New Technology Opening Old Doors To Theories of the Mind

dys

C,mon----dive into deep water----I've never known you to be this cautious before)))))))))

freud
I share your confusion, Dyslexia. There needs to be a lexicon/typology of different kinds of out-of-awareness experience. When we sleep that is one kind of unconscious, when I bring to your attention the sensations in your fanny as you sit on your chair, sensations you were not aware of until I brought them to your attention, that's another kind of unconscious. And those deeply repressed emotions and thoughts that psychoanalysis seeks to bring to consciousness are another level. By the way, the sensations of sitting on your chair provide an example of how MOST of our experience is out-of-awareness. We would suffer a great incapitating perceptual overload if we were unable to select only a relevant portion of the full spectrum of perceptions and emotions for given situations. And the selection process reflects both personality and cultural determinants. BTW I prefer the term SUBconscious for phenomena which is less than conscious but available to consciousness, as when I brought your attention to your fanny sensations, and UNconscious for repressed phenomena which can only come to awareness after great effort and the assistance of a psychoanalyst and her techniques.

Thanks JL, you have clarified the unconscious/subconscious differenciation. And defined the unconscious better than I could. Now let me go a little further. I'll just talk about Freud's or Freudian ideas of the subconscious for now and when I get home, I'll check a book or two for an attempt at the neurobiological definition which is more......well, neurobiological.

Given an always active mind, only a small part of the activity of the mind is conscious. The mind's activity consists of feelings, ideas, needs (drives/motivations). Freud thought of the unconscious at first as a hydrolic system. Energy/drives, expressed in the form of a wish pushing for expression in the conscious mind. In other words, the "mind" contained wishes that sought to be gratified. (That is, we want what we want.) And Freud originally believed there was a barrier or repression preventing expression. Eventually Freud had the idea that these wishes can come into conflict with each other, with reality and with the will of parents and others. For this reason the mind (the person with a mind) pushes against awareness of these conflicting forces. Psychoanalysis is thought to work because the analyst can help the patient identify methods by which he/she try to avoid awareness of unconscious wishes as well as identify what those wishes are. Once known, the patient is able to make better, more reality based decisions about what should be done about them. With knowledge, the person can try to achieve maximum gratification with a minimum of unpleasure (anxiety, depression, etc.)

Lola - you think it's possible to get anxiety and depression twisted around to be pleasurable? Thinking of the criminal mind....

Husker, is that a question? Or did you think I was saying that anxiety and depression could be pleasurable? There is sado/masochism in which pain and inflicting it can be pleasurable in a perverse sense.........but I'm not sure what you're asking/saying. Please say a bit more.

Lola

You as a professional psychoanalyst yourself, seem to agree with a substantial portion of Freuds theory. Where exactly do you make a departure from his teachings?

Do you consider unconscious and sub-conscious as interchangeable? I can find practically nothing in print regarding sub-conscious. As I told you I'm a reductionist where ever it seems logical, therefore with unconscious I consider it to be a realm where some mechanism in the brain(probably the hypothalamus) has shut off the flow of sensory input so the brain can consolidate the information received during waking hours. The mass of neurons(called the brain) remains just as active or more active than it was during waking hours building memory and learning. Is there any contolling realm that now takes over and guides the activity of the neurons----is this where the sub-conscious comes into play? It would seem that any thoughts or dreams are just random bits and pieces or is there orderly chaos of some sort?

Lola - lol at me! I stepped in a pile of me own do-do. Geesh I haven't thought about this stuff for 20 years. Gotta scrub off those memory cells.

Deleted due to error in editing

freud
I've never been too impressed by psychoanalysis as a therapy, at least as a treatment for most of the ails of non-psychotic people. I tend to favor cognitive therapy for the normally dysfunctional, the people Dr. Phil talks to, and chemical therapy for the bona fide psychotic. Nevertheless, I would not say that the long duration and expense of psychoanalysis is not for anybody. Self-knowledge is a value in itself. But what I do admire most about Freud was the revolution he brought to our thinking about thinking itself. He showed us that we are not as much in control as we imagine. Reason and logic were considered to be the hallmarks of the sane mind, assuming that people were completely conscious of their experience. After Freud we know how naive that was. We know now that to a great extent reason is the slave of passions, particularly unconscious passions. Indeed, we often use our powers of reason to defend ourselves from realities that cause anxiety. Freud called this rationalization. Freud enlarged our conception of the human mind (following insights from Dostoyevski--read The Possessed for examples of how Dostoyevski depicted characters acting in terms of unconscious motives).

Perception, thank you for the additional links; as usual, the result after reading them is that I have more questions than answers, which is what makes this subject so interesting. In one of your posts you said:

I also think of the sub-conscious as monitoring the thinking process during waking hours and perhaps cateloging events for input during the shaping of the memory during subsequent sleep.

Husker mentioned the effectiveness of advertising and marketing, which follows one of the theories that false memories are easily induced--that the brain is malleable.

JLN said:
Indeed, we often use our powers of reason to defend ourselves from realities that cause anxiety. Freud called this rationalization.

Yet, one of the links (it's late and I can't remember which one--possibly Lola's) says that modern theory disagrees with Freud's opinion that traumatic experiences are locked in the subconscious. Instead, according to the link, we tend to clearly remember traumatic experiences.

If this is true, how can anyone who has had a traumatic experience function normally? Wouldn't the memory be so distracting and possibly frightening, that it would interfere with our ability to focus on our jobs and responsibilities? This is where rationalization would come in, but is it unconscious or subconscious, could parasomnia (Kara's link) be induced by this conflict? And since our brains are so malleable, how much can we trust our memories, especially the traumatic ones?

Another question I have is why on earth do I get into these threads when it gets so late? I'm off to bed, perchance to dream...

Is there any difference between something that is unconscious and something that doesn't exist?

I have never seen my unmirrored face, does it exist?

I have never perceived my internal organs, do they exist?

Point is, cause and effect may only come into existence upon perception.

We only ever perceive or are aware of fragments of things, we never see the whole of them, the whole of our bodies. Where does this unconscious reside? Where is the back of my head? In another universe?

How can it exist if it's not being perceived?


There is a Zen saying, "Take nothing for granted"

Twyvel

There was a time when we thought that accept for occasional dreams, brain activity stopped when asleep. Micro-imaging has proven that is nonsense. While the mind and it's activities prove to be overwhelming in complexity I think it not useful to indulge in such frivolous speculation. However there is one thing you said that I believe to be pertinent,"cause and effect can only come into existence upon perception". Perception is the doorway to each person's reality and from there social constructs form the remainder of that person's reality.

Dianne

Thanks for your comments and the apparent contradiction in the article. I tried to go back and read Lola's link but it had expired on my browser. Lola can confirm this of course but it would seem that Freud must be correct when he says that truly traumatic events must remain locked in the subconscious for that very reason----we would not be able to function in all likelyhood.

freud
Yes, Diane, I think it's partly because of Freud's "revolution" that you can ask the important question, "can we trust our memories?"

JL

Re: trusting memories----I further predict that future micro-imaging will prove that imbalances of critical neurochemicals will cause faulty memories which in turn will cause flawed decisions.

Perception, I disagree that any of twyvel's questions were frivolous. With all the new brain imaging technology and with quantum theory, our perceptions and knowledge are changing drastically, turning our understanding of consciouness, even the world and the universe, upside down.

I know very little about zen or Bhuddism(sp?), but some of the concepts seem to coincide with quantum theory.

Here is a link to a short article on quantum theory and perception... http://www.ru.org/31realit.html.

and here is the last paragraph of the article:
The first scientific questioning of the concept of physical reality came with Niels Bohr's 'Copenhagen' interpretation of the quantum theory, which maintained that there was no deep reality, only a description of it. A BBC TV programme speculated that, perhaps, some time in the future, our present view of the universe would be seen as mistaken, our present scientific theories as myths. Our minds and thinking shape our perception of the world. The new paradigm of the future will view a universe where consciousness is the primary reality, from which physical reality is derived.

The way I read this is that, unless twyvel sees his/her face in a mirror or it is veiwed (perceived) by someone else, perhaps it doesn't exist at that moment, or it exists in another form.

This thread is getting very interesting, and I have lots to add to the discussion. But I must wait until this afternoon. I do want to say though, just very quickly, two things. 1. About tramatic events. The mind/brain does not deal with trauma in the same way everytime for every person. There are lots of variables about trauma, such as, at what age was the trauma experienced, was it a one time thing or was it chronic, was the trauma due to an abandonment or otherwise failure of trust of a loved one? etc. But the biggest variable is what methods the individual has developed for managing the feeings associated with the trauma. Affect management is a huge subject and very pertinent to our discussion. But with brain research, we know now what Freud did not know. It is possible to literally forget. Synapses or pathways to a specific memory in the brain can become totally dysfunctional, disconnected. But it's not the trauma itself which causes most problematic symptoms. The cause has much more to do with the method, developed by the traumatized person for managing the feelings. That's stated very poorly, but I'm pressured for time.

2. twyvel, the unconscious, like consciousness is located in the brain. There is no other place for it to be. It is us. That's why Freud called it, Das Ich, the I. It is in the English translation by a man named Strachey, that the "I" was changed to the "Id." But here is another way in which we have learned more than Freud knew (initially, in the early part of his work). The unconscious is not limited to wishes and drives, defenses and punishments can also be unconscious. Freud actually reasoned this out himself, through the process of clinical observation. And now we understand even better how it has to do with brain functioning. And brain functioning has to do, eventually with how a person manages feelings. I know that sounds circular. I'll work on it when I get home later this afternoon.

Dianne

Let me explain my reasoning for the "frivolous" comment. And thanks to Lola for stating that the unconscious is located in the brain "because" there is no place else for it to be. Some things are self evident----I think we approach a real danger of considering many self evident phenomena irrelevant because of some new theory such as Quantum particle theory. While it is true that some objects are not as they seem(due to atomic structure for example) I like to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground until one of my "self evident" truths has been exploded.

I think I'm correct in saying that Einstein could not accept quantum theory and while I do admit the possibility that all things are interconnected, I cannot yet accept any relevance of the human thinking system to quantum theory. Until proof otherwise and in order to maintain my sanity, I like to think of the brain/mind activity as being more neural activity than some transcendental mumbo jumbo.

The human ability to imagine anything when properly harnassed and controlled is capable of marvelous creation but it is also on the edge and in danger of slipping over the edge.

mind
Twyvel, you say that cause and effect may come into existence only upon perception. I'm not sure I understand that yet...working on it. But I WOULD say that cause and effect come into existence upon CONCEPTION (was that what you meant?). When we want to "explain" a phenomenon, we usually want to do so in terms of causality. What caused the phenomenon,? How, and perhaps why, did it come into being? We then frame the problematical phenomenon as an "effect" and look for its corresponding cause or causes. The world does not consist of actual causes and effects. Noone has ever bumped into a cause or an effect. These are not things we perceive; they are notions good to think with. This leads me to a problem discussed in another thread (on indeterminism). Just because we can gain limited but useful results from causal explanations (based on the imposed constructs of cause and effect), this does not justify our thinking of the universe in terms of a deterministic model of reality. Sorry for the digression.

mind
Yes, Perception, consciousness and unconsciousness can only be located in the (material) BRAIN because they ARE functions of the brain (and the mentalists/philosophical idealists would insist that "brain" itself is a concept, a function of non-material MIND).

But I really sympathize with and appreciate your (legitimate) anxiety to defend long standing and useful truisms against the shock of revolutionary discoveries. This is not just because you are conservative. It's a necessary defense. I hold that ALL our knowledge is contingent, not to mention temporary. The conclusions of quantum theorists only "make sense," which is to say are "useful" at the sub-atomic level, while the principles of Newton and his descendants are only useful at a level consistent with our visiable world. Explanation/understanding of the universe at both its macro and micro levels require different epistemologies. That's a simple fact. We must accept a level of naivete when discussing macro phenomena (i.e., we are ignoring its micro substratum) and when discussing micro phenomena we must do the same (i.e, we cannot build bridges that stand on the basis of quantum mechanics). The bottom line is that all of this is false in the sense that knowledge is RELATIVE to context. I find refuge from such anxieties by means of what little I understand of eastern mysticism and good old American pragmatism (William James and, now, Richard Rorty).