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Our Subconscious - Real or Woo?

This Guy

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This Guy
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Mar 24, 2006
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OK, here's the deal, many years ago, I had someone tell me about a book he read. This book (the title/author long since forgotten by me) explained that we have a ton of facts in our heads, basically. Often, when we get in a situation these facts come into play, without our being aware.

Some examples -

You meet someone. Something about them just doesn't strike you as being good. You can't put your finger on what you dislike, but the feeling is there.

Someone makes you an offer. Something about the deal just doesn't sound good. Again, you can't put your finger on what's wrong with it, but it doesn't feel right.

The book indicated that those uneasy feelings are caused by facts in the back of our minds, so to speak, that we're not conscious of, and that subconsciously we picked up on parts of the event that we didn't consciously become aware of.

Made up examples to explain -

The deal is to sell us a car at whats sounds like a very good price for the make/year/miles... But something doesn't seem right, even though a test drive indicates the car is fine. Later you remember an article on that make/model you read a few weeks ago that indicated the transmissions lock up or something.

The person you meet appears normal and nice. But there are tell tell signs that they are drug abusers (a couple spots on the arms, wearing sunglasses while it's hazy out, I don't know whatever else might be a clue). You didn't really consciously notice those things though, and later you read they were arrested for dealing.

These examples are extreme, and limited by my lack of imagination.

Question is, has anyone else read anything about this "effect" of our subconscious, or have any info to share pro or con?

Personally, I'm inclined to believe there is something to it. I don't consider it anything magic, just a function of the way our brains, and thoughts work. But maybe I'm just slow, so I'm actually conscious of the "hints" but just don't realize it till later :-)
 
I suggest you read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell for starters, and if the subject interests you, continue to look for more books on neuroscience.

Yes, the subconcious is real, not woo. There are so many functions that our brains perform that we're not constantly conciously thinking about. Ever been jarred awake at night by a sound that wasn't very loud, but just unusual? How do you think the brain recognized that sound as a possible threat while ignoring much louder but more familiar sounds, like the refridgerator or furnace turning on or a freeway near your house? It's a survival mechanism.

Now, there are some woos who will claim that the subconscious holds miraculous powers of perception. The more you find out about the brain, the more fascinated you will be, but as amazing as the brain's capabilities are, they're not supernatural.
 
Real: There is obviously stuff going on in our brains that we aren't consciously aware of in detail. And a lot of it is very, very useful. Sometimes the messages are general feelings or even complete plans.

Might be called woo: I notice that a lot of people here have some sort of default, oversimplified view of how the brain works, and they consider that skeptical. To operate on instinct is considered bad in some way, even though everyone does it. But they lie about it.

Woo: There really isn't a "place" called the subconscious, or a neurological structure, or anything like that. Things aren't really "sublimated" into the subconscious or unconscious.
 
Another book I'd suggest is Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson, but Blink sounds most like the book you're describing. They're both accessible to someone with little or no background knowledge of the brain, which sounds like your situation.
 
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epepke said:
Woo: There really isn't a "place" called the subconscious, or a neurological structure, or anything like that. Things aren't really "sublimated" into the subconscious or unconscious.
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Good call. Because our minds are unaware of the underlying processes that actually run it we assume that the two are seperate. Conscious and sub-conscious (or body and mind) are not seperate it only appears that way.
 
There is an evolutionary basis for how the mind works. I'm not an expert on such things, myself, but I've read up a bit about these things.

According to what I've read, it seems the conscience mind more or less evolved to handle a previously-evolved series of "parallel" "subconscious" minds, each one particularly good at particular tasks. We may not be consciously aware of how the other minds work out their decisions, but the conscious mind sort-of tallies the results, so we can make a decision on them.

By "mind", I am referring to the various physical neural structures (mostly synapses, I guess), and NOT some other-worldly reality or anything woo like that.

Each of our human minds are "complex adaptive pattern recognition machines", to some extent, refined in their tasks over millions of years, with too many "rules" for our conscience mind and memory to handle alone. So, yeah, these inklings of feelings may seem to occur for "mysterious" reasons. But, today, science is starting to understand them.
 
Strider1974 said:
Good call. Because our minds are unaware of the underlying processes that actually run it we assume that the two are seperate. Conscious and sub-conscious (or body and mind) are not seperate it only appears that way.
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Just piggy-backing off of this point (because I'm utterly fascinated with this subject) --
The brain is very astute at focusing on just what it needs to for the moment while tuning out unecessary information, This Guy, but it's also aware of this extra information and can shift focus quickly and seamlessly.

Right now, I imagine that you're sitting at your computer. Your brain is constantly monitoring the room temperature, but you probably wouldn't even think about it unless there was a sudden change of temperature -- say it suddenly became very hot. Now, you know for a fact that the room wasn't this hot a minute ago, even though you weren't actively keeping track of it. Your perception of the room temperature certainly doesn't seem to be "subconscious" anymore. But you didn't have to consciously "dig up" this information -- it was there the whole time, but it would have otherwise distracted you from the task at hand.
 
Forty-Two said:
They're both accessible to someone with little or no background knowledge of the brain, which sounds like your situation.
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That could be taken two ways, and both probably apply ;-)

Thanks for the suggestions!

And I wasn't so much asking about our brains having some background functioning, if you will, but more about the specific types of functions I mentioned. Picking up on things, and sort of guiding us when we're not sure why we feel the need to take the course it's pointing us to.

I'll try to check out the books! Most of my reading on our brains was long ago, and limited. A few high school and one or two collage text books on psychology. Articles in mags, and what not. No formal classes though.

Thanks for the info and comments!
 
This Guy said:
That could be taken two ways, and both probably apply ;-)
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I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to be mean or anything! I'm just a bit passionate about the subject, and these were the books that I started with when I knew practically nothing other than what I'd retained from my sophomore psych class. Good luck! :)
 
Forty-Two said:
I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to be mean or anything! I'm just a bit passionate about the subject, and these were the books that I started with when I knew practically nothing other than what I'd retained from my sophomore psych class. Good luck! :)
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You posted fine. I was joking, and added the 2nd interpretation for humor :-)

And I appreciate the input!

You have to excuse my vane attempts at humor. I've always tried to add a bit in, even in the most dire situations. Prolly a subconscious thing ;-)
 
Forty-Two said:
Just piggy-backing off of this point (because I'm utterly fascinated with this subject) --
The brain is very astute at focusing on just what it needs to for the moment while tuning out unecessary information,
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I recently saw a interesting doco that put forth the theory that people with Autism lack the ability to "tune out" unnessary information. They believe that autisic people are forced by their minds to focus on everything they sense and so suffer sensory overload very easily. This also explains why autisic people can be a "idiot savant" because they see and process ebverything they can perform mental feats that are impossible for the rest of us.

When I tried to look this up on the net it appeared that autism is a much more complex subject and that the theory above appears too simple to explain all the observed behaviours. Has anyone else heard of this theory and what do you think?
 
We won't have a true understanding of subconscious until we have a working definition of conscousness. There probably are different levels of consciousness; awareness can be bypassed vis a vis ideomotor and other effects and sleep and hypnosis are probably altered states or different levels of consciousness.
 
One other note, regarding the ability of the subconscious to make quick judgements: There are some people who exploit this ability as being "psychic" or other woo. Many of the best cold readers are people for whom these skills are highly developed, so they notice small things very quickly and incorporate them into their schtick. Some of them may even go so far as to think, "Well, how could I have known this detail? I must be psychic!" without realizing that there's nothing supernatural going on.

And then there are some people who are mentally ill and actually perceive this information from other parts of the brain as coming from an outside source, like God or aliens.
 
Wowbagger said:
According to what I've read, it seems the conscience mind
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Uhh... that's "conscious". kon-shus, not kon-shinse.

I guess that's another example of the unconscious mind: I had to say each word several times to figure out what the pronunciation of each was, even though I already know how to pronounce them.
 
This Guy said:
Some examples -
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You're making up examples when they don't mean anything. You're assuming something specific is going to happen after these examples, and you're pretending that we all "know" what is going to happen is some sort of psychic revolation. What if I made up endings to each example that were the opposite if what you'd predict, what would that mean? What is coming up with examples supposed to mean?
 
I think there may be a confusion between the voluntary and involuntary processes of the brain. If by subconscious you're implying some voluntary "thinking" part of the brain of which we are unaware, I would disagree. "Thinking" is something of which we are conscious. Most of those "bad feeling" situations are conditioned responses caused by previous learning. You have emotional reactions to strong stimuli that you learned are unpleasant. You react without thinking, involuntarily.
 
grizzled56 said:
I think there may be a confusion between the voluntary and involuntary processes of the brain. If by subconscious you're implying some voluntary "thinking" part of the brain of which we are unaware, I would disagree. "Thinking" is something of which we are conscious. Most of those "bad feeling" situations are conditioned responses caused by previous learning. You have emotional reactions to strong stimuli that you learned are unpleasant. You react without thinking, involuntarily.
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To those who say this, I usually ask them to write down all the rules of language that are sufficient to write a computer program that can understand and produce language in context.

There are more than six billion people who can speak language correctly, appropriately, and in context.

There are zero people, so far, who have been able to "think" enough about language enough to complete what should be a simple task if all thinking were conscious.

There are a very few people who, with years of study, can make some inroads, but their ability to describe the process is pathetic compared to what practically every ten-year-old can simply do.
 
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