5.1 Conscious and Unconscious: The Mind's Eye, Open and Closed

cognitive unconscious

all the mental processes that give rise to a person's thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior even though they are not experienced by the person.

What comes first: brain activity or thinking?

But, as shown in FIGURE 5.2b, the brain also started to show electrical activity before the person reported a conscious decision to move. Although your personal intuition is that you think of an action and then do it, these experiments suggest that your brain is getting started before either the thinking or the doing, preparing the way for both thought and action. Quite simply, it may appear to us that our minds are leading our brains and bodies, but the order of events may be the other way around (Haggard & Tsakiris, 2009; Wegner, 2002).

What are the properties of consciousness that are involved in integrating lots of information and filtering some out?

Consciousness has intentionality, which is the quality of being directed toward an object. Consciousness is always about something. Despite all the lush detail you see in your mind's eye, the kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and feelings and thoughts, the object of your consciousness at any one moment is just a small part of all of this (see FIGURE 5.3). Consciousness has unity, which is resistance to division. As you read this book, your five senses are taking in a great deal of information. Your eyes are scanning lots of black squiggles on a page (or screen) while also sensing an enormous array of shapes, colors, depths, and textures in your periphery; your hands are gripping a heavy book (or computer); your butt and feet may sense pressure from gravity pulling you against a chair or floor; and you may be listening to music or talking in another room, while smelling the odor of your roommate's dirty laundry. Your brain—amazingly—integrates all of this information into the experience of one unified consciousness. Consciousness has selectivity, the capacity to include some objects but not others. While binding the many sensations around you into a coherent whole, your mind must make decisions about which pieces of information to include—and which to exclude. For example, in what has come to be known as the cocktail-party phenomenon, people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby. In dichotic listening situation tests, in which people wearing headphones hear different messages in each ear, participants directed to pay attention to messages in one ear are especially likely to notice if their own name is spoken into the unattended ear (Moray, 1959). Perhaps you, too, have noticed how abruptly your attention is diverted from whatever conversation you are having when someone else within earshot at the party mentions your name Consciousness has transience, or the tendency to change. The mind wanders not just sometimes, but incessantly, from one "right now" to the next "right now" and then on to the next (Wegner, 1997). William James, whom you met way back in the Psychology: Evolution of a Science chapter, famously described consciousness as a "stream" (James, 1890). The stream of consciousness may flow in this way partly because of the limited capacity of the conscious mind. We humans can hold only so much information in our minds at any one moment, so when more information is selected, some of what is currently there must disappear. As a result, our focus of attention keeps changing. The stream of consciousness flows so inevitably that it even changes our perspective when we view a constant object like a Necker cube (see FIGURE 5.4).

What might Freudian slips tell us about the unconscious mind?

Freud looked for evidence of the unconscious mind in speech errors and lapses of consciousness, or what are commonly called Freudian slips. Forgetting the name of someone you dislike, for example, is a slip that seems to have special meaning. Freud believed that errors are not random and instead have some surplus meaning that has been created by an intelligent unconscious mind, even though the person consciously disavows the thoughts and memories that caused the errors in the first place

What aspect of full consciousness distinguishes it from minimal consciousness?

Full consciousness occurs when you know and are able to report your mental state. Being fully conscious means that you are aware of having a mental state while you are experiencing the mental state itself. When you have a hurt leg and mindlessly rub it, for instance, your pain may be minimally conscious. It is only when you realize that your leg hurts, though, that the pain becomes fully conscious. Have you ever been driving a car and suddenly realized that you don't remember the past 15 minutes of driving? Chances are that you were not unconscious but were instead minimally conscious. When you are completely aware and thinking about your driving, you have moved into the realm of full consciousness. Full consciousness involves not only thinking about things but also thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things (Jaynes, 1976; see the Hot Science box). Minimal consciousness is a low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior (Armstrong, 1980). This kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness could even happen when someone pokes you during sleep and you turn over. Something seems to register in your mind, at least in the sense that you experience it, but you may not think at all about having had the experience. It could be that animals or, for that matter, even plants can have this minimal level of consciousness. But because of the problem of other minds and the notorious reluctance of animals and plants to talk to us, we can't know for sure that they experience the things that make them respond.

How do researchers study subjective experience?

Much of consciousness beyond this orientation to the environment turns to the person's current concerns, or what the person is thinking about repeatedly (Klinger, 1975). TABLE 5.1 shows the results of a study where 175 college students were asked to report their current concerns (Goetzman, Hughes, & Klinger, 1994). Keep in mind that these concerns are ones the students didn't mind reporting to psychologists; the private preoccupations of these students may have been different and probably far more interesting.

How can unconscious processes be measured?

One indication of the cognitive unconscious at work is when a person's thoughts or behaviors are changed by exposure to information outside of consciousness. This happens in subliminal perception, when thought or behavior is influenced by stimuli that a person cannot consciously report perceiving.

When do people go out of their way to avoid mirrors?

Self-consciousness is yet another distinct level of consciousness in which the person's attention is drawn to the self as an object (Morin, 2006). Most people report experiencing such self-consciousness when they are embarrassed; when they find themselves the focus of attention in a group; when someone focuses a camera on them; or when they are deeply introspective about their thoughts, feelings, or personal qualities. Looking in a mirror, for example, is all it takes to make people evaluate themselves—thinking not just about their looks, but also about whether they are good or bad in other ways. People go out of their way to avoid mirrors when they've done something they are ashamed of (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). However, because it makes people self-critical, the self-consciousness that results when people see their own mirror images can make them briefly more helpful, more cooperative, and less aggressive (Gibbons, 1990).

How does the capacity for experience differ from the capacity for agency?

The researchers found that people judge minds according to two dimensions: the capacity for experience (such as the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger, consciousness, anger, or fear) and the capacity for agency (such as the ability for self-control, planning, memory, or thought). As shown in FIGURE 5.1, respondents rated some targets as having little experience or agency (the dead woman), others as having experiences but little agency (the baby), and yet others as having both experience and agency (adult humans) People appreciate that minds both have experiences and lead us to perform actions.

Is consciously avoiding a worrisome thought an effective strategy?

These ironic effects seem most likely to occur when the person is distracted or under stress. People who are distracted while they are trying to get into a good mood, for example, tend to become sad (Wegner, Erber, & Zanakos, 1993), and those who are distracted while trying to relax actually become more anxious than those who are not trying to relax (Wegner, Broome, & Blumberg, 1997). Likewise, an attempt not to overshoot a golf putt, undertaken during distraction, often yields the unwanted overshot (Wegner, Ansfield, & Pilloff, 1998).

What part of the brain is active during daydreaming?

This default network became activated whenever people worked on a mental task that they knew so well that they could daydream while doing it (see FIGURE 5.5). The areas of the default network are known to be involved in thinking about social life, about the self, and about the past and future—all the usual haunts of the daydreaming mind (Mitchell, 2006).

repression

a mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps them in the unconscious.

dynamic unconscious

an active system encompassing a lifetime of hidden memories, the person's deepest instincts and desires, and the person's inner struggle to control these forces.

The _____________ unconscious is at work when subliminal and unconscious processes influence thought and behavior.

cognitive

thought suppression

conscious avoidance of a thought

Which of the following is NOT a basic property of consciousness?

disunity

mind-body problem

he issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body.

phenomenology

how things seem to the conscious person

ironic processes of mental control

ironic errors occur because the mental process that monitors errors can itself produce them

René Descartes (1596-1650)

is famous for proposing, among other things, that the human body is a machine made of physical matter but that the human mind or soul is a separate entity made of a "thinking substance.

cocktail-party phenomenon

people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby

Levels of Consciousness

self-consciousness A distinct level of consciousness in which the person's attention is drawn to the self as an object. minimal consciousness A low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior. full consciousness Consciousness in which you know and are able to report your mental stat

dichotic listening

situation tests, in which people wearing headphones hear different messages in each ear

mental control

the attempt to change conscious states of mind.

problem of other minds

the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others

two of the more vexing mysteries of consciousness

the problem of other minds and the mind-body problem.

rebound effect of thought suppression

the tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression,

Currently, unconscious processes are understood as

unexperienced mental processes that give rise to thoughts and behavior.

subliminal perception

when thought or behavior is influenced by stimuli that a person cannot consciously report perceiving.