Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  Outside consciousness there rolls a vast tide of life which is perhaps more important to us than the little isle of our thoughts which lies within our ken.

  -E. S. Dallas (1866)

  Consider for a moment how hard it is to describe the nature of conscious experience. It is difficult for the simple reason that we cannot observe conscious states directly in anyone but ourselves. How can I be certain that my subjective experience is like yours? We can try to describe our thoughts and feelings to each other, of course, but we have no way of knowing whether the words we use are referring to the same thing, as in the classic enigma of whether my experience of the color red is the same as yours.

  Despite these conundrums, we can at least agree that there is a phenomenon to be understood. We know that there is such a thing as consciousness because we have all experienced it firsthand. Moreover, we can reach consensus about some of the contents of consciousness. Most of us would agree that emotions are an important part of conscious experience, because we have all felt love, anger, and fear. We would agree that consciousness can involve a mental projection of images, because if someone said, "Think of a dachshund," we could easily do so. True enough, I have no way of knowing whether your mental image of a dachshund is anything like mine, but we could at least agree that we can both project such images in the theater of consciousness.

  It is much more difficult to describe the adaptive unconscious, precisely because we do not experience it firsthand. If you said to me, "Think about the last time you made a nonconscious assumption about what another person was like," the best I could give you would be a blank stare. Describing the parts of our mind that are out of view is as difficult as describing the operation of our kidneys or pineal glands. Even more difficult, actually, because we do not have magnetic-resonance-imaging machines that can take pictures of the adaptive unconscious. Thus, the best way to begin describing the parts of our minds we cannot observe directly is perhaps to describe what it would be like to lose our nonconscious minds.

  The Unconscious Takes a Holiday

  Consider a man who awoke one Saturday morning with a terrible malady: the unconscious parts of his mind had stopped functioning, and he had only his conscious mind to guide his thoughts, feelings, and actions-an Aware Head, so to speak. How would he fare? If we had posed this question to Rene Descartes three centuries ago, he would have replied that this man's day would be like any other; what we are aware of is what we think, because there are no other mental processes. A surprising number of early twentieth-century psychologists (and even a few stubborn holdouts today) would agree, arguing that there is no such thing as unconscious thought. In honor of Descartes, we will call the person who has lost his nonconscious mind "Mr. D."

  It would be immediately apparent that Descartes was wrong and that Mr. Ws day would not be like any other, beginning with his attempt to get out of bed. Humans have a "sixth sense" called proprioception, which is the sensory feedback they constantly receive from their muscles, joints, and skin, signaling the position of their bodies and limbs. Without knowing it, we constantly monitor this feedback and make adjustments to our bodies; for example, when we lift our left arm, we subtly shift some weight to the right side of our bodies to maintain our balance. If we didn't, we would list dangerously to one side.

  In rare cases people lose their sense of proprioception, with grave consequences. The physician Jonathan Cole documented the case of Ian Waterman, a man who suffered nerve damage when he was nineteen and lost all proprioception. Mr. Waterman was like the straw man in the Wizard of Oz, newly released from his pole. If he tried to stand, he ended up in a heap of tangled limbs on the floor. As long as he focused on his arm or leg he could keep it still, but as soon as he looked away, it would start moving uncontrollably. With a great deal of courage and hard work, Mr. Waterman was able to regain some control of his body, by replacing his unconscious proprioception with conscious attention. He learned to walk, to dress himself, and even to drive a car by watching himself carefully with fierce concentration. He literally kept an eye on himself at all times, because he was in trouble if he lost sight of his body. One day he was standing in the kitchen and there was a sudden power failure, casting the room into darkness. Mr. Waterman immediately fell to the floor. Because he could not see his body, he could no longer control it.'

  We are completely unaware of this critical sensory system. We can stand and close our eyes and keep our balance, with no awareness of how much mental work is involved. It is only the loss of the hidden proprioceptive system, as in Mr. Waterman's case, that demonstrates how important it is.

  Proprioception is but one of many nonconscious perceptual systems. An important role of the nonconscious mind is to organize and interpret the information we take in through our senses, transforming light rays and sound waves into the images and noises of which we are aware. We see that the chair in our bedroom is closer to us than the bureau, with no idea of how our brains transformed the light rays striking our retinas into a perception of depth. If these nonconscious computations were to cease, the world would look like a confusing jumble of pixels and colors instead of cohering into meaningful, three-dimensional images.'

  In fact it makes little sense to imagine what it would be like to have only a conscious mind, because consciousness itself is dependent on mental processes that occur out of view. We couldn't be conscious without a nonconscious mind, just as what we see on the screen of a computer could not exist without a sophisticated system of hardware and software operating inside the box. Nonetheless, it is worth illustrating the importance of nonconscious thinking by pursuing our thought experiment a little further, exploring in more detail what it would be like to be Mr. D. Let's grant him the use of his perceptual system and see what else would be affected.

  Suppose Mr. D. turned on the television and heard a newscaster say, "Jones threw his hat into the ring last night, a year before the first presidential primary." When you read this sentence, you did not have to pause after each word and look it up in your mental dictionary; the meanings came to mind immediately. Mr. D., though, does not have this lightningfast ability to "look up" words; he would have to search laboriously for the meaning of each word as he encountered it. It is not even clear that he could access his mental dictionary without the aid of nonconscious processes, but for the sake of the example let's suppose he could.

  When you read the words "threw his hat into the ring," you undoubtedly interpreted them to mean that Jones announced that he was running for president, without consciously considering alternative meanings. You probably did not entertain the possibility that Jones was at the circus and decided that one of the dancing elephants would look nice in his fedora.

  Of course not, you might think, because it's obvious what the newscaster meant. But why is this obvious? The part about the presidential primaries came after the part about throwing the hat. There was no way you could have known what the newscaster meant when you first read about hat-throwing; you must have read the entire sentence and then gone back and attached the most likely meaning to the words. All this was done quite rapidly and nonconsciously, with no awareness that you were interpreting what was, in truth, an ambiguous sentence. Alas, poor Mr. D. would have to pause and consider the different meanings of the words and how they might apply in the context in which they were used. By the time he figured it out, the newscaster would be well into the next story about a massive heat wave approaching New England-prompting Mr. D. to wonder whether a tsunami was about to strike Massachusetts.

  In short, the mental processes that operate our perceptual, language, and motor systems operate largely outside of awareness, much like the vast workings of the federal government that go on out of view of the president. If all the lower-level members of the executive branch were to take the day off, very little governmental work would get done. Similarly, if a person's perceptual, language, and motor systems stopped working, people would find it difficult to function.

  But what about the
higher-order functions that make us uniquely human-our ability to think, reason, ponder, create, feel, and decide? A reasonable portrait of the human mind is that lower-order functions (e.g., perception, language comprehension) operate out of view, whereas higher-order functions (e.g., reasoning, thinking) are conscious. Pursuing our executive-branch analogy, the lower-level employees (the nonconscious mind) gather information and follow orders, but it is the high-level employees, such as the president and the cabinet officers, who ponder information, make decisions, and set policy. And these "mind executives" are always conscious.

  This portrayal of the mind vastly underestimates the role of nonconscious processing in humans. To illustrate this point, let's make a final concession and give Mr. D. the use of all his "lower-order" perceptual, motor, and language abilities (a quite generous bequest, given the complexities of language and the vast capacity of humans to communicate quickly and efficiently with the written and spoken word). Would the absence of any further nonconscious processes impair him in any way? Or would he now have a fully equipped human mind?

  Mr. D. would be at a severe disadvantage in all aspects of his life. Some very important tasks that we usually ascribe to consciousness can be performed nonconsciously, such as deciding what information to pay attention to, interpreting and evaluating that information, learning new things, and setting goals for ourselves. When we see a truck careening toward us as we are crossing a street, we know instantly that we are in danger and quickly jump out of the way, without having to deliberate consciously about the truck. Mr. D. would not experience that sudden fear in the pit of his stomach, at least not until he had time to retrieve laboriously from memory what he knew about trucks and their effects on unwary pedestrians. Similarly, when meeting someone for the first time we quickly make assumptions about the kind of person she is and experience a positive or negative evaluation-all within seconds or less.

  Further, much of what we think of as Mr. Ws personality-his temperament, his characteristic way of responding to people, his distinctive nature that makes him him-would no longer exist. An important part of personality is the ability to respond in quick, habitual ways to the social world. It also means having a healthy psychological defense system, warding off threats to the self in reasonable, adaptive ways. Much of this personality system operates outside of awareness.

  Defining the Unconscious

  A simple definition of the unconscious is anything that is in your mind that you are not consciously aware of at a particular point in time. However, we quickly run into problems here. Suppose I asked you for the name of your hometown. Presumably you did not have any trouble bringing the name of this city into consciousness, even though this city was probably not in your consciousness before I asked you to think about it. Does this mean that the name of your hometown is unconscious most of the time?

  This argument would seem to be stretching things and highlights the problem of equating consciousness with attention or short-term mem ory, as some theorists prefer to do.' I, for one, would not want to say that I am unconscious of "Philadelphia" when I am not thinking about it. Philadelphia may not be in my working memory or the object of my current attention, but it is not unconscious, at least in my conception of the term. It is one of the thousands of things I can retrieve from long-term memory when needed-Philadelphia, W. C. Fields's joke about it, the starting lineup of the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers, the words and music to "South Street" by the Orlons. Freud described thoughts such as these as residing in the "preconscious," the mental anteroom in which thoughts remain until they "succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness."4

  What is more interesting is the part of my mind that I cannot access even when I try. A better working definition of the unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior. No matter how long I tried, I could not access my proprioception system or the way in which my mind transforms light rays that strike my retina into three-dimensional vision. Nor do I have direct access to many of my higher-order mental processes, such as the way I select, interpret, and evaluate incoming information and set goals in motion.

  The unconscious is notoriously difficult to define, and my definition is but one of many that have been offered. I don't like getting bogged down in definitional issues and will not dwell on the many alternatives.5 It is more interesting to take a look at what humans can accomplish outside the spotlight of consciousness.

  The Adaptive Unconscious, or What Mr. D. Cannot Do

  The term "adaptive unconscious" is meant to convey that nonconscious thinking is an evolutionary adaptation. The ability to size up our environments, disambiguate them, interpret them, and initiate behavior quickly and nonconsciously confers a survival advantage and thus was selected for. Without these nonconscious processes, we would have a very difficult time navigating through the world (much less standing up without constant attention, like Ian Waterman). This is not to say that nonconscious thinking always leads to accurate judgments, but on balance it is vital to our survival.'

  Consider that at any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of information. Scientists have determined this number by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from these cells to the brain. Our eyes alone receive and send over 10,000,000 signals to our brains each second. Scientists have also tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect different flashes of light, and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second. Think about it: we take in 11,000,000 pieces of information a second, but can process only 40 of them consciously. What happens to the other 10,999,960? It would be terribly wasteful to design a system with such incredible sensory acuity but very little capacity to use the incoming information. Fortunately, we do make use of a great deal of this information outside of conscious awareness.'

  LEARNING: THE ADAPTIVE UNCONSCIOUS AS PATTERN DETECTOR

  Suppose you were introduced to a person who suffered from amnesia due to brain damage. Organic amnesia can result from a number of traumas to the brain, such as injuries suffered in car accidents, brain surgery, Alzheimer's disease, and Korsakoff's syndrome (brain damage resulting from chronic alcohol abuse). These disorders lead to somewhat different kinds of memory deficits, depending on the exact areas of the brain that are affected. In all of them, however, people lose the ability to form memories of new experiences.

  If you were to encounter such a person, you probably could not tell right away that he or she suffered from amnesia. People with these disorders usually retain their level of intelligence and their general personalities. Suppose, however, that you were to chat with an amnesiac for awhile, leave the room, and return an hour later. You would find that the person had no memory of having met you before. Everyone, of course, has occasional memory lapses, such as failing to remember the name of someone he or she has just met. What is striking about amnesiacs is that they have no conscious recollection of any new experience.

  Note my key use of the word "conscious" in the previous sentence. It is now clear that amnesiacs can learn many things nonconsciously. A famous (and devilish) demonstration of this fact was performed by a French physician named Edouard Claparede. Each time he visited a woman suffering from amnesia, she had no recollection of ever having met him before. He would have to introduce himself anew at each visit. One day, Claparede reached out and shook her hand, as usual, but this time he concealed a pin in his hand. The woman withdrew her hand quickly, surprised at the painful prick. The next time Claparede visited the woman, she showed no sign of recognizing him, and so he reintroduced himself and held out his hand. This time, however, she refused to shake his hand. She had no conscious recollection of ever having met Claparede but somehow "knew" that she shook this man's hand at he
r own risk. Claparede observed several other examples of such nonconscious learning in this patient; for example, she had no conscious memory of the layout of the institution in which she had lived for six years. When asked how to get to the bathroom or the dining hall, she could not say. However, when she wanted to go to one of these locations, she would walk directly to it without getting lost."

  There are by now many other examples of people's ability to learn new information nonconsciously. People are even able to understand and retain some of what occurs when they are under general anesthesia. When patients are given suggestions during surgery that they will recover quickly, they subsequently spend less time in the hospital than patients not given the suggestions, despite having no conscious memory of what was said while they were under anesthesia.'

  Cases such as these illustrate the difference between two types of learning, implicit and explicit. Explicit learning is the effortful, conscious kind of memorization we often dread. When we think about the prospect of learning something difficult-a foreign language, how to assemble our new gas grill-we often groan and anticipate a lot of painful work. To accomplish such tasks we need to engage in prolonged concentration, devoting all of our conscious attention to learning vocabulary lists or figuring out how to attach the hose in Figure All to the burner in Figure C6.

  It should thus come as good news that we are capable of learning a great deal of complex information implicitly without any effort at all, such as Claparede's patient's knowledge of how to get to the dining hall. Implicit learning is defined as learning without effort or awareness of exactly what has been learned. Perhaps the best example is a child's ability to master her native language. Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists and attending classes on grammar and syntax. They would be hard pressed to explain what participles are, despite their ability to use them fluently. Humans learn to speak with no effort or intention; it just happens.