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Ever do a double take without knowing why? Your unconscious mind may have noticed something that did not fit your expectations. A study published in June in Psychological Science suggests that the mind’s unconscious awareness is capable of analyzing everyday situations for red flags and alerting our conscious brain about them. Psychologists at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem showed subjects various scenes, masked by moving geometric shapes, which gradually became easier to see. Subjects were instructed to press a button as soon as they could make out the scene. They hit the button faster for incongruous situations—such as a basketball player dunking a watermelon—as compared with typical ones, which suggests that the unconscious mind was differentiating between them. [For more on this work and unconscious awareness, turn to this issue's Consciousness Redux column.]
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11 Comments
Add CommentYes. Often, people mistake this for 'intuition' - the belief that you have some mystical ability to perceive things before they happen or 'see' past events that you did not witness. It's self delusion in those cases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut this does not explain why automobile drivers do not see motorcyclists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the motorcyclists should wear watermelon helmets.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis would explain why so many people immediately notice a gorilla walking across the basketball court during a game. Oh, wait. It completely begs the question, "So why do so many people completely fail to notice a gorilla walking across a basketball court during a game?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood observation Dude. I didn't read the primary report by Mudrik (Integration Without Awareness: Expanding the Limits of Unconscious Processing), but perhaps she addressed this contradiction in her findings--let's hope? All in all, I'm not sure why this experiment is news worthy. Many cognitive scientists already believe that most 'processing' is unconscious--safely walking and navigating through your surroundings likely requires tremendous processing demands that occur with minimal conscious awareness. When was the last time you consciously thought about how to move your legs in sequence to walk down a flight of stairs?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article doesn't go into it, but I wonder how many symptoms of mental illness are related to our subconscious making mistakes or misinterpreting queues. Then presenting our conscious with a muddled view of the world. In other words, is a dysfunctional subconscious 'reality check' process the cause of psychosis?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet me restate: "Could a dysfunctional subconscious 'reality check' process be a cause of psychosis?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, the unconcious, or better our subliminal perceptions, can detect incongruities in an scene, as one of the most important tasks for the subliminal perceptions is helping us in the mind's main goal or activity: survival. The unconscious is a different thing, and sadly, it can be re-programmed to some kind of self destructive or self punishment orientation, for example, as having break some taboo in the opposition to a parental or authority figure, and even if it doesn't reach the point of suicide, it enormously impairs the mind efficiency in solving every day life tasks. Beware of transfer !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone happen to have a link to the original study? I can't seem to find it
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince we all live a moment in the past,the brain needs to predict our next move,and we are not conscious of this process.Take the example of a baseball batter.They have to predict the pitch before the ball is thrown because of the time lapse that occurs when seeing the ball and then swinging.If this is not seeing the future I don't know what is?If someone has another explanation please post it?There are many other examples like this to numerous to mention.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn answer to the question in your first paragraph, Melinda Moyer; I did a double-take when I read the article you wrote about Allergies. As a matter of fact, I did many, many double-takes at the excess of erroneous information in that article .... but I certainly knew why. The reason for the many double-takes was that one presumes that an article that is published under the umbrella of a journal that refers to itself as "Scientific American"; to be accurate. But,the information you offered up in the article on allergies was so glaringly incorrect, that I would be hard-pressed to consider anything you put forth as being credible. What I'm not clear on, that you should want to shed light on is, what was your motivation for providing such inaccurate information? Particularly under your own name?
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