Psychologists have been talking about the power of the unconscious for more than a century, but so far there is no serious experimental evidence of the existence of this layer of the psyche. We are telling you about one recent study, the authors of which, Professor of Psychology David Oakley and Professor of Neuropsychology Peter Halligan, conducted a series of experiments using fMRI and came to the conclusion that consciousness not only does not control emotions, feelings and thoughts, it, on the contrary, goes on about for them, and after the fact, creates explanations for these feelings and thoughts, thus creating our personal history. This sheds new light on how the conscious and unconscious can interact.
We often assume that our behavior, beliefs, or opinions about something are all the result of careful consideration. It seems to us that a kind of "executive committee" sits inside our head, which thinks, makes plans, comes to conclusions and lets us down the ready-made decisions that we put into practice. For decades, this top-down executive control model prevailed in the minds and suited not only ordinary people, but also scientists.
Most experts today view human consciousness as a combination of two different phenomena. The first is personal consciousness that we experience from one moment to the next and which is the source of knowledge about who we are in the real world and where we are. It helps in recognizing the phenomena of objective reality and allows you to see opportunities and threats. And the second is the content of consciousness: our thoughts, feelings, impressions, intentions and memories.
The article “Chasing the Rainbow: The Unconscious Nature of Being,” published in November 2017 in Frontiers of Psychology, makes a “revolutionary” assertion that in fact our thoughts and feelings are not the result of the work of habitual logic, but are a derivative of fast unconscious processes, and that "consciousness" does not imply an executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the psychological processes we are accustomed to, usually attributed to it. Researchers note that the experience of consciousness is the passive accompaniment of unconscious processes of "internal broadcasting" and the creation of a personal narrative.
Simply put, we do not consciously choose our thoughts or feelings - we just become aware of them and build them into our own story.
Psychoanalysts, relying on their clinical experience, have been talking about this for a whole century, but the use of magnetic resonance imaging of the brain during hypnosis sessions has made it possible to give several more arguments in favor of the primacy of the unconscious mechanisms of our brain in the formation of a person's personality.
The study was organized by David Oakley, emeritus professor of psychology at University College London, and Peter Halligan, professor of neuropsychology at Cardiff University in Wales. They used the hypnotic method, which was used to treat neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric disorders, and in parallel recorded the activity of the subjects' brain in order to trace the presence of signals between the brain and the body.
As a result of experiments, it was possible to identify a pattern showing that in extremely suggestive (suggested) states, people can change their beliefs, mood and perception. For example, the study participants raised their hand even when the brain did not receive a conscious signal about it, and it looked like an unintended action, and the researchers were able to convince the subjects that the aliens forced them to do it.
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Scientists have come to the conclusion that our brains are less designed to generate conclusions and conclusions, and more so to recognize how we are feeling. The authors of the article note that the "content of consciousness" does not come entirely from the "experience of consciousness", but originates in the "unconscious brain activity."
The rainbow metaphor explains this statement well:
The English biologist and popularizer of science Thomas Henry Huxley (Huxley) compared the conscious part of the psyche to something like a steam whistle on a train that accompanies the operation of the engine, but does not have internal influence or control over it (Huxley, 1874).
Thus, personal awareness is real, it is present simultaneously with the unconscious life processes of our brain (or mental sphere), but it is not causal and has no effect on our psychological processes.
The authors write that unconscious activity generates almost all the content of our consciousness through such a mechanism as "continuous self-referential personal narration." Behind the scenes of conscious activity, our thoughts, feelings and emotions about this or that experience interact quite quickly and very effectively, saving our conscious resource, which is necessary for our survival.
What exactly is a continuous “self-referential individual storytelling”? According to the authors, this is the sum of the accumulated experience and the impressions that it once caused.
This "data bank" is not static, it is constantly updated as new life experiences affect us. It is rather a process, it has a fluid and volatile nature, so it is better to call it narration or narrative. Through this process, we can communicate with other people, understand them, grow closer and cooperate for the common good.
In connection with the above, the question arises: how much are we responsible for our behavior, and to what extent is it beyond the control of our consciousness?
Given that most thoughts and feelings are beyond our control, can we be completely responsible for the choices we make, for our opinions, beliefs or behavior? And if we are not fully responsible for this, then who will share this responsibility with us?
In an interview with TheConversation, the researchers say they view "free will and personal responsibility as ideas installed in us by the social order."
These ideas only express the generally accepted opinion about how everything works, but they can contribute to an erroneous understanding of how and why we behave in one way or another and along which path our society develops.
On the other hand, such an installation of the idea of free will helps us to talk about ourselves as a person, to transmit our narrative to the Other, to enrich experience and to form closer ties, promoting social cooperation and evolution.
