We often feel more confident in ‘ reading’ people’s body language than perhaps we should – deception, in particular, is often surprisingly hard to detect. However, there is no denying that becoming more conscious of the gestures and facial expressions we unconsciously display can improve how we communicate. We can monitor and refine our nonverbal […]

When we interact with others, we convey a great deal of information about ourselves through our body language. Such non-verbal signals may be quite unwitting – although the thoughts and attitudes they reflect are often all too conscious. Much of the information that we get from body language is picked up unconsciously. We are often

A killer claims he is innocent because his ‘alter ego’ did it. A woman tells a psychiatric conference more than 180 different personalities inhabit her. If these reports are true, then the human mind is – astonishingly – able to host not just oneself but many. The 19th–century thinker William James argued that the stream

Consciousness is inherently individual. It is not simply experiencing – there is always a ‘me’ at the center doing the feeling, responding, and interpreting. But locating this self has proved surprisingly difficult. Towards the end of the 19th century, pioneering psychologist William James began an exhaustive labor of introspection – a search for the core

Although psychologists now think that Sigmund Freud was wrong about many things, there is no denying that he had a huge influence on Western culture, as have many psychoanalysts who followed him. Without Freud, we might still be living in the buttoned-up world of Victorian values. Over the past twenty years, scientific psychology has established

One out of every two hundred people with autism has remarkable abilities. They can perform marvels of mental arithmetic or play accurately a tune they have heard only once. What is more, their abilities can help us to understand our unconscious minds. Charles is autistic. He has an IQ of around 58 and the reasoning skills

One of the most fascinating aspects of the unconscious mind is the way in which it can solve problems while the conscious mind is occupied with other matters. Many examples of unconscious problem-solving come from everyday situations, but there are also well-documented cases where these processes have led to important scientific breakthroughs and artistic inspiration.

Sometimes, we think we have made up our minds when, in fact, they have been made up for us. None of us is immune to the influence of strong ideas forced upon us by other people, and much of our behavior owes less to the tree’s will than it does to the will of others.

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

By definition, our unconscious minds are unknown to us: if we could ponder our unconscious mental processes, they would no longer be unconscious. Although we have all experienced the forces that our unconscious can exert on our conscious thinking and behavior, discovering the exact way in which our minds work beneath our consciousness is not