The Ascendancy of the Unconscious Mind

Scientists are beginning to zero in on the different types of unconscious brain activity which underlie and inform ordinary conscious awareness. From mathematics to music to visual awareness to moods, our unconscious minds form the foundation and framework for whatever our conscious minds choose to build.

We have looked at Daniel Kahneman's theories of the fast mind (intuitive, automatic, unconscious) and the slow mind (conscious, deliberative) and discovered that although we cannot live without our fast intuitive minds, we cannot altogether trust them either. Regardless, since we are stuck with this mode of cognition, we had best set about understanding it as well as we can.

Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see.

Unconscious Arithmetic
The first experiment is a collaboration among Filip Van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, Floris P. de Lange of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris. Dehaene, director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, is best known for his investigations of the brain mechanisms underlying counting and numbers. 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...

...What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem set out to test the extent to which the unconscious can integrate all the information in any one picture into a unified and coherent visual experience. Giulio Tononi and I had proposed in the last Consciousness Redux column [September/October 2011] that the ability to rapidly integrate all the disparate elements within a scene and place them into context is one of the hallmarks of consciousness.

The Israeli researchers used “continuous flash suppression,” a powerful masking technique, to render images invisible. A series of rapidly changing, randomly colored patterns was flashed into one eye while a photograph of a person carrying out some task was slowly faded into the other eye. For a few seconds, the picture is completely invisible, and the subject can see only the colored shapes. Because the images become progressively stronger, eventually they will break through, and the subject will see them. It is like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility fading with time and revealing what is underneath... _More at SciAm

The above short SciAm description of the two lines of research, should serve as a teaser for those interested in how the brain works. Here is more information from researchers themselves:

Von Opstal et al Rapid Parallel Semantic Processing of Numbers Without Awareness (Abs)

Full PDF article Von Opstal, Dehaene, De Lange

Integration Without Awareness: Expanding the Limits of Unconscious Processing (PDF) Mudrik, Lamy, et al

More publications from Lamy's lab

George Alvarez: Representing Multiple Objects as an Ensemble Enhances Visual Cognition (PDF) How unconscious ensemble coding helps us effortlessly keep track of multiple objects.

It is only by understanding both our strengths and our weaknesses that we can plot our path through life's challenges and obstacles. In many ways, our intuitive and automatic unconscious minds are both a strength and a weakness.

Certainly if we do not put in the effort to understand our own minds, eventually someone else will. And they are not as likely to have our best interests at heart.

Pardon Me, Madame: Is That My Arm Up Your Dress?

How odd that Charlie would not know that it is his arm up Mrs. Randthorpe-Fitzgerald's dress. But we all remember that Charlie suffered an infarction of his right insular cortex following a stroke last spring. Yes, of course, Charlie must be suffering from left sided neglect -- he doesn't know that his left arm is actually his.

But wait a minute! It is Charlie's right arm that is up Mrs. R-F's dress. Charlie, you dog! And why is Mrs. R-F smiling?

This is where the insula is located -- hidden beneath the temporal lobe (cut away in the illustration). It is like an island into itself, and is in many ways like a separate brain. But the insula happens to be crucial to a person's sense of self, and to his consciousness. Here is how:

The insula has increasingly become the focus of attention for its role in body representation and subjective emotional experience. In particular, Antonio Damasio has proposed that this region plays a role in mapping visceral states that are associated with emotional experience, giving rise to conscious feelings. This is in essence a neurobiological formulation of the ideas of William James, who first proposed that subjective emotional experience (i.e. feelings) arise from our brain's interpretation of bodily states that are elicited by emotional events. This is an example of embodied cognition.

Functionally speaking, the insula is believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. More specifically, the anterior insula is related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, while the posterior insula is related more to auditory-somesthetic-skeletomotor function. Functional imaging experiments have revealed that the insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness.

Functional imaging studies have also implicated the insula in conscious desires, such as food craving and drug craving. What is common to all of these emotional states is that they each change the body in some way and are associated with highly salient subjective qualities. The insula is well situated for the integration of information relating to bodily states into higher-order cognitive and emotional processes. The insula receives information from "homeostatic afferent" sensory pathways via the thalamus and sends output to a number of other limbic-related structures, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex, as well as to motor cortices. ^[45]

A study using magnetic resonance imaging has found that the right anterior insula was significantly thicker in people whomeditate. ^[46]

_Wapedia

It is remarkable to think that such a small, hidden patch of cortex could be so pivotal to the "soul" of each human being. Al Fin has long championed the concept of "Embodied Cognition", the idea that a mind must have a body in order to be functionally conscious. Particularly when one's consciousness rests so crucially upon a sense of self.

The insula is also thought to be important in the act of decision-making including, perhaps, the making of moral decisions. That makes sense, given the importance of the insula to one's internal body sense, or "gut sense."

Many of our decisions are based upon gut instincts, as it were. Some acts and people "make us sick", while others leave us weak, strong, or make our heads hurt. The way our bodies feel about things can influence us far more than we realise.

And so we leave the insulae of one armed Charlie and Mrs. R-F in the parlour, performing an ancient "dance of the insular cortices."

Meanwhile we may contemplate how it would be possible to insert an insula-like processor into a machine brain, to give it a sense of embodiment. It would be but a bare beginning, of course. But it would be a rational beginning.