When today’s psychologists talk about the unconscious, they don’t mean the independent force that Freud imagined. Rather, the unconscious is seen more like a network of automatons ) each of which controls an aspect of behavior.
Imagine that you are walking through a wood char you know to be full of venomous snakes. Suddenly, you jump backward. As you are in the air, you become dimly aware of something long, thin, and brown that is in your path; you have just avoided treading on a snake. Yet when you started your jump, you weren’t aware of anything dangerous at all.
This is an example of an unconscious response initiated not by the cortex – the thinking, judging part of the brain – but by an autonomous processing unit, a subsystem that produces automatic reactions. Your ears detect a signal of danger (the rustling of the snake in the grass ), and a signal is sent via the brain’s auditory system directly to the amygdala, a structure that controls fear response. Because it bypasses the cortex, the ‘danger’ signal causes you to move that much faster, gaining you vital milliseconds that may save your life.
Unconscious helpers
Countless other subsystems exist in the brain. Moment by moment, this army of unconscious helpers handles all sorts of complicated processing of which we are not aware. They control blood pressure, build our three-dimensional images of the world from the two – dimensional information coming from the retina, and effortlessly produce grammatical sentences. When we learn a new physical skill – Like typing or playing the piano – we are actually training subsystems to carry out sets of complex functions automatically. Even tasks that many people imagine depending on awareness – such as an understanding of speech – are, in fact, carried out by these unconscious helpers. Each one of the separate processing units is, in the words of one researcher, a ‘ mindless simple ton ‘ because it can do only one thing – but it does that thing very well and reports its actions back to the central executive of consciousness. So rather than consciousness being seen as the boss, controlling the mind like a general, it looks increasingly like the figurehead of a large organization – or perhaps a government minister who is backed up by an army of invisible civil servants.
Blind vision
An astonishing demonstration of the abilities of our unconscious pathways comes from studies of a bizarre condition known as blindsight. Graham, a typical sufferer, is totally blind on the right side of his visual field as a result of an accident. Experim entered and asked Graham what he could see on the right side; predictably, his reply was ‘ nothing.’Then, the experimenters set up a projector screen in Graham’s blind patch. Onto it, they projected spots of light, shapes, and words and asked Graham to guess what was out there. Remarkably, he could ‘ guess with great accuracy. In fact, Graham could see, but he was not conscious of seeing because his vision was being processed by the unconscious helpers alone.
Equally amazing is the fact that the unconscious brain is often better than the conscious mind at interpreting data from our senses. The conscious mind is quite easily fooled by illusion; for example, flat paintings that use perspective often appear to have real depth. But the unconscious is much less likely to be taken into – perhaps because it is designed for fast evaluation and action. The Good ale illusion is a good example. This consists of two circular wooden counters, identical in size and shape, one surrounded by a cluster of smaller counters, the other by bigger ones. The conscious brain cannot help but see an illusion – the counter surrounded by the smaller chips always looks the bigger. But the unconscious robot’s pathway ‘sees’ them. as identical: if someone is asked to pick up the central counters, careful measurement of the space between their fingers at the moment of contact reveals an identical gap.
A new role for consciousness
Another set of experiments, conducted in the 1960s by the Californian physiologist Benjamin Libet, underlines the extraordinary abilities of the unconscious and challenges our cherished notion of free will. Libet connected subjects to EE G monitors that recorded their brain waves, in particular one type of electrical pulse known as a ‘ readiness potential,’ which signals that the brain is preparing to make a consciously willed movement. The subjects were asked to watch a dot move clockwise on a screen. Li bet would then ask them to lift a finger whenever they felt the urge and to note where the dot was at that moment. Remarkably, the EEG readings showed that the readiness potential appeared about half a second before subjects said that they had ‘decided’ to move. In other words, some combination of the unconscious modules was preparing for a move before the subjects had consciously decided to move.
If the unconscious can do all these things – if it can see, hear, and take decisions before we are even aware of them, if it can process language and trigger emotional responses – then what exactly is the role, and indeed the point, of consciousness? In fact, the unconscious and conscious parts of our minds need one another and work in close partnership.
Consciousness – the executive
Brain scans reveal quite different patterns of mental activity when we think consciously about a task (for example, the first time we try to play the piano) and when our unconscious ‘simpletons’ handle a task unaided (when we can play the piano fluently). When we think consciously, big areas of the brain ‘light up on the scans as we mobilize our mental resources to deal with a nun familiar situation. Unconscious activity, in contrast, produces a much fainter trace on a brain scan. So consciousness takes charge of novelty, while commonplace processing takes place unconsciously.
Consciousness also has a crucial ‘ executive’ function in mind: we have only one body, and so consciousness must decide between conflicting unconscious instructions about where to move the legs or turn the head, for example. Consciousness has the power of veto over the unconscious – free won’t rather than free will – so they are just slaves to the robot within.
Unconscious Accuracy
Consciousness personalizes our world. Our conscious perceptions are determined by our beliefs, interests, fears, and preoccupations, as well as by what is ‘out there. In contrast, the kind of unconscious processing that we use to make physical (rather than verbal) judgments is less subject to these idiosyncratic influences. Consequently, these judgments are often more reliable. This effect becomes obvious when people are asked, for example, to estimate the steepness of a hill. When asked for a verbal judgment, almost everyone overestimates the gradient, although younger and fitter people will think the slope is less steep than older or unfit people. But when people are asked to tilt their hand to match the slope of the hill, they do so with considerably greater accuracy.
