Unconscious Part 1

The unconscious. While discussing the unconscious, people usually think about the “consciousness iceberg”, which is divided into three levels: conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Those with more knowledge of psychological knowledge might think about the sexual drive theories of Freud. However, both of these models of the unconscious are antiquated and incongruent with modern research about the unconscious.

The unconscious is much simpler than the models posited by Freud and plays a more significant role than the “iceberg model” suggests. Broadly speaking, the conscious consists of all of the thoughts, feelings, and memories that we can acknowledge. Whereas the unconscious is the deeper mental processes that we can’t readily access.  

The first psychologist to analyze the ramifications of the unconscious mind in our lives was Sigmund Freud. In fact, psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychology are the only two domains that actively consider the role that the unconscious has in our lives. Herein lies one of the major issues with modern psychology:  

Despite the constant role the unconscious plays in our everyday lives, many domains of psychology fail to account for its effects.  

The unconscious is, in its purest form, an engine for information processing. The brain is the busiest organ. It uses up 20% of the body’s total energy, is running 24/7, and is responsible for coordinating everything from movement to thinking to digestion to emotions. To have our conscious control everything that the brain coordinates would be both impossible and deadly. There is an obvious reason that our brain automatically tells our hearts to pump, our lungs to breathe, and for our eyes to blink.  

We know that the unconscious is responsible for most of the brain’s workings. What we can’t always know is what is part of our conscious brain and what isn’t. For example, we concretely know that the unconscious is responsible for the heart pumping blood, the body producing sweat, the alveoli expanding and contracting, etc. What we don’t know concretely are areas like emotion.  

For example, you may wake up feeling sad one day. You may not know why you’re feeling sad, but you have the conscious experience of feeling sad nonetheless. There is a constant interplay between the conscious experience of emotion and the unconscious causing of that emotion. The exploration of how emotions are created from the unconscious mind is still a major field of research, but some of it may have to do with the physiology of our brain. 

Our central nervous system is created from a network of neurons. Neurons are special types of cells that can send information from one neuron to another (there are many types of neurons and the function of those neurons can vary based on the neurotransmitters they contain, but this definition will suffice for our purposes). The brain is also built through a series of associative bundles. This means that the neurons in a particular part of the brain will all have similar functions. This associative nature of neurons has major ramifications for our unconscious brains.

Referring to our previous example, you might have woken up sad because a related series of neurons had fired the day before, and the neurons responsible for producing the emotion of sadness were activated accidentally. Many other emotional states and cognitive functions such as intuition, anger, repressed memories, and hidden beliefs are caused by similar associative networks of neurons.  

Now that we have a basic understanding of the unconscious and its relation to our physiology, we can delve into more interesting facets of the unconscious and how it affects your lives in upcoming blogs.