I know when I took a psychology class in community college, some time back, the teacher said, according to Freud, there were three levels of the human mind: the conscious, the pre-conscious and the unconscious. He also said three was the chosen number, because three had mystical importance, for some reason.
Anyways, there is no need for modern psychologists to turn towards mysticism to establish their theories. So I have just one question: Is there really an unconscious mind?
I mean is there any proof, any evidence, that supports that there is? Because let’s face it, Freud was wrong about many things.
It is a very readable account of science’s investigations into the unconscious and explains the effect of Freud’s theories. Malcolm Gladwell has written, “Strangers to Ourselves is probably the most influential book I’ve ever read.”
Ever find yourself surprised that you’re where you are on the highway, because you just totally zoned out for 5 miles? Some mind was driving that car, and it wasn’t your conscious one.
It’s not really debated that humans can engage in complex physical and mental tasks without conscious direction. The debate lies mostly in the area of determining how much this influences the parts of our lives that we feel are conscious, like decision making.
So, yes, there really is a subconscious. Whether or not it behaves like or serves the functions Freud attributed to it is still a matter of debate.
It’s not at all clear that what happened was the unconscious was controlling the car vs. there was simply no consciously-retrievable memory stored of what *was *going on then. IOW, you were consciously driving but don’t remember doing so.
Like questions about whether love is real, or God is real, or beauty is other than merely in the eye of the beholder, this one is not very productive without defining some terms.
Is a conscious mind a mind that is consciously monitoring itself, attentive to its own processing? Is there a self that is conscious of what the mind is doing, and if so is it a single and undifferentiated self or is there a conscious self and an unconscious self that pays attention in the background while the conscious self is doing other stuff? If the latter, is the unconscious self conscious of the unconscious mental processes? Contrariwise, might the conscous mind / conscious self have been fully aware of all processes but then discards the recall of the cognitive processes themselves for a goodly chunk of what it processes? Is it like multitasking on a computer where you have a foreground process but other apps and tasks keep running merrily in the background? If so, who or what is staring at the monitor screen?
If you were conscious of everything going on in your mind, you’d go nuts.
Obviously we have unconscious processing. Our autonomous nervous system is an example. Are you thinking about your heart beating? Nope, but it happens, and your brain controls it.
The stuff that goes on “unconsciously” to make vision work is astounding. If you read any books about all the gymnastics your mind has to go to, to present you with an image of a stationary world, from the jumping around and superficially inconsistent data your eyes are presenting to your brain, you’d be impressed and astonished. (For example, you have no color vision in your periphery. All the color you think you see there is an artifact of your brain making sense of limited input and remembering what it saw there earlier, and what it knows about stuff, and continuity.)
Perhaps the question is not so much “is there processing we’re unaware of” but “are there motives we’re unaware of?” There’s lots of good evidence that there is. In fact, one of the things we’ve learned about the brain is that it’s a fricking good rationalization engine. (Something to keep in mind when dealing with other people, especially children.) Here’s a classic example. Some people have their right and left hemispheres disconnected, usually in order to reduce really bad symptoms of epilepsy. Of course, brain scientists love to study these people. So, they set the subject up so that the left eye sees one projection and the right eye sees another, and then talk to the subjects about what they see. Then they present to one side (I forget which; the right I think) text that says “Stand and leave the room.” Most subjects do so. When asked why, the answers are like “I have to go to the bathroom” or “I need to be somewhere else”, etc. Rarely is it “I don’t know” or “The text told me to leave.”
Admittedly, that’s a case of abnormal brains, but I’m sure the same kind of thing can happen in normal brains.
There are books full of stuff about this kind of thing, and they’re fascinating. I’ll be interested to check out the one mentioned above (thanks!)
To do careful studies, one needs careful definitions. But there are some very easy ways to identify unconscious motives or behaviors: they’re the ones we’re not aware of, and when asked, can’t give an answer for – even when test conditions make it quite clear what the actual reason is.
There is certainly a lot going on in the brain that we’re not aware of, whatever we want to call it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about your post on my drive this morning. I thought it was an interesting point. I thought about how difficult it would be to test or measure that hypothesis. I thought existential thoughts about whether we are who we are in the moment, or if we are the memories we hold. I thought about what that means for people with memory loss…
Know what I didn’t think about? Driving. Not once. I made turns, I merged in traffic, I stored at stop signs, I even stopped at a malfunctioning stop light and played “whose turn is it?” with the other drivers. Not once did I think about placing my foot on the accelerator or break, or turning in my turn signal, or how many degrees to turn my steering wheel, or when and how to press my horn gently to signal you go ahead dummy.
When I do have to think about driving -say when I’m backing my car up to my trailer - I suck at it. Even in the moments just now when I started thinking about not thinking about driving, I got worse at it. My conscious brain is a shitty driver.
How about when your subconscious takes control of your driving on a freeway and you go right past your intended exit? Isn’t that fairly persuasive evidence that the higher level of consciousness is AWOL and otherwise occupied? I’ve also had the reverse happen – lost in thought on the freeway, and finding myself on a very familiar exit ramp where I had turned off thousands of times before, except this time I was going somewhere else and my suddenly activated conscious self had to find a way to get back on the highway! It really does seem to have all the earmarks of a kind of low-level automatic pilot – knows how to control the car from ingrained habit and knows how to alert the higher consciousness when it’s needed, but doesn’t know much else.
This is an excellent clarification of the OP’s question. With regard to processing (e.g., interpreting sensory inputs and executing appropriate responses), the large majority is probably unconscious. Freud’s idea of the unconscious mind, by contrast, was closer to the idea of unconscious motives – a part of our personality that has its own goals, driving us to do things for reasons we may not normally have conscious access to. The example given above probably wouldn’t be psychodynamic enough to suit Freud, but it does show how people can lack insight into why they do the things they do. Another example would be the social psychological literature on insufficient justification.
