11 ms·

There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought

119 points by dnetesn 8y ago

crazygringo 8y ago
tl;dr: When you have a flash of inspiration, it isn't because your mind was subconsciously putting it together in the background prior to that, or preparing you for it -- you just had the inspiration in that moment like any other thought. However, I'd make two counterpoints: 1) The article completely ignores nighttime dreaming, when our brain does reorganize information we've processed during the day, and perhaps prepares us for the subsequent flash of inspiration we wouldn't otherwise achieve. 2) The idea of "unconscious thought" is a contradiction in terms -- thought is generally defined as exclusively conscious -- so the article sets up a bit of a semantic strawman. But the research here in no way invalidates our unconscious knowledge or instincts, which of course play a huge role in psychology.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up. I guess that raises the question of how that queue of stuff to think about forms, and where sits until runtime?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - projektir 8y ago
    > I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up. I don't know if this really passes the... sniff test, if you will. Even if something is not remembered, it would need to be processed long enough for the subject to also be able to recognize it and/or wake up as a result, with an emotional reaction. This doesn't really seem to happen. Most cases of people waking up with a strong reaction involve nightmares and similar. "Anything can happen if we can forget it" is not really that solid, since things happening here-and-now nonetheless have effect, even if not remembered. Conscious thought requires effort, is tiring, for some painful, etc. I find it unlikely that, during sleep, this activity suddenly becomes more viable.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Also, where does that sudden inspiration come from? It must be a function of the brain state just before it, unless you subscribe to some sort of magical Cartesian duality.
jawarner 8y ago
I'm not quite convinced of the article's thesis. It may be true that the brain doesn't chug along on a background problem continuously for days, but instead it checks in on the problem every so often when it is in a different state. But the act of reconsidering a problem from a different mental context is the essence of problem solving. The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.
- mtippett 8y ago
  It might be arguable that the check-in on the problem isn't so much an automatic process, but one of stimuli triggering a pattern match on a problem, or conscious triggering of the thought process. When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration. I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.
  - wahern 8y ago
    > I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed. That doesn't explain dreams. The notion that the brain requires constant external stimuli to keep it pumping along doesn't fit known phenomena.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I think the conclusions the author makes are way too broad. What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think. Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing. If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point. Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary. So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.
- drb91 8y ago
  > Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing. Conscious brain activity always struck me as the primary meaning of "thought". The idea of conflating "thought" with unconscious brain activity just seems to devalue the word itself rather than bring some utility or added understanding to the table. Personally, I don't think of breathing as a thought at all, or my heart beating, even though it's evidently controlled by the brain, evidently also the source of thoughts. I only really ever have evidence of thoughts as distinct from other brain functions because I experience them consciously.
  - Retric 8y ago
    I regularly have non linguistic thoughts. Picture trying to pack a suitcase into the nearly full list trunk of your car and it's all objects not words. Chess is a great example you picture a 'move' as a new layout. Practicing physical activities falls under the same kind of thing where I can focus on where to place my foot or when to breathe etc even when not doing the activity.
brianberns 8y ago
The thesis of this article (that the brain can't multiprocess because neurons are all interconnected) is presented without evidence or any elaboration. It's not hard to imagine that brain has a way to maintain the integrity of multiple distinct thoughts at once, even though they're all running on the same hardware network.
- opportune 8y ago
  Yeah, this is like saying that CPUs can’t truly multiprocess because cores can share memory
  - brianberns 8y ago
    Or like saying that a room can't carry multiple sounds at once because all the air molecules in the room are touching each other.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > The thesis of this article is presented without evidence From the article: > I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind. ... Across a wide range of test stimuli, the results were unequivocal That's not conclusive proof, but it looks to me like evidence?
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I feel like that's bordering on anecdote.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
      > I feel like that's bordering on anecdote. We can take a default view that what "a professor of behavioral science" calls an experiment is likely an experiment. Feels presented "without evidence or any elaboration" don't make it an anecdote. The real answer would be to consult with an expert in the field over the details of this experiment.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
What garbage. I can't even make sense of the author's point, it's so diluted with random asides and free-association tangents (poincare, etc). Perhaps we should start by defining terms. What is "unconscious," and what is "thought." Depending on how you define that, visual processing, dreaming, operant-conditioning, all fall into that category. There is also strong peer-reviewed evidence that our mind is constantly reviewing what we have just learned, and interrupting this will inhibit our learning. Perhaps the author should discuss that [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactive_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...
Symmetry 8y ago
Poincaré and Hindemith cannot possibly be right. If they are spending their days actively thinking about other things, their brains are not unobtrusively solving deep mathematical problems or composing complex pieces of music, perhaps over days or weeks, only to reveal the results in a sudden flash. No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.
pmichaud 8y ago
> Suppose, instead, that while focusing our conscious minds on generating foods, unconscious mental search processes can work away, in the background, unearthing a string of countries. Then, when we switch to countries, we should be able rapidly to download these—they would not need to be found afresh, because unconscious search would have identified them already. ... The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task-oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds. Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."
mrob 8y ago
>If unconscious thought is impossible, any background racing around our mental archives is entirely ruled out. That is, if we are scouring our memories for foods, we cannot simultaneously search for countries, and vice versa. The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.
- projektir 8y ago
  > I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. I feel like this might have happened to me here or there... You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?
dgreensp 8y ago
There are plenty of times in the day or night where we may be "thinking" about things but not attending to our thoughts very much or at all, such as while dreaming or zoning out while driving. Actually, driving itself is a great example of a complex activity that requires very little conscious oversight. While driving, you can suddenly realize you have no recollection of the last ten minutes. If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. Moreover, you can be driving home from work after a hard day, and your brain can switch back and forth between emotional processing of your day and keeping an eye on the road, and you can still have that feeling where you can't remember the last ten minutes. None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness." Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions: 1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image) 2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought") 3) Verbal, narrative mental occurrences ("thoughts") 4) Conscious awareness Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness. Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  > If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously. In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily). But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.
nitwit005 8y ago
> A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel. Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.
StClaire 8y ago
The author jumped from an experiment he did which suggests that our brains can't pull different objects from our memories at the same time to "There is no unconscious thought." I think he needs stronger evidence
toss1 8y ago
Having before college stumbled across the "study then toss it to the background and wait for inspiration" method, and used it successfully ever since (& having studied neuroscience in college & seen other similar mistakes), I can say that the author's study & results are likely accurate, and definitely irrelevant. The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B. Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives). He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand. I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.
jeffmcmahan 8y ago
Nautilus is built on this kind of psycholo-garbage. The conclusions go way too far, but the title gets clicks.
groupdeterminac 8y ago
> Importantly, the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks. If interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at cross-purposes—and neither task will be completed successfully: Each neuron has no idea which of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and which are just irrelevant junk. If the brain solves problems through the cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one problem at a time. Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?
DanWaterworth 8y ago
Off topic, and IANAL, but I believe this website breaks European law by refusing to serve the article to european residents who block cookies. Under the ePrivacy legislation (and GDPR's redefinition of consent), you must obtain "freely given consent" to use cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site (and under this definition, analytics cookies are not necessary). By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > they ensure that consent can only be given under duress. Not being able to read a random website is not "duress".
  - conquistadog 8y ago
    The randomness of the website is irrelevant to the requirement, at least as I understand it.
    - dingo_bat 8y ago
      Irrelevant to the main point. Since you're being childish I'll explain again. Not being able to read a particular article or articles is not duress. Duress is if nautilus would threaten to send killer ninjas to your house of you won't accept the cookies.
      - DanWaterworth 8y ago
        You're right to complain that conquistadog's comment was irrelevant to your main point. It's frustrating when people miss what you are saying and get so hooked on trivialities. Incidentally, your nitpicking about my use of the word duress is also irrelevant. Next, you call people childish, when you are acting immaturely. How does name-calling generally work out for you as a means for settling disagreements? It also bugs me that you are not even technically correct. You see, I looked up the definition of duress before I posted. I am British, so I used the OED and it told me that in the legal sense of the word, duress is, "Constraint illegally exercised to force someone to perform an act." Based on that definition, I don't think I could have picked a word that would better suit my intention.
denimalpaca 8y ago
> "A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The phenomenon of sudden insight stems not from unconscious thought, but from the nature of the problem: Searching for a meaningful interpretation with few helpful and unambiguous clues." The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because we have an instance of conscious thought leading to the conclusion, and a scenario where it is possible that the unconscious is playing a role, the conclusion that in the second scenario the unconscious does not play a role based on the ability to come to the conclusion consciously does not follow. The nature of the problem here is not given enough of a definition for one to conclude that there is only one way to get to the answer, either. >"The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks." Except we know very well that the brain solves different kinds of problems in different areas... the Occipital lobe, Wernicke's area vs Broca's area, are different "sub problems" the brain is working on which the conscious part gets information about. Maybe different creative problems use the whole frontal cortex differently, but the "computational machine" that is our brain is definitely divided up into sub-problems; some are very, very obviously unconscious, like the "problem" of keeping our hearts beating. >" If it is indeed possible to search for foods or countries simultaneously (even though we can consciously report the results of only one search at a time), then the rate at which we generate answers in both categories should be substantially greater than the rate at which we can generate answers from either category alone." I think this is a bad experiment and a bad conclusion. It's a bad experiment because in the "control case" (only listing foods or only listing countries), the unconscious, if helping, would still be helping in these cases, trying to generate a list while the conscious mind is also trying to generate a list. So it's not really a controlled experiment, because the unconscious mind is never "stopped" - it is assumed to not be used. It's a bad conclusion then because the premise is faulty; we wouldn't expect someone to list two separate lists more quickly if the same unconscious mechanism is a poor assistant when making the lists alone, too.
faragon 8y ago
"Science and Method" (1908, "Science et méthode" -original title in French-) is Poincaré's book the blog post author is speaking about. In my opinion, Poincaré's book is very valuable, and useful for anyone dealing with non trivial problems, no matter if there is "unconscious though" or not.
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
I've never seen so many unsupported assertions presented as fact outside of the realm of politics.
carapace 8y ago
This is a "just so" story. The bulk of our thinking is unconscious (in the sense that, whatever your subjective awareness is, it doesn't contain perceptions of the process of most thinking your system does.) In fact, you have a distributed brain in your gut that does a great deal of thinking about food, both what to eat and what to do to handle what we've already eaten. (To give an extreme example, it's what decides you have to throw up.) And the spine and motor cortex form a kind of brain also. But even the head-brain thinking is mostly outside of your subjective awareness. Certainly it's possible to cram your brain with information, then take a break and sleep on it (literally or otherwise) and then come back and suddenly the answer appears, or your understanding has increased.
_mhr_ 8y ago
So what is the Default Mode Network doing during daydreaming/"inactivity"? Nothing at all?
armitron 8y ago
Any experienced psychonaut knows this is utter bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of LSD or psilocybin for one to experience "unconscious" thought, it is amongst the first things to manifest on a trip. To clarify, this is cognitive activity that results in various streamS of thought that is ordinarily hidden from the conscious self but one can become aware of under altered states of consciousness. Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters. Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  One time I smoked a lot of weed and I felt myself rising and falling with the music in my room. It was quite pleasurable. What does this profound experience with drugs tell us about human consciousness/thought? Literally nothing.
  - armitron 8y ago
    First, the definition: Psychonautics (from the Ancient Greek ψυχή psychē ["soul", "spirit" or "mind"] and ναύτης naútēs ["sailor" or "navigator"] – "a sailor of the soul") refers both to a methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness, especially an important subgroup called holotropic states, including those induced by meditation or mind-altering substances, and to a research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses themselves into an altered mental state in order to explore the accompanying experiences. Smoking weed with music playing in the background (your own words) is pretty far from doing _research_ by immersing oneself into altered mental states. Psychedelics are powerful but one, of course, needs a modicum of understanding into how to best take advantage of them and the ability to do _research_ with one's own psyche as the subject. I could rephrase your comment as: "One time I drove a race car and I had a lot of fun, it was quite pleasurable. What does this experience tell us about the limits of the human body in such situations? Literally nothing." => Because you are not in the position to evaluate the inputs you are receiving besides the rudimentary level of "having fun". Or as the old Hermetic proverb goes: "The lips of Wisdom are sealed; except to ears of Understanding"
bodas 8y ago
The unconscious is the opposite of the conscious, if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously about where to put your limbs. You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.
- projektir 8y ago
  > if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove. I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it? And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate. > but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.
masswerk 8y ago
This is really taking the Von Neumann computing device metaphor to the extreme. Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena. Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)
lostconfused 8y ago
The article doesn't succeed in presenting a good argument. There's a lot of attempts at making examples and using thought experiments but it doesn't actually present any sort of mechanism or model for the mental process involved.
boomlinde 8y ago
A long, meandering article making some sort of argument about consciousness and thought, seemingly without defining either (I stopped reading halfway through) when when it really hinges on what exactly these things are.
hyperpallium 8y ago
I wonder if the key evolutionary development for intelligence was a way to reliably harness it for survival purposes. Chomsky thinks that there's a sharp divide between language and non-linguistic communication, in that a language is infinite. Turning to formal languages, even regular languages are infinite, so I think he's more talking about Turing equivalent languages - and given just a little complexity, just about everything is Turing equivalent. Some people equate language with intelligence. But it's possible intelligence is a cause of language (or both are caused by something else).
modzu 8y ago
f off dull professor at Warwick Business School
- dang 8y ago
  Posting like this will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - modzu 8y ago
    it was an emotional reaction. i do think the subject is worthy of more rigorous discussion. please accept my apologies
pixelperfect 8y ago
The arguments in this article were unconvincing. It's not surprising that naming foods and countries together is no easier than naming them separately. These are two similar, focused tasks. There is no time for the unconscious to do any work amidst this focus. The unconscious mind requires a more diffuse state, which is best attained by walking in the park, taking a shower, or something like that.
projektir 8y ago
I wouldn't be too surprised if this is true... but there's no way in hell that's enough evidence to reach that conclusion. We do not know 100% that brains are ran on a single conscious mind, even. Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. Something has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense. I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.
teilo 8y ago
Right. So we have no idea what consciousness is, or how it works, or where it comes from, but yet we can deduce that there is no such thing as unconscious thought?
8bitsrule 8y ago
What behavioralism lacks in charm, it tries to compensate for with persistence.
deleted 8y ago
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treya 8y ago
We clearly think in ways that aren't available to the conscious parts of the mind, read most any Oliver Sachs or VS Ramachandran book for clear evidence of that. But what part this plays in specific problem solving isn't clear. And this article dismisses unconscious thought but doesn't offer a good explanation for what is happening. For instance, what actually happens when you figure something out? And while what actually happens is undoubtedly related to flashes of inspiration or seeing an optical illusion in a new way, these things are only part of the story. A story that isn't told by most conventional models of learning or understanding. But with careful observation, you can find clues for a simple explanation of epiphanies, solving problems in your sleep, and acquiring greater understanding over time. And that explanation is that the mind grows during rest/sleep in response to cognitive effort, most significantly during a period starting at least 24 hours afterwards and maybe peaking 36-48 hours later. That time frame here is from my own observations, the actual numbers aren't important to the explanation here. But it seems probable that learning and understanding is the result of “brain growth” that occurs as a result of thinking about something, and that this growth is specific to what you've been thinking about, and is cumulative. Your brain is not consciously thinking during this, and likely not unconsciously thinking about it either, but instead is just growing in a specific area. The result of the growth is that you are better able to perceive and grasp ideas that you couldn't previously. We already know that memories are “consolidated” during sleep. Likely this consolidation is just some kind of structural or neural growth in the brain. Other parts of the brain are unlikely to be much different. The flashes of inspiration can be sudden understandings of a simple problem, but understanding deeper concepts or ideas requires brain growth in the area. I'd guess the flashes of inspiration type of understanding is analogous to short term memories, whereas deeper understanding and learning is the result of accumulated brain growth. When that brain growth becomes sufficient to grasp a concept, the sudden understanding (or epiphany) moment doesn't necessarily come with a realization that your brain is different and only has just then been able to grasp or figure out a problem. Also, my intuition tells me that maybe we don't actually know anything at all, and we really only “figure out” everything. In other words, our brain is just a very good JIT (just-in-time) prediction engine. And when we think we know something, it's actually just the case that we predict or model it in real time at the moment we begin thinking. And memories are reformed every time we try to recall them, by neural structures that recreate the same pattern over and over when it's asked for. This also explains things like prodigies, who typically spent many formative hours immersed in something over a long period to develop their abilities, and even acquired savant syndrome that can occur after head trauma (which does occur until after the brain has healed in response to the trauma).

119 points by dnetesn 8y ago

tl;dr: When you have a flash of inspiration, it isn't because your mind was subconsciously putting it together in the background prior to that, or preparing you for it -- you just had the inspiration in that moment like any other thought. However, I'd make two counterpoints: 1) The article completely ignores nighttime dreaming, when our brain does reorganize information we've processed during the day, and perhaps prepares us for the subsequent flash of inspiration we wouldn't otherwise achieve. 2) The idea of "unconscious thought" is a contradiction in terms -- thought is generally defined as exclusively conscious -- so the article sets up a bit of a semantic strawman. But the research here in no way invalidates our unconscious knowledge or instincts, which of course play a huge role in psychology.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up. I guess that raises the question of how that queue of stuff to think about forms, and where sits until runtime?
- deleted 8y ago
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- projektir 8y ago
  > I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up. I don't know if this really passes the... sniff test, if you will. Even if something is not remembered, it would need to be processed long enough for the subject to also be able to recognize it and/or wake up as a result, with an emotional reaction. This doesn't really seem to happen. Most cases of people waking up with a strong reaction involve nightmares and similar. "Anything can happen if we can forget it" is not really that solid, since things happening here-and-now nonetheless have effect, even if not remembered. Conscious thought requires effort, is tiring, for some painful, etc. I find it unlikely that, during sleep, this activity suddenly becomes more viable.
Sharlin 8y ago
Also, where does that sudden inspiration come from? It must be a function of the brain state just before it, unless you subscribe to some sort of magical Cartesian duality.

jawarner 8y ago

I'm not quite convinced of the article's thesis. It may be true that the brain doesn't chug along on a background problem continuously for days, but instead it checks in on the problem every so often when it is in a different state. But the act of reconsidering a problem from a different mental context is the essence of problem solving. The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.

mtippett 8y ago
It might be arguable that the check-in on the problem isn't so much an automatic process, but one of stimuli triggering a pattern match on a problem, or conscious triggering of the thought process. When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration. I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.
- wahern 8y ago
  > I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed. That doesn't explain dreams. The notion that the brain requires constant external stimuli to keep it pumping along doesn't fit known phenomena.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I think the conclusions the author makes are way too broad. What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think. Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing. If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point. Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary. So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.

drb91 8y ago
> Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing. Conscious brain activity always struck me as the primary meaning of "thought". The idea of conflating "thought" with unconscious brain activity just seems to devalue the word itself rather than bring some utility or added understanding to the table. Personally, I don't think of breathing as a thought at all, or my heart beating, even though it's evidently controlled by the brain, evidently also the source of thoughts. I only really ever have evidence of thoughts as distinct from other brain functions because I experience them consciously.
- Retric 8y ago
  I regularly have non linguistic thoughts. Picture trying to pack a suitcase into the nearly full list trunk of your car and it's all objects not words. Chess is a great example you picture a 'move' as a new layout. Practicing physical activities falls under the same kind of thing where I can focus on where to place my foot or when to breathe etc even when not doing the activity.

brianberns 8y ago

The thesis of this article (that the brain can't multiprocess because neurons are all interconnected) is presented without evidence or any elaboration. It's not hard to imagine that brain has a way to maintain the integrity of multiple distinct thoughts at once, even though they're all running on the same hardware network.

opportune 8y ago
Yeah, this is like saying that CPUs can’t truly multiprocess because cores can share memory
- brianberns 8y ago
  Or like saying that a room can't carry multiple sounds at once because all the air molecules in the room are touching each other.
SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
> The thesis of this article is presented without evidence From the article: > I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind. ... Across a wide range of test stimuli, the results were unequivocal That's not conclusive proof, but it looks to me like evidence?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I feel like that's bordering on anecdote.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    > I feel like that's bordering on anecdote. We can take a default view that what "a professor of behavioral science" calls an experiment is likely an experiment. Feels presented "without evidence or any elaboration" don't make it an anecdote. The real answer would be to consult with an expert in the field over the details of this experiment.

alexandercrohde 8y ago

What garbage. I can't even make sense of the author's point, it's so diluted with random asides and free-association tangents (poincare, etc). Perhaps we should start by defining terms. What is "unconscious," and what is "thought." Depending on how you define that, visual processing, dreaming, operant-conditioning, all fall into that category. There is also strong peer-reviewed evidence that our mind is constantly reviewing what we have just learned, and interrupting this will inhibit our learning. Perhaps the author should discuss that [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactive_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...

Symmetry 8y ago

Poincaré and Hindemith cannot possibly be right. If they are spending their days actively thinking about other things, their brains are not unobtrusively solving deep mathematical problems or composing complex pieces of music, perhaps over days or weeks, only to reveal the results in a sudden flash. No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.

pmichaud 8y ago

> Suppose, instead, that while focusing our conscious minds on generating foods, unconscious mental search processes can work away, in the background, unearthing a string of countries. Then, when we switch to countries, we should be able rapidly to download these—they would not need to be found afresh, because unconscious search would have identified them already. ... The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task-oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds. Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."

mrob 8y ago

>If unconscious thought is impossible, any background racing around our mental archives is entirely ruled out. That is, if we are scouring our memories for foods, we cannot simultaneously search for countries, and vice versa. The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.

projektir 8y ago
> I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. I feel like this might have happened to me here or there... You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?

dgreensp 8y ago

There are plenty of times in the day or night where we may be "thinking" about things but not attending to our thoughts very much or at all, such as while dreaming or zoning out while driving. Actually, driving itself is a great example of a complex activity that requires very little conscious oversight. While driving, you can suddenly realize you have no recollection of the last ten minutes. If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. Moreover, you can be driving home from work after a hard day, and your brain can switch back and forth between emotional processing of your day and keeping an eye on the road, and you can still have that feeling where you can't remember the last ten minutes. None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness." Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions: 1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image) 2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought") 3) Verbal, narrative mental occurrences ("thoughts") 4) Conscious awareness Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness. Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.

crazygringo 8y ago
> If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously. In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily). But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.

nitwit005 8y ago

> A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel. Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.

StClaire 8y ago

The author jumped from an experiment he did which suggests that our brains can't pull different objects from our memories at the same time to "There is no unconscious thought." I think he needs stronger evidence

toss1 8y ago

Having before college stumbled across the "study then toss it to the background and wait for inspiration" method, and used it successfully ever since (& having studied neuroscience in college & seen other similar mistakes), I can say that the author's study & results are likely accurate, and definitely irrelevant. The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B. Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives). He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand. I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.

jeffmcmahan 8y ago

Nautilus is built on this kind of psycholo-garbage. The conclusions go way too far, but the title gets clicks.

groupdeterminac 8y ago

> Importantly, the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks. If interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at cross-purposes—and neither task will be completed successfully: Each neuron has no idea which of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and which are just irrelevant junk. If the brain solves problems through the cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one problem at a time. Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?

DanWaterworth 8y ago

Off topic, and IANAL, but I believe this website breaks European law by refusing to serve the article to european residents who block cookies. Under the ePrivacy legislation (and GDPR's redefinition of consent), you must obtain "freely given consent" to use cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site (and under this definition, analytics cookies are not necessary). By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.

dingo_bat 8y ago
> they ensure that consent can only be given under duress. Not being able to read a random website is not "duress".
- conquistadog 8y ago
  The randomness of the website is irrelevant to the requirement, at least as I understand it.
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    Irrelevant to the main point. Since you're being childish I'll explain again. Not being able to read a particular article or articles is not duress. Duress is if nautilus would threaten to send killer ninjas to your house of you won't accept the cookies.
    - DanWaterworth 8y ago
      You're right to complain that conquistadog's comment was irrelevant to your main point. It's frustrating when people miss what you are saying and get so hooked on trivialities. Incidentally, your nitpicking about my use of the word duress is also irrelevant. Next, you call people childish, when you are acting immaturely. How does name-calling generally work out for you as a means for settling disagreements? It also bugs me that you are not even technically correct. You see, I looked up the definition of duress before I posted. I am British, so I used the OED and it told me that in the legal sense of the word, duress is, "Constraint illegally exercised to force someone to perform an act." Based on that definition, I don't think I could have picked a word that would better suit my intention.

denimalpaca 8y ago

> "A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The phenomenon of sudden insight stems not from unconscious thought, but from the nature of the problem: Searching for a meaningful interpretation with few helpful and unambiguous clues." The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because we have an instance of conscious thought leading to the conclusion, and a scenario where it is possible that the unconscious is playing a role, the conclusion that in the second scenario the unconscious does not play a role based on the ability to come to the conclusion consciously does not follow. The nature of the problem here is not given enough of a definition for one to conclude that there is only one way to get to the answer, either. >"The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks." Except we know very well that the brain solves different kinds of problems in different areas... the Occipital lobe, Wernicke's area vs Broca's area, are different "sub problems" the brain is working on which the conscious part gets information about. Maybe different creative problems use the whole frontal cortex differently, but the "computational machine" that is our brain is definitely divided up into sub-problems; some are very, very obviously unconscious, like the "problem" of keeping our hearts beating. >" If it is indeed possible to search for foods or countries simultaneously (even though we can consciously report the results of only one search at a time), then the rate at which we generate answers in both categories should be substantially greater than the rate at which we can generate answers from either category alone." I think this is a bad experiment and a bad conclusion. It's a bad experiment because in the "control case" (only listing foods or only listing countries), the unconscious, if helping, would still be helping in these cases, trying to generate a list while the conscious mind is also trying to generate a list. So it's not really a controlled experiment, because the unconscious mind is never "stopped" - it is assumed to not be used. It's a bad conclusion then because the premise is faulty; we wouldn't expect someone to list two separate lists more quickly if the same unconscious mechanism is a poor assistant when making the lists alone, too.

faragon 8y ago

"Science and Method" (1908, "Science et méthode" -original title in French-) is Poincaré's book the blog post author is speaking about. In my opinion, Poincaré's book is very valuable, and useful for anyone dealing with non trivial problems, no matter if there is "unconscious though" or not.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

I've never seen so many unsupported assertions presented as fact outside of the realm of politics.

carapace 8y ago

This is a "just so" story. The bulk of our thinking is unconscious (in the sense that, whatever your subjective awareness is, it doesn't contain perceptions of the process of most thinking your system does.) In fact, you have a distributed brain in your gut that does a great deal of thinking about food, both what to eat and what to do to handle what we've already eaten. (To give an extreme example, it's what decides you have to throw up.) And the spine and motor cortex form a kind of brain also. But even the head-brain thinking is mostly outside of your subjective awareness. Certainly it's possible to cram your brain with information, then take a break and sleep on it (literally or otherwise) and then come back and suddenly the answer appears, or your understanding has increased.

_mhr_ 8y ago

So what is the Default Mode Network doing during daydreaming/"inactivity"? Nothing at all?

armitron 8y ago

Any experienced psychonaut knows this is utter bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of LSD or psilocybin for one to experience "unconscious" thought, it is amongst the first things to manifest on a trip. To clarify, this is cognitive activity that results in various streamS of thought that is ordinarily hidden from the conscious self but one can become aware of under altered states of consciousness. Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters. Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.

dingo_bat 8y ago
One time I smoked a lot of weed and I felt myself rising and falling with the music in my room. It was quite pleasurable. What does this profound experience with drugs tell us about human consciousness/thought? Literally nothing.
- armitron 8y ago
  First, the definition: Psychonautics (from the Ancient Greek ψυχή psychē ["soul", "spirit" or "mind"] and ναύτης naútēs ["sailor" or "navigator"] – "a sailor of the soul") refers both to a methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness, especially an important subgroup called holotropic states, including those induced by meditation or mind-altering substances, and to a research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses themselves into an altered mental state in order to explore the accompanying experiences. Smoking weed with music playing in the background (your own words) is pretty far from doing _research_ by immersing oneself into altered mental states. Psychedelics are powerful but one, of course, needs a modicum of understanding into how to best take advantage of them and the ability to do _research_ with one's own psyche as the subject. I could rephrase your comment as: "One time I drove a race car and I had a lot of fun, it was quite pleasurable. What does this experience tell us about the limits of the human body in such situations? Literally nothing." => Because you are not in the position to evaluate the inputs you are receiving besides the rudimentary level of "having fun". Or as the old Hermetic proverb goes: "The lips of Wisdom are sealed; except to ears of Understanding"

bodas 8y ago

The unconscious is the opposite of the conscious, if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously about where to put your limbs. You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.

projektir 8y ago
> if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove. I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it? And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate. > but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.

masswerk 8y ago

This is really taking the Von Neumann computing device metaphor to the extreme. Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena. Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)

lostconfused 8y ago

The article doesn't succeed in presenting a good argument. There's a lot of attempts at making examples and using thought experiments but it doesn't actually present any sort of mechanism or model for the mental process involved.

boomlinde 8y ago

A long, meandering article making some sort of argument about consciousness and thought, seemingly without defining either (I stopped reading halfway through) when when it really hinges on what exactly these things are.

hyperpallium 8y ago

I wonder if the key evolutionary development for intelligence was a way to reliably harness it for survival purposes. Chomsky thinks that there's a sharp divide between language and non-linguistic communication, in that a language is infinite. Turning to formal languages, even regular languages are infinite, so I think he's more talking about Turing equivalent languages - and given just a little complexity, just about everything is Turing equivalent. Some people equate language with intelligence. But it's possible intelligence is a cause of language (or both are caused by something else).

modzu 8y ago

f off dull professor at Warwick Business School

dang 8y ago
Posting like this will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- modzu 8y ago
  it was an emotional reaction. i do think the subject is worthy of more rigorous discussion. please accept my apologies

pixelperfect 8y ago

The arguments in this article were unconvincing. It's not surprising that naming foods and countries together is no easier than naming them separately. These are two similar, focused tasks. There is no time for the unconscious to do any work amidst this focus. The unconscious mind requires a more diffuse state, which is best attained by walking in the park, taking a shower, or something like that.

projektir 8y ago

I wouldn't be too surprised if this is true... but there's no way in hell that's enough evidence to reach that conclusion. We do not know 100% that brains are ran on a single conscious mind, even. Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. Something has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense. I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.

teilo 8y ago

Right. So we have no idea what consciousness is, or how it works, or where it comes from, but yet we can deduce that there is no such thing as unconscious thought?

8bitsrule 8y ago

What behavioralism lacks in charm, it tries to compensate for with persistence.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

treya 8y ago

We clearly think in ways that aren't available to the conscious parts of the mind, read most any Oliver Sachs or VS Ramachandran book for clear evidence of that. But what part this plays in specific problem solving isn't clear. And this article dismisses unconscious thought but doesn't offer a good explanation for what is happening. For instance, what actually happens when you figure something out? And while what actually happens is undoubtedly related to flashes of inspiration or seeing an optical illusion in a new way, these things are only part of the story. A story that isn't told by most conventional models of learning or understanding. But with careful observation, you can find clues for a simple explanation of epiphanies, solving problems in your sleep, and acquiring greater understanding over time. And that explanation is that the mind grows during rest/sleep in response to cognitive effort, most significantly during a period starting at least 24 hours afterwards and maybe peaking 36-48 hours later. That time frame here is from my own observations, the actual numbers aren't important to the explanation here. But it seems probable that learning and understanding is the result of “brain growth” that occurs as a result of thinking about something, and that this growth is specific to what you've been thinking about, and is cumulative. Your brain is not consciously thinking during this, and likely not unconsciously thinking about it either, but instead is just growing in a specific area. The result of the growth is that you are better able to perceive and grasp ideas that you couldn't previously. We already know that memories are “consolidated” during sleep. Likely this consolidation is just some kind of structural or neural growth in the brain. Other parts of the brain are unlikely to be much different. The flashes of inspiration can be sudden understandings of a simple problem, but understanding deeper concepts or ideas requires brain growth in the area. I'd guess the flashes of inspiration type of understanding is analogous to short term memories, whereas deeper understanding and learning is the result of accumulated brain growth. When that brain growth becomes sufficient to grasp a concept, the sudden understanding (or epiphany) moment doesn't necessarily come with a realization that your brain is different and only has just then been able to grasp or figure out a problem. Also, my intuition tells me that maybe we don't actually know anything at all, and we really only “figure out” everything. In other words, our brain is just a very good JIT (just-in-time) prediction engine. And when we think we know something, it's actually just the case that we predict or model it in real time at the moment we begin thinking. And memories are reformed every time we try to recall them, by neural structures that recreate the same pattern over and over when it's asked for. This also explains things like prodigies, who typically spent many formative hours immersed in something over a long period to develop their abilities, and even acquired savant syndrome that can occur after head trauma (which does occur until after the brain has healed in response to the trauma).