What is the subconscious and how does it impact our perception?

[Ebolamonk3y]

I have no idea what the heck this is... Anyone have a clue?

 

[Pattielli]

I think it is what lies beneath what you can realize, understand and sense it daily...
There is Nothing people, in my opinion, can forget. Because that "Everything" is lying deep in the other part of their memory which people call "Subconscious", in which what contains will be invoked one day, and this sometimes makes us stunning, and wondering ~"It is so familiar, I seem to have already seen it somewhere"~
The most apparent case to give us an explanation I think is when people are sleeping, and a dream is a place for what seems to be utterly forgotten to get back to...
However, even when we see it again by our own eyes, our feelings for it are not the same as they used to be because it is "time" that faded away everything, no one knows since when such images that are now "passively left" in us "went out of our active lives"...I guess it is caused by the repetation of daily work and the enough duration needed to turn what considers to be "memorable" into "non-memorable", it is a process. Non-memorable I meant doesn't mean Erasable, it is quite similar to Not-included and what is not included will be put in some other places for later use, which i think is the nature of Subconscious...

But, would you tell me why you made this question in this biology forum ? Do you have any ideas about Subconscious and Human biological clock or Human psychological development process ? Honestly, this is a subject that most of us here are really interested in.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

There are all these new age learning programs that exploits the subconcious... I think this is because we have enough material on how to use the conscious and not so much on the subconcious, or, how to bring what we can see each day into a grand perspective with everything else that we saw before...

Not so much into the biological clock or anything like that... Can you explain what human psychological development process is?

Subconcious... I know Freud dealt with that and the surreal and dada movement dealt with those things.

More interesting though is what the mind can do OVER the body... Like stop arterial bleeding, pain control, and many other things...

But... As we talk of these abilities we turn from the Western world to the land of the East so that discussion might not last long unless someone is very familiar with the arts of the east.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I have personal experience that my mind is more than I am consciously aware of, and that important things can go on in my mind to deceive my conscious awareness. So in this sense I am sure that subconscious is real. But all of Freud's theories about the subconscious, those I am skeptical about.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

sA, what exactly do you speak of? Can you gives some illustrative examples and how you did it?

 

[Pattielli]

You were really correct, I was wrong about that, so you shouldnot take what I said that seriously, I just thought what i said could be anything for someone to consider but now it is okay, please forget about what I said... :sm:
About what we study, i think they won't be anything related to what you are doing or asking...I see what you mean...:sm:

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

Further. How does the mind and its "parts" relate to the whole subject of cogniative psychology?

Rather. What is the mind? Because that is like what is energy... Its kind of confusing because we just see energy in different forms without knowing what it is... So would the question "What is the mind" bring about a paradox of thoughts that led to no where?

 

[selfAdjoint]

sA, what exactly do you speak of? Can you gives some illustrative examples and how you did it?

On one occasion when I thought passionately that I wanted to make a certain phone call - and I had to make it that night, I walked several miles looking for a public phone, and didn't find one. I went to bed dejected. I woke up refreshed, the crisis was over, even if I was consciously dissatisfied. I walked back along the same path and counted four public phones that I "hadn't seen" the night before.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

Sounds more like dream relation to solve problems..

 

[BoulderHead]

I have no idea what the heck this is... Anyone have a clue?

Perhaps it is analogous to the hidden processes which take place behind the GUI of an operating system.

 

[Vast]

I was asking this question just recently...

It's said Freud proved that there is actually two minds. But then I was wondering about the different frequencies from a low delta (which is deep sleep) through to beta.(which is highly alert)

The subconscious operates more actively during sleep, and what's complex about the subconscious is the way it throws things together.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

throws what exactly together? Everything or...

 

[Vast]

This is just my observation, what I mean is everything from short term memories to long term memories. In a way it seems to sometimes function quiet randomly, by that I mean that not only are memories stored within the subconscious but also thoughts and emotions. How everything operates together will give you a particular state of mind.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

Is that flexible or is it concrete once the state of mind is formulated? As in... what are the relations between the present now and the past if any...

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

Monique... you have no reply to your field of interest?

 

[Vast]

Say someone has arachnophobia. The reason that they’re afraid of spiders might be because of some traumatic experience with them. Now that fear of spiders is a subconscious imprint, meaning it can be overwriting. So maybe in some circumstances the subconscious can adopt a particular mind frame.
However ones state of mind I think can be very flexible. In regards to the relation between states of mind past and future, these can grow more mature, or they may form behavioral thinking patterns.

 

[Ebolamonk3y]

What about past negative programming? Like we learn to say negative **** to yourself that brings out long drawn out periods of nonproductivity? Don't you think evolution can or could of taken care of that mental state or do you think that is a vital tool in discovering what is our challenge and to overcome it?

 

[Vast]

Human evolution I think definitely can, you often hear people saying kids are smarter these days, but each of us is born with our own individual character, and of course the circumstances we’re in, our environment and such, all of which goes into making us who we are.
Some things we learn at an early age, bad habits and negative programming are all things we can do something about to reprogram.

 

[MonstersFromTheId]

I'll tell you something, in all seriousness, I don't believe there really IS anything like what psychologists describe as a "Sub-conscious mind".
I think that concept really is no different at all than concepts like there having to be a "luminiferous ether" through which light passes in a vacuum. It's a concept that's widely accepted and talked about. It's a concept, that in our current state of near total ignorance, makes perfect and logical sense. It's a concept, that when argued against, will get you labeled as a crackpot. But it's still a bogus idea.
Take dreams for example.
Dreams are something I believe have been all but completely romanticized, as well as rationalized, into being some kind of "window into the inner mind" that doesn't exist, and never did.
My own belief is that the Human mind faces EXACTLY the very same kinds of problems that ANY information storage and manipulating system inevitably MUST face as it works.
As information is constantly accessed, cross referenced, combined with other information, and re-stored in new organizational structures, that information becomes scattered all over it's storage medium, to the point where finding the relevant bits of it required from moment to moment becomes so monumental a task that the system can no longer function.
In that sense, dreams are nothing at all more than what you perceive as your "hard drive" is being "optimized" every night.
Consider the kinds of odd associations that you "see" in dreams all the time.
One moment you're in your car, eating a sandwich. The next, seamlessly, you're on your back porch, with your mother, and the sandwich is now a bowl of Cheerios.
What's really going on here? Some "deep insight into your association with your mother"?
Unlikely.
MUCH more likely, in my opinion, is that a memory (eating a sandwich), has been plucked from a location near another memory (being in your car), either because the "eating a sandwich" memory was in a spot too "far" (in terms of synaptic connections required to reach it) from other memories of that class, and it's now being moved to another area of memory, next to the "bowl of Cheerios" memory of sitting on the back porch with your mom having breakfast when you were ten. Or, just as likely, the "eating a sandwich" memory is being moved from its place next to the "being in your car" memory, because space near the "being in your car" memory has to be opened up to make room for a DIFFERENT memory to be stored there.
Which is why, in the next instant in that dream, you suddenly find yourself no longer on the back porch with the Cheerios and your mom, but again, seamlessly, find yourself walking past the Barnes and Nobel in the mall, that you got to that afternoon using, you guessed it, the car you started out sitting in.
There's a TREMEDIOUS temptation to try to find meanings in your dreams. And quite frankly, I think the primary reason few people want to believe something like this, is that it's a PROFOUNDLY disturbing thought, that while you're dreaming, there IS no sense to be made of your existence, and that while you are dreaming you are quite literally no more sentient than a toaster.
Kind of takes all the romance and mystery out of dreams doesn't it?
It also reduces the dogma taught to students of psychology and psychiatry to the level of superstitious fantasy, no different in my mind, from the accepted rules of numerology and reading Tarot cards. Which really doesn't give the practitioners of those disciplines much in the way of motivation to accept such a simple, but patently heretical notion like this. It makes everything they dedicated years of their life studying pretty much pointless, which is why most of them will fight viciously against the idea. No one likes to think they dedicated years of their life to mastering the rules of superstitious nonsense. It takes someone with a mind like Kepler's to do that, and people like Kepler don't pop up very often.
Dreams mean nothing, nothing at all.
The rest of what passes for the "Subconscious Mind" I think amounts to very little more than a series of relatively simple pattern recognition sub-routines that are always running in the background.
Data that matches the patterns of regular input are ignored. Data that doesn't match the patterns of regular input is flagged for priority processing.
Data that matches the pattern of a threat, is passed to a pre-existing response set of reactions - boost adrenaline levels, duck, scream, bite, hide, fight or flight.
Females are ALWAYS being assessed as potential mates, all of them, all the time.
So are males.
There is no "Subconscious Mind", there are no "hidden motivations" lurking beneath the surface to be exposed, no "suppressed wishes", these are literally no more than the demons, fairies, and capricious gods hurling thunderbolts, of our "modern" times.
And I'll tell you something else that I honestly believe.
One of these days people are going to figure out that the very LAST thing that any "healer of the mind" should be doing is digging up things like "repressed memories". I have a very VERY hard time believing that the Human mind developed the capability of putting certain experiences in the equivalent of your brain's "Recycle Bin". That "Recycle Bin" didn't just pop up out of no where. It undoubtedly developed because it was a critically required ability for the rest of the system to function. Dragging things out of it, I think, is a practice that will someday be regarded in the same light as bleeding people to "let the bad blood out". It's an accepted practice now, just as bleeding people used to be, because we're ignorant, and have precious little idea of what the hell we're doing.
Alchemy before Hooke or Boyle, Astrology before Kepler, Psychology and Psychiatry before - ?

"Id Id Id! It's an obsolete term. Used long ago to describe part of what they used to call the unconscious mind."
Dr. Edward Morbius - FORBIDDEN PLANET MGM Pictures 1956

"But they forgot one thing. Monsters John! Monsters from the Id!"
Lt. 'Doc' Ostrow - FORBIDDEN PLANET MGM Pictures 1956

 

[jammieg]

That was interesting MostersId, I agree that psychiatry may come to be known as mental blood letting someday, but for now it is the best we have. What about arachnophobia? If we could be conditioned to fear spiders given the observation of a certain stimuls response in childhood, might we be conditioned to have other less obvious behaviors due to preceiving other more subtle stimulus responses patterns? One way to overcome irrational fears is to confront them, another is biofeedback.

 

[Vast]

So let's see. When it comes to dreams and the bizarre scenarios they create, there’s obviously associations made between things, between thoughts and memories. Perhaps in the scenario with sandwiches and your mother, the association is you were brought up on those particular sandwiches your mother made you? See to me that’s the subconscious mind, passing information through already established links, making new connections.

Your right about people not wanting to believe something like this, try explaining to someone their consciousness is housed in their brain, and by that I’m referring to remote viewing, telepathy, life after death. People Want to believe consciousness isn’t located in the brain, but these concepts have existed since the dawn of humans, the way humans interpret the world and their own minds has had to evolve.

 

[MonstersFromTheId]

To Jammieg:
Best we've got? I very much agree. Think of it this way- would astronomy have developed had it not been for astrologers like Kepler? Would chemistry have developed w/o alchemy? Possibly, but I doubt it. A science has to start somewhere. It seems to me that in order to arrive at a science you often have to go thru the phase of proto-science.
Psychiatry and psychology I see as still being in a proto-science phase.
Neither has developed a unified system of measurements yet.
Neither has developed a set of determinate equations.
Both predominately rely on postulating theories and then attempting to "prove" those theories by way of bolstering them with statistics. A mistaken approach imo.
There are, only fairly recently, some attempts at making less allegorical observations using mri's, pet scans, and the like, as a brain performs various tasks.
But still, beneath far too much of what passes for psychology and psychiatry, even today, lies the terrible curse of Freudian thinking. Freud, and even Jung, imo, set the study of the mind back and anchored it in what amount to little more than a self supporting series of popularly accepted superstitions, myths, and unsupportable dogma.
I don't know about people being "conditioned" to fear creepy bugs like spiders. I suspect that those are instincts, default synaptic pathways, many brains are predisposed to develop due to genetics. Without medical attention, many insects can kill a Human being, long before it's likely to mate and successfully reproduce, so it's understandable that pathways like that would develop. (Though, again, I see even that idea as being currently no more than a good area for investigation. Until such "pathways" can be literally picked out, and their effects on behavior predicted by determinate equations that can be tested, they are still little more than an untested idea. Rigor is critical to science. Just because something makes sense as an idea means little imo. Ideas are useful starting points, but until they can be rigorously tested, they're good for little more than a topic for conversation like this one.)
Many "fears", fear of bugs, fear of heights, fear of enclosed spaces, I suspect are instincts that came into being as a result of brains predisposed to developing certain behavioral pathways being more likely to survive to reproduce.
What amazes me is that most instincts can apparently be overwritten.
Take the instinct to gasp and hold your breath when you fall into water. That's an instinct I personally had overwritten when I was trained as a scuba diver. The very same instinct that will save your life under normal conditions is VERY likely to KILL you if you're breathing air under unnaturally high pressure in a tank on your back. So I was trained to constantly blow a small amount of air out when I'm in the water. Trained to the point where when I fell off a dock about a year ago, I noticed that I never did hold my breath. I "instinctively" found myself blowing out air slowly from the moment I was in the water, though orienting myself and realizing that I'd fallen in, and making my way to the surface. Apparently a new "instinctive" behavioral pathway had been "burned in" over the original "instinct" to hold my breath. What would be interesting to see is if my children were similarly trained, as well as their children, and their children, if at one point the "default" wiring became the new instinct to always blow a small amount of air out when submerged without any further requirement for training.

To Vast:
I can see your point. But I still question the validity of things like psychoanalysis. That still impresses me as an activity more akin to reading tea leaves than anything else frankly. I also have quite profound reservations about things like allowing the testimony of psychiatrists or psychologists in court for example. That really shouldn't be allowed any more than allowing the testimony of astrologists or numerologists imo.

 

[Innexplicable]

To answer the original question:

Awareness occurs kind of like spotting the biggest drop of water. In the brain every strand of thought is transferred to the parts of the brain that matter, working like a continuous wave. However this occurs all the time, and way too much for us to perciieve. So the brain works by spotting out the most important things, meaning the things that "make the biggest waves". The subconscious is this constant unimportant jibber jabber. Oddly, though one may not be aware of the subconscious thoughts ast the time, they may still turn into memories, and may come back at any given moment.

Why does this matter? When the brain choses the most important thoughts it usually choses things from the outside world such as vision, and the senses in general, which takes up more than 1/3 of the brains capacity. Also, the frontal lobe acts as a filter, making u unaware of the subconscious blah blahs. During sleep however, the frontal lobe is no longer active, giving the subconscious total reign, even though that due to the innactivity of the frontal lobe all logic and reason is lost even though perception continues. The result=falsified reality creatied by subconscious thought.