and occultic properties.

There is a great controversy over the concept of an unconscious in regard to its scientific or rational validity and whether the unconscious mind exists at all. Among philosophers, Karl Popper was one of Freud's most notable contemporary opponents. Popper argued that Freud's theory of the unconscious was not falsifiable, and therefore not scientific. He objected not so much to the idea that things happened in our minds that we are unconscious of; he objected to investigations of mind that were not falsifiable. If one could connect every imaginable experimental outcome with Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, then no experiment could refute the theory.

In the social sciences, John Watson, considered to be the first American behaviourist, criticized the idea of an "unconscious mind," using a similar line of reasoning, and instead focused on observable behaviors rather than on introspection.

Unlike Popper, the epistemologist Adolf Grunbaum argued that psychoanalysis could be falsifiable, but its evidence has serious epistemological problems. David Holmes^[29] examined sixty years of research about the Freudian concept of "repression", and concluded that there is no positive evidence for this concept. Given the lack of evidence of many Freudian hypotheses, some scientific researchers proposed the existence of unconscious mechanisms that are very different from the Freudian ones. They speak of a "cognitive unconscious" (John Kihlstrom),^[30][31] an "adaptive unconscious" (Timothy Wilson),^[32] or a "dum unconscious" (Loftus & Klinger),^[33] which executes automatic processes but lacks the complex mechanisms of repression and symbolic return of the repressed.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Bouveresse argued that Freudian thought exhibits a systemic confusion between reasons and causes: the methods of interpretation can give reasons for new meanings, but are useless to find causal relations (which require experimental research). Wittgenstein gave the following example (in his Conversations with Rush Rhees): if we throw objects on a table, and we give free associations and interpretations about those objects, we'll find a meaning for each object and its place, but we won't find the causes.

Other critics of Freudian unconscious were Hans Eysenck, Jacques Van Rillaer, Frank Cioffi, Marshal Edelson, Edward Erwin.

Some stress, however, that these critics did not grasp the real importance of Freud's conceptions, and rather tried to criticize Freud on the basis of other fields.^{[citation needed]} The first who really grasped this was Bertrand Russell (see for example: "The impact of science in society", 1952). But in modern times, many other thinkers, as for example Althusser, and Bernard-Henri-Levy, managed to grasp the "falsification theory" from Popper, and the critics from Eysenck, as another expression of Master's discourse: the aspiration to a so-called scientific society led by evaluation. (For this side of the controversy, cf. the works of Jean-Claude Milner in France.)

In modern cognitive psychology, many researchers have sought to strip the notion of the unconscious from its Freudian heritage, and alternative terms such as "implicit" or "automatic" have come into currency. These traditions emphasize the degree to which cognitive processing happens outside the scope of cognitive awareness, and show that things we are unaware of can nonetheless influence other cognitive processes as well as behavior.^{[34][35][36][37][38]} Active research traditions related to the unconscious include implicit memory (see priming, implicit attitudes), and nonconscious acquisition of knowledge (see Lewicki, see also the section on cognitive perspective, below).

Unconscious mind in contemporary cognitive psychology

Research

While, historically, the psychoanalytic research tradition was the first to focus on the phenomenon of unconscious mental activity, there is an extensive body of conclusive research and knowledge in contemporary cognitive psychology devoted to the mental activity that is not mediated by conscious awareness.

Most of that (cognitive) research on unconscious processes has been done in the mainstream, academic tradition of the information processing paradigm. As opposed to the psychoanalytic tradition, driven by the relatively speculative (in the sense of being hard to empirically verify), theoretical concepts such as the Oedipus complex or Electra complex, the cognitive tradition of research on unconscious processes is based on relatively few theoretical assumptions and is very empirically oriented (i.e., it is mostly data driven). Cognitive research has revealed that automatically, and clearly outside of conscious awareness, individuals register and acquire more information than what they can experience through their conscious thoughts.

Unconscious processing of information about frequency

For example, an extensive line of research conducted by Hasher and Zacks^[39] has demonstrated that automatically (i.e., outside of conscious awareness and without engaging conscious information processing resources), individuals register information about the frequency of events. Moreover, that research demonstrates that perceivers do so unintentionally, truly "automatically", regardless of the instructions they receive, and regardless of the information processing goals they have. Interestingly, their ability to unconsciously, and relatively accurately tally the frequency of events appears to have little or no relation to the individual's age, education, intelligence, or personality, thus it may represent one of the fundamental building blocks of human orientation in the environment and possibly the acquisition of procedural knowledge and experience, in general.

Artificial grammars

Another line of (non-psychoanalytic) early research on unconscious processes was initiated by Arthur Reber, using so-called "artificial grammar" methodology. That research revealed that individuals exposed to novel words created by complex sets of artificial, synthetic "grammatical" rules (e.g., GKHAH, KHABT...), quickly develop some sort of a "feel" for that grammar and subsequent working knowledge of that grammar, as demonstrated by their ability to differentiate between, new grammatically "correct" (i.e., consistent with the rules) and "incorrect" (inconsistent) words. Interestingly, that ability does not appear to be mediated, or even accompanied by the declarative knowledge of the rules (i.e., individuals' ability to articulate how they distinguish between the correct and incorrect words).

Unconscious acquisition of procedural knowledge

The gist of these early findings (from the '70s) has been significantly extended in the '80s and '90s by further research showing that outside of conscious awareness individuals not only acquire information about frequencies (i.e., "occurrences" of features or events) but also co-occurrences (i.e., correlations or, technically speaking, covariations) between features or events. Extensive research on nonconscious acquisition of information about covariations was conducted by Pawel Lewicki, followed by research of D. L. Schachter (who is known for introducing the concept of implicit memory), L. R. Squire, and others.

In the learning phase of a typical study, participants were exposed to a stream of stimuli (trials or events, such as strings of letters, digits, pictures, or descriptions of stimulus persons) containing some consistent but non-salient (hidden) covariation between features or events. For example, every stimulus person presented as "fair" would also have a slightly elongated face. It turned out that even if the manipulated covariations were non-salient and inaccessible to subjects' conscious awareness, the perceivers would still acquire a nonconscious working knowledge about those covariations. For example, if in the testing phase of the study, participants were asked to make intuitive judgements about the personalities of new stimulus persons presented only as pictures (with no personality descriptions), and judge the "fairness" of the depicted individuals, they tend to follow the rules nonconsciously acquired in the learning phase and if the stimulus person had a slightly elongated face, they would report an intuitive feeling that this person was "fair".

Nonconscious acquisition of information about covariations appears to be one of the fundamental and ubiquitous processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge (skills, experience) or even preferences or personality dispositions, including disorders or symptoms of disorders.

A note on terminology: "unconscious" vs. "nonconscious"

Unlike in the psychoanalytic research tradition that uses the terms "unconscious", in the cognitive tradition, the processes that are not mediated by conscious awareness are sometimes referred to as "nonconscious". This term, rarely used in psychoanalysis, stresses the empirical and purely descriptive nature of that phenomenon (a qualification as simply "not being conscious") in the tradition of cognitive research.

Specifically, the process is non-conscious when even highly motivated individuals fail to report it, and few theoretical assumptions are made about the process (unlike in psychoanalysis where, for example, it is postulated that some of these processes are being repressed in order to achieve certain goals.)

References

1. ^ Bynum, Browne & Porter, The Macmillan Dictionary of the History of Science, London, 1981, p.292
2. ^ Its more modern history is detailed in Henri F. Ellenberger's Discovery of the Unconscious (Basic Books 1970)
3. ^ Alexander, C. N. 1990. Growth of Higher Stages of Consciousness: Maharishi's Vedic Psychology of Human Development. C. N. Alexander and E.J. Langer (eds.). Higher Stages of Human Development. Perspectives on Human Growth. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ Meyer-Dinkgräfe, D. 1996 Consciousness and the Actor. A Reassessment of Western and Indian Approaches to the Actor's Emotional Involvement from the Perspective of Vedic Psychology. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang
5. ^ Haney, W. S. II. 1991. Unity in Vedic aesthetics: the self-interacting dynamics of the knower, the known, and the process of knowing. Analecta Husserliana 233, pp. 295-319
6. ^ Geraldine Coster 'Yoga and Western Psychology: A comparison' 1934
7. ^ WALLACE, R. K.; FAGAN, J. B.; and PASCO, D. S. Vedic physiology. Modern Science and Vedic Science 2(1): 3-59, 1988
8. ^ Michael S. King (2003) Natural Law and the Bhagavad-Gita: The Vedic Concept of Natural Law Ratio Juris 16 (3),399–415
9. ^ Alexander, Charles N, Robert W. Cranson, Robert W. Boyer, David W. Orme-Johnson. "Transcendental Consciousness: A Fourth State of consciousness beyond Sleep, Dream, and Waking." Sleep and Dream. Sourcebook. Ed. Jayne Gackenbach. New York, London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1986. 282-315
10. ^ Alexander Charles N. et al. "Growth of Higher Stages of Consciousness: Maharishi's Vedic Psychology of Human Development." Higher Stages of Human Development. Perspectives on Human Growth. Eds. Charles N. Alexander and Ellen J. Langer.New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 286-341
11. ^ Harms, Ernest., Origins of Modern Psychiatry, Thomas 1967 ASIN: B000NR852U, p. 20
12. ^ The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare: Edited by M. D. Faber. New York: Science House. 1970 An anthology of 33 papers on Shakespearean plays by psychoanalysts and literary critics whose work has been influenced by psychoanalysis
13. ^ Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel "Hamlet's Procrastination: A Parallel to the Bhagavad-Gita, in Hamlet East West, edited by. Marta Gibinska and Jerzy Limon. Gdansk: Theatrum Gedanese Foundation, 1998e, pp. 187-195
14. ^ Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel 'Consciousness and the Actor: A Reassessment of Western and Indian Approaches to the Actor's Emotional Involvement from the Perspective of Vedic Psychology.' Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996a. (Series 30: Theatre, Film and Television, Vol. 67)
15. ^ Yarrow, Ralph 'Identity and Consciousness East and West: the case of Russell Hoban'. Journal of Literature & Aesthetics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (July-Dec. 1997), pp. 19-26
16. ^ Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann: The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday, 1966
17. ^ Blumer, Herbert (1962). "Society as Symbolic Interaction", in Arnold M. Rose: Human Behavior and Social Process: An Interactionist Approach. Houghton-Mifflin
18. ^ Miller, Laurence In search of the unconscious; evidence for some cornerstones of Freudian theory is coming from an unlikely source - basic neuroscience. Psychology Today December 1, 1986
19. ^ Retrieved from [1] April 17 2007
20. ^ Crews, F.C. (Ed.). (1998). Unauthorized Freud: Doubters confront a legend. New York: Viking
21. ^ Kihlstrom, J.F. (1994). Psychodynamics and social cognition: Notes on the fusion of psychoanalysis and psychology. Journal of Personality, 62, 681-696.
22. ^ Kihlstrom, J.F. (1999). The psychological unconscious. In L.R. Pervin & O. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality, 2nd ed. (pp. 424-442). New York: Guilford.
23. ^ Macmillan, M.B. (1996). Freud evaluated: The completed arc. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press
24. ^ Roth, M. (1998). Freud: Conflict and culture. New York: Knopf.
25. ^ Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 333-371
26. ^ Kihlstrom JF Is Freud Still Alive? No, Not Really Retrieved from [2] April 17, 2007 Extract: No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory, such as the idea that development proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages, or that little boys lust after their mothers and hate and fear their fathers. No empirical evidence indicates that psychoanalysis is more effective, or more efficient, than other forms of psychotherapy, such as systematic desensitization or assertiveness training. No empirical evidence indicates the mechanisms by which psychoanalysis achieves its effects, such as they are, are those specifically predicated on the theory, such as transference and catharsis
27. ^ Geraskov, Emil Asenov The internal contradiction and the unconscious sources of activity. The Journal of Psychology November 1, 1994 Abstract: This article is an attempt to give new meaning to well-known experimental studies, analysis of which may allow us to discover unconscious behavior that has so far remained unnoticed by researchers. Those studies confirm many of the statements by Freud, but they also reveal new aspects of the unconscious psychic. The first global psychological concept of the internal contradiction as an unconscious factor influencing human behavior was developed by Sigmund Freud. In his opinion, this contradiction is expressed in the struggle between the biological instincts and the self. Retrieved from [3] April 17, 2007
28. ^ For example, dreaming: Freud called dream symbols the "royal road to the unconscious"
29. ^ List of his publications at [4] retrieved April 18, 2007
30. ^ Kihlstrom, J.F. (2002). The unconscious. In V.S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, Vol. 4 (pp. 635-646). San Diego, Ca.: Academic.
31. ^ Kihlstrom, J.F., Beer, J.S., & Klein, S.B. (2002). Self and identity as memory. In M.R. Leary & J. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 68-90). New York: Guilford Press.
32. ^ Wilson T D Strangers to Ourselves Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
33. ^ Loftus, E. F., & Klinger, M. R. (1992). Is the Unconscious Smart or Dumb? American Psychologist, 47(6), 761-765
34. ^ Anthony G. Greenwald, Sean C. Draine, Richard L. Abrams Three Cognitive Markers of Unconscious Semantic Activation Science 20 September 1996: Vol. 273. no. 5282, pp. 1699 - 1702
35. ^ Raphaël Gaillard, Antoine Del Cul, Lionel Naccache Fabien Vinckier, Laurent Cohen, and Stanislas Dehaene Nonconscious semantic processing of emotional words modulates conscious access Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS May 9, 2006 vol. 103 no. 19 7524-7529 Retrieved from [5] April 17, 2007
36. ^ Markus Kiefer and Doreen Brendel Attentional Modulation of Unconscious "Automatic" Processes: Evidence from Event-related Potentials in a Masked Priming Paradigm Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006;18:184-198 retrieved from [6] April 17, 2007
37. ^ L. Naccache, R. Gaillard, C. Adam, D. Hasboun, S. Clemenceau, M. Baulac, S. Dehaene, and L. Cohen A direct intracranial record of emotions evoked by subliminal words Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS May 24, 2005 vol. 102 no. 21 7713-7717 Retrieved from [7] April 17, 2007
38. ^ E. R. Smith and J. DeCoster Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems. (2000) Personality and Social Psychology Review 4, 108-131
39. ^ Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1984). Automatic processing of fundamental information: The case of frequency of occurrence. American Psychologist, 39, 1372-1388.

Notes

• [8] from Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, "Implicit Memory"
• Nonconscious Acquisition of Information (a reprint from American Psychologist, 1992)

See also

• Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious
• Jacques Lacan's assertion that "the unconscious is structured like a language".
• Adaptive unconscious
• Psychoanalysis
• Consciousness
• Mind's eye
• Unconscious communication
• Preconscious
• Transpersonal Psychology

Transdisciplinary topics

• Cell signaling
• Molecular Cellular Cognition
• Philosophy of mind
• Portal:thinking
• List of thought processes

External links

• Hebbian Unconscious
• The Rediscovery of the Unconscious
• Unfelt Feelings
• Unconscious structure
• Nonconscious Acquisition of Information (a reprint from American Psychologist, 1992)
• The Unconscious: Rethinking the Unthinkable
• The Emergence of Novel Information during Trance

Categories: Psychology | Philosophy of mind | Unconscious | Freudian psychology | Jungian psychology | Cognitive science | Neuropsychology | Central nervous system | Hypnosis

See Also:

• Mind Control: Encyclopedia

What Links Here:

Recently Viewed Pages:

• Home
• Human Potential Movement: Blogs
• Silva Method: Blogs
• Raymond Moody: Blogs
• Argument From Ignorance: Blogs
• Demonology: Encyclopedia
• Close Encounter: Blogs
• Joseph Gaither Pratt: Blogs
• Sense: Encyclopedia
• Extra-sensory Perception: Encyclopedia

Most Popular Pages:

• Raymond Moody: Blogs
• Joseph Gaither Pratt: Blogs
• Board
• Silva Method: Blogs
• Tommaso Palamidessi: Blogs
• Robert Monroe: Blogs
• Clever Hans: Images
• Self Tests: Answers
• Human Potential Movement: Blogs
• Ganzfeld Experiment: Encyclopedia

Related 'Unconscious Mind' Searches: