Consciousness and unconciousness

Consciousness

what you’re aware of

Unconsciousness:

what’s under the surface

Sigmund Freud

father of psychoanalysis (he was interested in dreams, emotions…)

Preconscious(Freud)

superego and ego

superego

incorporates the values and morals of society (angel on your shoulder) (society’s influence)

Ego

operates according to reality (the way one navigates between the id and superego)

Unconscious:(freud)

id

Id

primitive and instinctive component of personality (the devil on your shoulder) (deep down dark desires)

Modern Views of Unconscious Modularity

Limits of Consciousness

Evidence of Unconscious Processes

Limits of Consciousness

• Zoning out

  • You can consciously be thinking of something while unconsciously doing something else

• Doing habitable things

  • These things don’t require conscious thought (the unconscious can take over)

Evidence of Unconscious Processes

• Unconscious learning

• Pattern detection

• Unconscious filtering

• Unconscious Priming

Unconscious learning

• Amnesia: people with amnesia might not have conscious memory but they could have unconscious memory

Pattern detection

a skill of how people identify the objects in their environment

e.g chicken sexting: trying to guess the sex of a chicken

People are able to unconsciously determine the sex but can’t necessarily explain how to do it

Unconscious filtering

Cocktail Party Effect

You're at a party, talking to a person and you hear your name from a far distance in a crowd

Most people can't consciously multitask but it’s possible for your unconscious to scan those conversations waiting for relevant info and bump that to your conscious

Unconscious priming

: when you’re exposed to a piece of information, it has a potential of influencing your response to a succeeding piece of information

Stroop effect

Stroop Effect

when the name of a color doesn't match the color in which it's printed

Your unconscious and conscious are not aligned; you’re forced to ignore your unconscious to read aloud the correct color and not the name of the color