Neuroscience of the Nonconscious Mind

Rajendra Badgaiyan

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780128163764
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

Neuroscience of the Nonconscious Mind includes novel concepts and insights on the brain mechanisms that control nonconscious mental functions, some of which were developed in the author's laboratory. The book describes neuroscience of conventional nonconscious mental functions, along with not so conventional functions like creativity, hypnosis and extrasensory perception, thus making it a very unique reference. This thought provoking book for students of mind, brain and consciousness will help explain concepts and introduce the science behind the nonconscious.

• Explains how the brain controls nonconscious cognition and behavior
• Describes how the nonconscious mind helps us make smart decisions
• Includes historical perspectives and interesting experiments on nonconscious cognition
• Presents novel, thought provoking ideas concerning neural signal processing
• Describes situations where the nonconscious mind is smarter than the conscious mind

Chapter 1

Historical perspective

Abstract

Systematic scientific study of the nonconscious mind began a little over a hundred years ago. These studies have firmly established the nonconscious mind as a scientific entity. In recent years, a number of protocols have been developed to study nonconscious processes and neuroimaging experiments have identified some of the brain areas and neural networks involved in their processing.

Keywords

Subliminal stimuli; consciousness; nonconscious mind; vedic philosophy; priming; psychotherapy; Patanjali; dichotic listening

It is indeed surprising that we do not have acceptable definitions of the conscious and nonconscious mind even though these concepts were developed thousands of years ago in ancient civilization. Ancient Indian literature, the Vedas, which originated in oral form around 4000 BCE (but scripted around 1500 BCE) have detailed descriptions of the conscious and nonconscious mental functions.¹ These concepts, however, remained unappreciated for centuries possibly because scriptures were in Sanskrit, an old and dead language. The Vedas have now been translated into many languages. The basic concepts of consciousness described in Vedas are as relevant today as they were centuries ago.

The following is a brief snapshot of those concepts. I have spelled Sanskrit words to sound as close to the original phonation as possible. Therefore, spellings in this book may differ from those used by other authors. Additionally, because ancient Indian scriptures evolved over centuries, there are several versions and schools of thought with slightly different concepts. For the sake of simplicity I have discussed only those concepts that are accepted by most scholars. Vedas are a collection of many scriptures and the word literally means “knowledge” in Sanskrit. Therefore Vedas are considered books of knowledge.

The Vedas describe two forms of consciousness: universal consciousness called brahman and personal consciousness called atman.^1–3 These two forms are practically indistinguishable because atman is a part of brahman (Fig. 1.1). There is only one brahman but each individual has atman. Therefore there is no difference in atman of two people. It imparts basic consciousness, which is same in all members of the human species. What distinguishes people is their inner self or antahkaran, which is a form of atman. This inner self has four components: ahankar (ego), buddhi (intellect), manas (senses), and chitta (mind). Further, chitta or mind consists of five entities: jagrat chitta (wakeful consciousness), sanskar chitta (subconscious mind), vasana chitta (subsubconscious mind), karan chitta (superconscious mind), and anukaran chitta (subsuperconscious mind). Thus Vedic literature describes two forms of nonconscious mind: sanskar chitta and vasana chitta. Sanskar is the upper layer of subconscious and is a stage just beneath conscious layer. It is supposed to be a repository of past experience. Vasana chitta operates at a deeper level and it provides a framework for the mind to work. It defines a person’s personality by guiding his or her thoughts and actions.

Figure 1.1 Schematic representation of a simplified vedic concept of consciousness.

These concepts are not much different from those of the modern western philosophy developed in the 19th century after publication of the book Philosophy of the Unconscious.⁴ The original German version was published by philosopher Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (Fig. 13.1) in 1869 and an English translation appeared in 1884. Hartmann bundled vedic concepts with contemporary German philosophy and proposed three forms of nonconscious/unconscious mind: absolute unconscious, which is a substance of the universe and is the source of all other unconscious; physiological unconscious, which is at work in the origin, development, and evolution of living beings; and psychological unconscious, which lies at the source of our conscious mental life. This concept was further developed by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (Fig. 1.6). In an article titled “The Unconscious,”⁵ published in 1915, Freud suggested that the unconscious mind primarily works as a repository of information and has no processing function. He developed psychoanalytical techniques to bring nonconscious information to conscious awareness and used them to treat psychological disturbances. It is now clear that the nonconscious mind is not merely a repository; it performs high-level cognitive processing while keeping it out of our conscious awareness. Freud also suggested that the unconscious mind modifies our actions based on repressed desires, drives, and motivations.

Since a discussion of philosophical concepts is out of the scope of this book, these concepts will not be discussed. Here, we focus on scientific evidence and concepts.

Evidence of the existence of nonconscious mind was experimentally demonstrated for the first time in 1884 by an American logistician named Charles S. Peirce (Fig. 1.2) at Johns Hopkins University. Peirce was admired as one of the greatest logisticians, philosophers, and mathematicians of the time, but because of his antipathy to the then president of Harvard University Charles Elliot, he could not get a faculty position there. He worked as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins but was dismissed because of an extramarital affair. Peirce died in poverty and lived on donated money raised by his friend William James (Fig. 7.1), a well-known psychologist at Harvard. After death, Peirce left 1650 unpublished manuscripts in over 100,000 pages.

Figure 1.2 Charles Peirce (1839–1914). Conducted experiments on the nonconscious mind. Reprinted from Wikimedia Commons.

Peirce conducted a landmark experiment with Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944). In this experiment he asked volunteers to make an estimate of the weight placed on a pane of a balance and also to estimate the degree of confidence in their answer. He found that despite having very low confidence, estimates were close to the actual weight.⁶ This observation made him believe that volunteers “knew” something that they were not consciously aware of. Peirce conducted another experiment in which volunteers estimated the luminosity of a lamp. He found similar results.

With these experiments, Peirce and Jastrow introduced the nonconscious mind to experimental psychology, but the first major contribution in this area was made by a psychiatrist Boris Sidis (Fig. 1.3). He described most of his work in the book The Psychology of Suggestion, published in 1898.^6,7 Sidis was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States in 1887 to avoid political persecution. After receiving PhD and MD degrees from Harvard University, he joined the faculty of its psychology department. Sidis named his son William James in honor of his friend and the famous psychologist who had the same name. Junior Sidis was consciously raised to be a prodigy. As a result, he was said to be proficient in 40 languages and earned a BA degree from Harvard at age 16. However, those were the only extraordinary achievements of his life. He died at the age of 46 without making a lasting intellectual contribution.

Figure 1.3 Boris Sidis (1867–1923). His experiments provide scientific evidence of the existence of nonconscious mind. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Sidis published many groundbreaking studies on nonconscious perception. He first experimented on hypnotized volunteers and then on himself and finally on nonhypnotized people. He observed that the threshold for visual, auditory, and haptic perception is significantly reduced under hypnosis. They therefore can perceive stimuli that cannot normally be perceived. This observation led him to extend the study on himself. Since Sidis had an amblyopic right eye he was particularly interested in visual perception. With the right eye he could not differentiate whether a printed character was a letter or a number. While experimenting with this eye he tried to guess whether a card had a number or letter printed on it. He found that he could guess correctly significantly above the chance level. Believing that he was perceiving sensory stimuli nonconsciously, he repeated those experiments on healthy volunteers. They were shown cards that had either a number or a letter written on them. Cards were placed at a distance from where volunteers could not read and would see the writing as “dim blurred spots.” They were then asked to guess if the writing was a letter or a number and also to guess which letter or number was printed on the card. To his surprise, volunteers correctly guessed the category (number or letter) in 70% of trials and correctly identified the number or letter in 34% of trials. It was much higher than expected and could not be explained by chance alone. This observation suggested that even though volunteers could not read the print, their brains somehow read it without making them consciously aware of it.

Sidis’ next experiment was equally fascinating. In this experiment he asked volunteers to look at a complicated drawing printed on a card for 10 seconds and then to reproduce it. He also asked them to reproduce one of eight numbers printed on top of the card. The card had another number in the margin. Even though volunteers denied seeing them, 32% of volunteers chose those numbers instead of the one on the top. Based on these observations Sidis developed a psychophysiological theory that suggests that the brain has a second channel for receiving information. From this channel information is selectively passed on to the “upper consciousness.” This concept is remarkably similar to the one we developed recently using neuroimaging data. Our concepts are described in Chapter 2, Nonconscious memory.

Sidis’ experiments suggested that we perceive more than what we know. It led investigators to conduct experiments to determine whether stimuli that cannot be perceived affect our cognition and behavior. Most of these experiments used subliminal stimuli, which are visual stimuli presented briefly for a few milliseconds. Because of the short duration of presentation, stimuli are not consciously perceived. Before in-depth research on cognitive and behavioral influences of these stimuli could be established, subliminal stimuli became a subject of controversy because of allegations of its use by commercial and government entities to alter people’s opinions and behaviors. The most infamous controversy was created by a Detroit-born market researcher James McDonald Vicary (Fig. 1.4). At age 13, Vicary rose to fame as the youngest snake charmer for his ability to comfortably handle snakes. But his real fame began with an “experiment” he conducted in 1957. He claimed that in a Fort Lee, New Jersey movie theater, he repeatedly showed a message “Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca Cola” for 1/3000th of a second. After this subliminal message, the sale of popcorn increased 57.5% and that of Coca Cola increased 18.1%.⁸ It generated a lot of public interest even though his data were challenged by many investigators. When Vicary was forced to repeat the experiment, he was not able to replicate the results and manager of the Fort Lee theater denied any knowledge of such an experiment ever conducted in the theater.

Figure 1.4 Top: James McDonald Vicary (1915–77) as a young snake charmer. He later falsely claimed that subliminal stimuli affect our behavior. Snapshot of a clip originally published in the Detroit News. Bottom: An example of a subliminal camouflaged advertisement. The images at the top right show a magnified view of the camouflaged word “sex” in an advertisement. Image on the top reproduced with permission from Global ImageWork and the one on the bottom reproduced from Open Library.

Despite doubts about veracity of Vicary’s claims, radio and television stations began airing subliminal commercials. This led to introduction of at least two bills in the US Congress to ban subliminal stimuli in 1958 and 1959 (both bills died before voting). Later, in a 1962 television interview, Vicary admitted that the Fort Lee experiment was a gimmick. Despite Vicary’s confession, fascination and commercialization of these stimuli continued unabated. Subliminal stimulus was exploited for commercial purposes by a journalism professor Wilson Bryan Key (1925–2008) who advanced the subliminal story by ...