Yet his momentary insight was surely a suspicion that the structure of benzene might be circular; and surely he must have followed endless false trails before alighting on the correct answer. And if that were true, this chain of events would, of course, require unconscious thought, and lots of it. But the checking and analysis comes after the momentary mental flash, not before.
W e might wonder how it is that the right perceptual interpretation happens to come to mind. Could it be that, while we may be unable actively to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, our brains can unconsciously search our mental archives, pulling out, as it were, useful files for later use? Then, on returning to a problem, some vital clues to the solution might have been ready to hand—and a flash of insight would result.
Can we find evidence for unconscious memory search? With my colleagues Elizabeth Maylor and Greg Jones at the University of Warwick, I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind.
Rather than choose deep mathematical reasoning, we chose the simplest possible task: retrieving familiar words from memory. Suppose, for example, that I ask you to name as many foods as you can. Despite the vastness of your food vocabulary, you will almost certainly find yourself slowing down surprisingly quickly, with flurries of fruits, bursts of baked goods, and surges of seasonings, punctuated by surprising, and ever longer, silences.
Suppose, instead, I ask you to name as many countries as you can. Although there are or so countries recognized by the United Nations, most of which will be familiar to you, you will, again, struggle sooner than you might expect.
But what if I asked you to name as many food items or countries as possible? The only way to do this is to focus on foods for a while, and then move over to countries when foods are getting tricky, and then back to foods again when you are running out of countries—and so on.
This is interesting in itself—perhaps indicating that our memories are organized so that foods are linked to other foods, and countries are linked to other countries.
But this switching strategy is also interesting for another reason: It provides a way of finding out how far we are able to continue to search for the category we are not currently generating.
If unconscious thought is impossible, any background racing around our mental archives is entirely ruled out. That is, if we are scouring our memories for foods, we cannot simultaneously search for countries, and vice versa. If so, we should generate foods or countries more rapidly than we can generate one or the other alone. Suppose, instead, that while focusing our conscious minds on generating foods, unconscious mental search processes can work away, in the background, unearthing a string of countries.
Then, when we switch to countries, we should be able rapidly to download these—they would not need to be found afresh, because unconscious search would have identified them already. Indeed, Freud has underestimated the importance of the unconscious, and in terms of the iceberg analogy, there is a much larger portion of the mind under the water. The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a significant degree of high level, sophisticated processing to the unconscious.
Whereas Freud viewed the unconscious as a single entity, psychology now understands the mind to comprise a collection of modules that has evolved over time and operate outside of consciousness. For example, universal grammar Chomsky, is an unconscious language processor that lets us decide whether a sentence is correctly formed. Separate to this module is our ability to recognize faces quickly and efficiently, thus illustrating how unconscious modules operate independently.
Finally, while Freud believed that primitive urges remained unconscious to protect individuals from experiencing anxiety, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that most information processing resides outside of consciousness for reasons of efficiency, rather than repression Wilson, McLeod, S.
Unconscious mind. Simply Psychology. Bargh, J. The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54 7 , Freud, S. A general introduction to psychoanalysis , trans. Joan Riviere. Greenwald, A. 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.
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. Get helpful tips and guidance for everything from fighting inflammation to finding the best diets for weight loss Stay on top of latest health news from Harvard Medical School. Recent Blog Articles.
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