After noon. You received a call from
Craig and Alta and you are staying at a small hotel in Oak Park and from there
will take the train into downtown Chicago – three nights and two days – then leave
on a Thursday in May. You four are excited for this next adventure in
friendship and travel. You swept upstairs and did your forty minutes of
exercises just like yesterday. In a few moments you are off to lunch at
Smashburgers. Below is an article you differed with and sent a note to the
author accordingly. Add and post. – Amorella
1237
hours. I bolded the below statement that is false, at least as far as I am
concerned.
** **
BBC Future
18 February 2015
Your
subconscious is smarter than you might think
Tom Stafford
We feel that
we are in control when our brains figure out puzzles or read words, says Tom
Stafford, but a new experiment shows just how much work is going on underneath
the surface of our conscious minds.
It is a
common misconception that we know our own minds. As I move around the world,
walking and talking, I experience myself thinking thoughts. "What shall I
have for lunch?", I ask myself. Or I think, "I wonder why she did
that?" and try and figure it out. It is natural to assume that this
experience of myself is a complete report of my mind. It is natural, but wrong.
There's an
under-mind, all psychologists agree – an unconscious, which does a lot of the
heavy lifting in the process of thinking. If I ask myself what is the capital
of France the answer just comes to mind – Paris! If I decide to wiggle my
fingers, they move back and forth in a complex pattern that I didn't
consciously prepare, but which was delivered for my use by the unconscious.
The big debate in psychology is
exactly what is done by the unconscious, and what requires conscious thought.
Or to use the title of a notable paper on the topic, 'Is
the unconscious smart or dumb?' One popular view is that the
unconscious can prepare simple stimulus-response actions, deliver basic facts,
recognise objects and carry out practised movements. Complex cognition involving planning, logical reasoning and combining
ideas, on the other hand, requires conscious thought.
A recent
experiment by a team from Israel scores points against this position. Ran Hassin and colleagues used a neat visual
trick called Continuous Flash Suppression to put information into
participants’ minds without them becoming consciously aware of it. It might
sound painful, but in reality it’s actually quite simple. The technique takes
advantage of the fact that we have two eyes and our brain usually attempts to
fuse the two resulting images into a single coherent view of the world.
Continuous Flash Suppression uses light-bending glasses to show people
different images in each eye. One eye gets a rapid succession of brightly
coloured squares, which are so distracting that when genuine information is
presented to the other eye, the person is not immediately consciously aware of
it. In fact, it can take several seconds for something that is in theory
perfectly visible to reach awareness (unless you close one eye to cut out the
flashing squares, then you can see the 'suppressed' image immediately).
Hassin’s key experiment involved
presenting arithmetic questions unconsciously. The questions would be things
like "9 - 3 - 4 = " and they would be followed by the presentation,
fully visible, of a target number that the participants were asked to read
aloud as quickly as possible. The target number could either be the right
answer to the arithmetic question (so, in this case, "2") or a wrong
answer (for instance, "1"). The amazing result is that participants
were significantly quicker to read the target number if it was the right answer
rather than a wrong one. This shows that the equation had been processed and
solved by their minds – even though they had no conscious awareness of it –
meaning they were primed to read the right answer quicker than the wrong one.
The result
suggests that the unconscious mind has more sophisticated capacities than many
have thought. Unlike other tests of non-conscious processing, this wasn’t an
automatic response to a stimulus – it required a precise answer following the
rules of arithmetic, which you might have assumed would only come with
deliberation. The report calls the technique used "a game changer in the
study of the unconscious", arguing that "unconscious processes can
perform every fundamental, basic-level function that conscious processes can
perform".
These are
strong claims, and the authors acknowledge that there is
unconscious
minds. Like icebergs, most of the operation of our minds remains out of sight.
Experiments like this give a glimpse below the surface.
If you have
an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these
columns please get in touch @tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.uk.
From -
http://www.bbcDOTcom/future/story/20150217-how-smart-is-your-subconscious
** **
Evening. Carol is on the phone with one of
her sisters. Carol created an ‘open omelet’ for supper – lots of goodies with
eggs – very good. You watched the news and “Person of Interest” and will get
back to “Mysteries of Laura”. Your cough has returned and Carol is asking you
to go to the doctor’s tomorrow morning. She is not much better either –
whatever you have lingers on and on. Later, dude. Post. - Amorella
Mid-afternoon. After lunch you drove to
Mike’s Carwash for a cleaning this sunny afternoon then to Lowe’s to pick up
bird food as you were running out in this cold weather. – Amorella
1552 hours. Such little things you
mention, Amorella, but I can see how that after death their meaning might have
more significance, that is, as an added dimension to what life is, not what life means.
2050 hours. Earlier this afternoon I
sent a quick note to Mr. Stafford apologizing for my error. In my anger I
stopped reading with the bolded comment in the article above and assumed he was
going to say the opposite of what he did. Very embarrassing on this end. I
should have read it through – all those years of teaching English and I made a
very stupid mistake I would have been all over my students for.
Later, post. - Amorella
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