Unconscious mind: Encyclopedia II - Unconscious mind - Unconscious mental processes

Unconscious mind - Unconscious mental processes

(Note: The next section does confuse the two but has not been removed because of the interesting examples that it gives)

The unconscious is arguably not the most intuitive idea, so why bother with it? What's the evidence? What might the unconscious explain?

• The fact that most bodily processes are not consciously controlled e.g. breathing, blood circulation, blinking
• The fact that something - not the conscious mind - creates the dreams that we wander around in at night
• The mind spontaneously moving from one idea or recollection to another
  • Creative ideas that do not appear to come from conscious thinking
  • Waking up in the morning with an insight or solution to a problem
  • All memory is unconscious. The act of remembering something means bringing the information stored outside our conscious mind into awareness.
  • The fact that we forget certain things but later spontaneously recall them
  • Intuition
• That we learn certain skills so that they become largely automatic eg driving a car, playing a sport
  • The fact that we can run downstairs without thinking where each foot falls.
• The instincts, such as self-preservation and sex, originate on an unconscious level
• The origin of all the bodily urges, such as hunger and thirst, lies outside the conscious mind
• Physical reflexes
• Subliminal perception. It is known that only a very tiny proportion of our bodily stimuli actually reach consciousness. Otherwise we would be swamped by billions of stimuli.
• Perception - a baby is not born able to recognise shapes but has to build up what is called perceptual stability during the first six months of life.
• The mental reaction of responding to a stimulus is not conscious but a pattern that is part of our conditioning eg our response to music
• Hypnosis and trance (Note: the existence of hypnosis as an altered state is controversial; see the article for more).
• Psychological processes such as denial, introjection and psychological projection
• Our own motivation tends to be something we are not consciously aware of, a good example of which is falling in love.
• With perhaps a few exceptions, nearly all our emotions are caused without our being aware of why at the time, though we may analyse them later
• We speak our native tongue without looking for words or consciously constructing grammatical phrases - this is done for us on an unconscious level

• Since without memory both thinking and learning would be impossible, the importance of the unconscious is far greater than may appear.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Unconscious mental processes", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki