deal quite intensively, but our associative cortex is not mature enough to store these events as conscious experiences. About two-thirds of our personality evolves in this manner, but we cannot recall or reflect on those experiences later.
There are still more elements to the unconscious beyond our everyday unconscious perceptions and the early childhood unconscious impressions buried deep within us. One example is when we’re on ‘autopilot.’ I have often been surprised by how well I’m able to make my way home in a state of complete intoxication and arrive safely, even though the next day I can’t recall a moment ofthe walk home. And as I sit here typing this sentence, how do my fingers find the keys on the keyboard in a mere tenth of a second? If someone were to ask me to draw a keyboard that is covered up, I imagine I’d have trouble labeling any keys correctly. Evidently my fingers know more than I do! And so many things that I have experienced and then forget will occur to me all of a sudden when something triggers them, even though they were not on the surface of my consciousness in the interim. The standard example is aromas that have the power to conjure up a whole chain of long-lost images in our heads.
Keeping all the above in mind, we have to admit that Freud was substantially correct. Most of what goes on in our brains occurs on an unconscious level, and this unconscious activity affects us powerfully. We might even say that unconscious perceptions are the norm, and the conscious ones – which are of course especially important to us – are the exception. Our awareness depends on the involvement of the associative cortex, which, it should be noted, is clearly dependent on the unconscious. As we saw in the previous chapter, feelings are the glue that binds. Without unconscious impulses from the limbic system, the associative cortex would have nothing to obtain, consider, assess, and express. It would be a high-performance machine devoid of electricity. The unconscious thus controls our consciousness far more strongly than the other way around. In our personal development it originated before consciousness, and it shaped us long before our consciousness began to awaken. The sum of our unconscious experiences and abilities – subconsciousness – is a powerful force over which we have little control. The most common route to our subconscious mind is by way of psychotherapy administered by others.
Brain researchers today dream of a psychoanalysis informed by neuroscience. A 1979 essay (‘Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse’) by Eric Kandel, the world-famous researcher on memory, laid out his ambitious vision of fusing the two disciplines. But to psychoanalysts, Kandel’s suggestions for a new scientific accuracy read like an ascetic diet, devoid of speculations or boldclaims or fantasies about curing mental and physical ailments with psychoanalysis. Instead, he proposes the use of empirical research, statistics, strict outcomes assessments, and the use of brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging to verify the progress of therapy in individual regions of the brain.
The use of the experimental methods of neuroscience to explore the unconscious is just getting under way. The unconscious, a stepchild of philosophy, which first began to be taken seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, may well be today’s key area of research on the path to a scientific self-awareness. Epistemology informed by biology thus sees humankind doubly bound: first by our senses, with the typical abilities and by the typical limits of the primate brain, and second, by the boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness. The access into the unconscious that constitutes the great majority of our experiences and our personality is largely blocked to us. Before we move on to questions of our behavior in the second part of this book, we need to have a closer look at one more aspect that has been tacitly
There are still more elements to the unconscious beyond our everyday unconscious perceptions and the early childhood unconscious impressions buried deep within us. One example is when we’re on ‘autopilot.’ I have often been surprised by how well I’m able to make my way home in a state of complete intoxication and arrive safely, even though the next day I can’t recall a moment ofthe walk home. And as I sit here typing this sentence, how do my fingers find the keys on the keyboard in a mere tenth of a second? If someone were to ask me to draw a keyboard that is covered up, I imagine I’d have trouble labeling any keys correctly. Evidently my fingers know more than I do! And so many things that I have experienced and then forget will occur to me all of a sudden when something triggers them, even though they were not on the surface of my consciousness in the interim. The standard example is aromas that have the power to conjure up a whole chain of long-lost images in our heads.
Keeping all the above in mind, we have to admit that Freud was substantially correct. Most of what goes on in our brains occurs on an unconscious level, and this unconscious activity affects us powerfully. We might even say that unconscious perceptions are the norm, and the conscious ones – which are of course especially important to us – are the exception. Our awareness depends on the involvement of the associative cortex, which, it should be noted, is clearly dependent on the unconscious. As we saw in the previous chapter, feelings are the glue that binds. Without unconscious impulses from the limbic system, the associative cortex would have nothing to obtain, consider, assess, and express. It would be a high-performance machine devoid of electricity. The unconscious thus controls our consciousness far more strongly than the other way around. In our personal development it originated before consciousness, and it shaped us long before our consciousness began to awaken. The sum of our unconscious experiences and abilities – subconsciousness – is a powerful force over which we have little control. The most common route to our subconscious mind is by way of psychotherapy administered by others.
Brain researchers today dream of a psychoanalysis informed by neuroscience. A 1979 essay (‘Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse’) by Eric Kandel, the world-famous researcher on memory, laid out his ambitious vision of fusing the two disciplines. But to psychoanalysts, Kandel’s suggestions for a new scientific accuracy read like an ascetic diet, devoid of speculations or boldclaims or fantasies about curing mental and physical ailments with psychoanalysis. Instead, he proposes the use of empirical research, statistics, strict outcomes assessments, and the use of brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging to verify the progress of therapy in individual regions of the brain.
The use of the experimental methods of neuroscience to explore the unconscious is just getting under way. The unconscious, a stepchild of philosophy, which first began to be taken seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, may well be today’s key area of research on the path to a scientific self-awareness. Epistemology informed by biology thus sees humankind doubly bound: first by our senses, with the typical abilities and by the typical limits of the primate brain, and second, by the boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness. The access into the unconscious that constitutes the great majority of our experiences and our personality is largely blocked to us. Before we move on to questions of our behavior in the second part of this book, we need to have a closer look at one more aspect that has been tacitly
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