The Israeli researchers used “continuous flash suppression,” a powerful masking technique, to render images invisible. A series of rapidly changing, randomly colored patterns was flashed into one eye while a photograph of a person carrying out some task was slowly faded into the other eye. For a few seconds, the picture is completely invisible, and the subject can see only the colored shapes. Because the images become progressively stronger, eventually they will break through, and the subject will see them. It is like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility fading with time and revealing what is underneath.
The fascinating aspect of the Mudrik study is that the time to become visible depends on the content of the image. Realistic scenes that depict a woman placing a pizza into an oven, a boy taking aim with a bow and arrow, or a basketball player dunking a ball into a hoop took 2.64 seconds to become visible, whereas unnatural scenes were masked for only 2.50 seconds, a small but significant difference. That is, the unconscious mind detected something incongruent about these pictures: a woman puts a chessboard into the oven, the cocked arrow is replaced by a tennis racket, and the basketball becomes a watermelon. The psychologists made sure that both congruent and incongruent images were truly invisible and could not be distinguished from one another when masked in this way. This discovery implies that the unconscious can recognize something is amiss in these images, that the object handled by the person in the image is not appropriate to the context.
How the mind recognizes that something is wrong is puzzling. Maybe because the vast and tangled neural networks of the cerebral cortex that encode images have learned that certain objects go together but others do not (akin to the software programs—bots—that Google and other search engines employ to trawl the Internet to list all images, sentences and Web pages so when you search for them they are readily accessible). Given the sheer infinite number of possible pairings of objects and context, is this solution likely to be done by the brain? Or maybe the masking techniques suppress visibility of the image but do not fully eliminate conscious access to them? Only more research will tell. In this way, we shall ultimately know the capabilities of the cognitive unconscious and the truly essential function that consciousness plays in our life.
This article was originally published with the title Probing the Unconscious Mind.
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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