Unconscious Processes and The Unconscious Mind
Some neuroscientific research supports the existence of the unconscious mind. For example, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have found that fleeting images of fearful faces—images that appear and disappear so quickly that they escape conscious awareness—produce unconscious anxiety that can be detected in the brain with the latest neuroimaging machines. The conscious mind is thus hundreds of milliseconds slower than unconscious processes.
To understand this type of research, a distinction has to be made between unconscious processes and the unconscious mind (neuroscientists are far more likely to examine the former). The unconscious mind and its expected psychoanalytic contents also differ from unconsciousness, coma, and a minimally conscious state. The difference in the uses of the terms can be explained, to a degree, by our different hypotheses on its subject. One such conjecture is the psychoanalytic theory.
Read more about this topic: Unconscious Mind
Famous quotes containing the words unconscious, processes and/or mind:
“We cannot remain long in a conscious state or in consciousness, we must take refuge again in the unconscious since there are our roots.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“All ... forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)