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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see.
Unconscious Arithmetic
The first experiment is a collaboration among Filip Van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, Floris P. de Lange of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris. Dehaene, director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, is best known for his investigations of the brain mechanisms underlying counting and numbers. Here he explored the extent to which a simple sum or an average can be computed outside the pale of consciousness. Adding 7, 3, 5 and 8 is widely assumed to be a quintessential serial process that requires consciousness. Van Opstal and his colleagues proved the opposite in an indirect but clever and powerful way.
A quartet of single-digit Arabic numbers (1 through 9, excluding the numeral 5) are projected onto a screen. Volunteers had to indicate as quickly as possible whether or not the average of the four projected numbers exceeded 5. Every trial was preceded by a hidden cue that could be valid or invalid. The cue consisted of a very brief flash of another set of four numbers whose average was either smaller or larger than 5. These were preceded and followed by hash marks at the location of the flashed numbers. The marks effectively masked the cue so that no subject ever consciously saw this quartet. Forcing them to guess whether the average of the four hidden numbers was less than or greater than 5 did not work either: they were at chance.
Yet the cue still influenced the subject’s reaction to the main response. If the implicit cue was valid, the response to the target was consistently faster than if the cue was invalid. In the illustration, the mean of the four invisible cues (3.75) is less than 5, whereas the average of the visible target numbers is greater than 5. Resolving this conflict demands additional processing time (about 1⁄40 of a second). That is, the cue triggers neural activity representing the assertion “less than 5,” which interferes with the rapid establishment of a coalition of neurons representing “greater than 5.” That invisible and undetectable cues influence behavior implies that the unconscious can somehow estimate the average of four single digits. It is unlikely that it does so following the precise, algebraic rules children learn in grade school. Instead it may rely on heuristics: for example, for each number larger than 5, increase the probability of pushing the greater than 5 button.
This is just the latest in a flurry of experiments demonstrating so-called ensemble coding, the ability of the mind to guesstimate the dominant emotional expression of a crowd of faces or the approximate size of a bunch of dots even though the individual faces or dots are not consciously perceived.
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem set out to test the extent to which the unconscious can integrate all the information in any one picture into a unified and coherent visual experience. Giulio Tononi and I had proposed in the last Consciousness Redux column [September/October 2011] that the ability to rapidly integrate all the disparate elements within a scene and place them into context is one of the hallmarks of consciousness.
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11 Comments
Add CommentLakoff says 98% of thinking is subconscious. We know that what our eyes see goes through the amygdala before any cognitive machinations take place. We know that microbes take part in brain construction. Time to drop the retro Freudian blather and get on with the program.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://powertoxins.blogspot.com/2011/12/hypothesis-microbes-generate-toxins-of.html
UNconscious, or PREconscious - there's a difference, yes?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen they're done validating the 'unconscious' I'd be interested also in hearing about their thoughts (from any form of consciousness) about the Ego; what it is, how it dominates our 'consciousness' and to what extent it distorts 'reality' to fit into its own version of the self-involved, delusion that we call the "real world;" far from dropping 'blather', we need to reaffirm Freud's brilliance and delve further into his psychological insights, using these new techniques.
"What our eyes see goes through the amygdala before any cognitive machinations take place", but apparently here we see proof of unconscious cognitive machinations taking place before the image even reaches the eye!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that this means the eye absorbs more than we can see with it.....if you can follow. Think of an invertebrate's pigment pit or "simple eye". If bugs can have simple eyes, I'm sure our compound eyes could contain some functions of a simple eye--like perceiving without consciousness!
Can EC and ECB mind-control important peripheral countries politicians with economic and political demands through the new converging technologies. http://convergingtechnology.eu/threats-for-developing-countries/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBefore Freud, philosopher Spinoza stated importance of unconscious mind which dominated entirely on our conscious mind.Recent research in neuroscience proved clearly how our unconscious mind guiding to our conscious mind.Though it is very difficult to accessible to understand process of unconscious mind.Freud developed free associations and investigating technique for find out meaning of dreams till we are not successful to open our unconscious mind fully.Recent research in neuroscience "Mirror neutrons and empathy" giving us new clue to understand the working process of unconscious mind.Let me tell my personal experiences on mirror neutrons and empathy. When I was one year old my mother was seriously sick with T.B.She was admitted in hospital I was with her sucking breast with doctor`s advised my father abruptly dragged me from mother.This psychological traumatic event occurred so traffic way on my unconscious mind that involved threatened death, my intention was relieved the suffering my mother but my father did not understand my intention,From that time I am suffering from guilt.From my experiences I can tell that unconscious mind fully dominated on your conscious mind.From last75 years what may I did in my carrier,my married life,my other activities which was always guided by my unconscious mind.After all every child is unique how can he developed his unconscious mind it depend what kind experiences he went thorough in his childhood.I must admit that understand the process of unconscious mind is very very difficult I am lucky my father told me in detail accident which happened in my childhood.so I can fully understand my unconscious mind
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuotes like the following from the article above are as much non-scientific blather as Freudian jargon:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"That is, the cue triggers neural activity representing the assertion “less than 5,” which interferes with the rapid establishment of a coalition of neurons representing “greater than 5.”
This sort of linguistic neuro-babble passes for credible scientific speak by most neuroscientists and laymen, but is really a cover-up for a lack of understanding. There is, for instance, almost zero evidence that neurons are capable of 'representing assertions'. While neural activity may statistically correlate with linguistic statements (this is the only evidence you will find), it is another to say that a group of neurons are representing the meaning, form, and content of an assertion independent of the rest of the brain and body.
Here is a satire of neuro-babble that will pass by most people as entirely serious.
http://falsehood-illusion.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html
Huh !:I have the hunch that the things in the experiments you describe and the unconscious Freud spoke about are different things, their only similarity is that both don't arrive to the level of these processing arriving to conscious awareness by the subject. The experiments above deal with perceptions, and other aspects of senses and awakeness. The subject of the Freud work was not perceptions that we are not aware of, but rather desires and feelings that don't arrive to be perceived because they're actively repressed by the super-ego or other instance, that consider them inadequate, preventing it to arrive to the conscious level, it´s not a matter of neuronal circuits speed, but of education and educationally or experimentally introspected taboos.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Lakoff says 98% of thinking is subconscious."
Lakoff is purely speculating then. There is no current way to prove a statement this.
"We know that what our eyes see goes through the amygdala before any cognitive machinations take place."
That's not entirely true. There are two major pathways that the visual system uses to process signals in the brain. The "lower" (more evolutionary basic track) detects some aspects of objects, particularly motion, and does connect up to the amygdala. However, this track is largely unavailable to our consciousness. You can see more for yourself with this youtube video on "Blindsight."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuNDkcbq8PY
Dr. Ramachandran (the man in the video) is a brilliant neuroscientist.
It's also useful to consider a simple anecdotal problem. Has someone ever thrown something to you and you were able to catch it but not know what it was?
These and other inquiries by Koch and Tononi (including Tononi's proposal for calculating a time- and state- dependent measure of consciousness in a system, see http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000091) and others, have made me wonder what it is exactly about human consciousness that seems qualitatively different from what machines do. You often see AI researchers referring to the vast superiority of the silicon substrate over the human brain in at least two dimensions: speed and perfect recall. But what if slowness and imperfect recall are basic to consciousness? Imagine a computer that couldn't effortlessly keep track of everything it had ever seen, done, or known. Imagine it had to compete with other entities in a world where overcoming those limitations conferred survival benefits. What capabilities would emerge? Would consciousness be one of them? What if consciousness is merely an moire-like pattern created by the interference between reality and an entity's perception and memory of that reality?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It was Dr. Joseph Ledoux, author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, and professor at The Center for Neural Science of New York University who first discovered a “neural back alley,” through which information is quickly routed to the amygdala before it reaches the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for thinking and reasoning."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.clarionenterprises.com/blog/?cat=154
Lakoff making "that 98% statement" in this video:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm0R1du1GqA&feature=player_detailpage