# The Unconscious - A Scientific Perspective



## Dreamer (Aug 9, 2004)

*Mysteries of the mind 
Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions 
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak 
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/0502 ... 8think.htm
U.S. News & World Report, 2/28/05*

The snap judgment. The song that constantly runs through your head 
whenever you close your office door. The desire to drink Coke 
rather than Pepsi or to drive a Mustang rather than a Prius. The 
expression on your spouse's face that inexplicably makes you feel 
either amorous or enraged. Or how about the now incomprehensible 
reasons you married your spouse in the first place?
Welcome to evidence of your robust unconscious at work.

While these events are all superficially unrelated, each reveals an 
aspect of a rich inner life that is not a part of conscious, much 
less rational, thought. Today, long after Sigmund Freud introduced 
the world to the fact that much of what we do is determined by 
mysterious memories and emotional forces, the depths of the mind 
and the brain are being explored anew.*

"Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, " says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan. "Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness."*

Fueled by powerful neuroimaging technology, questions about how we 
make snap decisions, why we feel uncomfortable without any obvious 
causes, what motivates us, and what satisfies us are being answered 
not through lying on a couch and exploring individual childhood 
miseries but by looking at neurons firing in particular parts of 
our brains. Hardly a week passes without the release of the results 
of a new study on these kinds of processes.

*And popular culture is so fascinated by neuroscience that Blink, journalist Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of "thinking without 
thinking," has remained on the bestseller lists for four weeks.
Most of us can appreciate the fact that we make up our minds about 
things based on thinking that takes place somewhere just out of our 
reach. But today, scientists are finding neural correlates to those 
processes, parts of the brain that we never gave their due, 
communicating with other parts, triggering neurotransmitters, and 
driving our actions.

Says Clinton Kilts, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory,

"There is nothing that you do, there is no thought that you have, 
there is no awareness, there is no lack of awareness, there is 
nothing that marks your daily existence that doesn't have a neural 
code. The greatest challenge for us is to figure out how to design 
the study that will reveal these codes."

Burgeoning understanding of our unconscious has deeply personal and 
also fascinating medical implications. The realization that our 
actions may not be the pristine results of our high-level reasoning 
can shake our faith in the strength of such cherished values as 
free will, a capacity to choose, and a sense of responsibility over 
those choices. We will never be able to control the rhythm of 
our heartbeats or the choreography of our limbic system. And yet,

Gladwell writes that "our snap judgments and first impressions 
can be educated and controlled . . . [and] the task of making sense 
of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there 
can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of 
rational analysis."

(Page 2 of 6)

Mental health.

But unconscious processing is not just the stuff of compelling 
personal insight. For those with emotional disorders like anxiety, 
bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and others who suffer from 
traumatic brain injuries either from a stroke or an accident, 
peeling away the behavioral layers of their dysfunction has 
revealed fascinating activity out of conscious awareness that may 
eventually provide clues to more effective treatments.

Recent research on minimally conscious patients, for example, shows 
language centers on fire when they hear personal stories recounted 
by a family member. Research on schizophrenia reveals that 
most who are afflicted have an impaired ability to smell, which 
researchers think may provide some clue to understanding why they 
have such difficulty perceiving social cues. Or consider the 
case of Sarah Scantlin, who was hit by a drunk driver and lay mute 
at the Golden Plains Health Care Center in Hutchinson, Kan., for 20 
years. After the Sept. 22, 1984, crash, the doctor told her parents 
that it was a miracle she was even alive but that she would never 
talk or move again on her own. Last month she began to speak--a 
simple "OK" at first, then more words, even short sentences.

How does this happen? What was going on all that time? How do we 
get some access to this thing called the unconscious?

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only 
about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our 
decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 
percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness. 
From the beating of our hearts to pushing the grocery cart and not 
smashing into the kitty litter, we rely on something that is called 
the adaptive unconscious, which is all the ways that our brains 
understand the world that the mind and the body must negotiate. The 
adaptive unconscious makes it possible for us to, say, turn a 
corner in our car without having to go through elaborate 
calculations to determine the precise angle of the turn, the 
velocity of the automobile, the steering radius of the car. It is 
what can make us understand the correct meaning of statements like 
"prostitutes appeal to pope" or "children make nourishing snacks" 
without believing that they mean that the pope has an illicit life 
and cannibals are munching on children.

Consuming thoughts.

Gerald Zaltman uses examples like these in many of his 
conversations. He may be an emeritus professor from the Harvard 
Business School, but he thinks about layers of consciousness like a 
neuroscientist. He is also a founding partner in Olson Zaltman 
Associates, a consulting firm that provides guidance to businesses 
seeking to better understand the minds--and in this case it is 
quite literally the minds--of consumers. 

As a professor of marketing, Zaltman obviously was very interested in figuring out what made people buy one thing and not the other. In the world of neuroscience, this goes to the heart of the profound questions of 
motivation. In the world of business, this goes to the bottom 
line.

(Page 3 of 6)

When trying to probe the minds of consumers, Zaltman wondered if 
there was a way to move beyond the often-unreliable focus group to 
get at the true desires of consumers, unencumbered by other noise, 
which would finally result in more effective sales and marketing.
His solution became U.S. Patent No. 5,436,830, also known as the

Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, which is, according to 
the patent, "a technique for eliciting interconnected constructs 
that influence thought and behavior."

From Hallmark cards to Broadway plays, from Nestle's Crunch bars to the design for the new Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, ZMET has been used to figure out how to craft a message so that consumers will respond with the important 95 percent of their brains that motivates many of their 
choices. How? Through accessing the deep metaphors that people, 
even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or 
feeling or place.

Language is limited, Zaltman says, "and it can't be confused with 
the thought itself." Images, however, move a bit closer to 
capturing fragments of the rich and contradictory areas of 
unconscious feelings. Participants in his studies cut out pictures 
that represent their thoughts and feelings about a particular 
subject, even if they can't explain why. He discovered that when 
people do this, they often discover "a core, a deep metaphor 
simultaneously embedded in a unique setting." They are drawn to 
seasonal or heroic myths, for example, or images like blood and 
fire and mother. They are also drawn into deep concepts like 
journey and transformation. His work around the world has 
convinced him that the menu of these unconscious metaphors is 
limited and universal, in the manner of human emotions like hope 
and grief.

And Zaltman has found that even grand metaphors have their 
practical applications. The architectural firm Astorino and the 
design firm Fathom asked Zaltman for help in designing a new 
children's hospital that would make a difficult experience somehow 
easier for children, their parents, and the people who work there. 
With the classic ZMET technique, children, parents, and staff 
members cut out pictures they somehow associated with the hospital 
and were then interviewed for nearly two hours about these 
pictures, exploring the thoughts, feelings, and associations that 
they triggered. A stream of metaphors emerged in the conversation.

A child brought in a picture of a mournful-looking pug, which 
she colored blue "because he's kind of sad, and that's the way I 
feel when I'm in the ICU or just can't get out of my room."

After each picture was thoroughly analyzed by the participants, the 
images were scanned, and another interviewer with a computer and a 
talent for the Photoshop program sat with the parent, child, or 
staff member and created a collage, a personal Rorschach test of 
the images (box, Page 60). This snapshot of the participant's 
unconscious associations with the hospital was then enlarged to 
include personal narratives using the collage. The process is 
painstaking, but after the transcripts of these sessions are 
reviewed, even in all the enormous variety of human expression 
and emotion, core themes emerge. In the case of Children's 
Hospital, says Christine Astorino Del Sole of the Fathom firm, "the 
main metaphor was transformation, and the supporting metaphors were 
control, connection, and energy."

(Page 4 of 6)

So how does that translate into the physical space? When patients 
and their families walk into the new hospital, which will be 
completed in 2008, they will be surrounded by images of 
butterflies, the ultimate symbol of transformation. Patient rooms 
will be more like home, and children will be able to exercise some 
control over their personal space. A huge garden, embodying 
transformation as well as energy and connection, will be visible 
from all rooms and accessible to children and their families.

"Before, design was a guessing game; it was hit or miss," says Del 
Sole. "But we know now that at the deepest level this hospital has 
to be about transformation." So when a sick child, or a worried 
parent, or a harassed nurse walks into this hospital, a deep and 
reassuring recognition of the potential beauties of transformation 
will resonate unconsciously.

Waves of cola.

Zaltman, obviously, is not the only person peering into the mind of 
the consumer. In a neuroscientific take on the time-honored blind 
taste test, Coke and Pepsi once again squared off. In 
Blink, Gladwell describes how the Coca-Cola Co. made a 
costly mistake in using data from blind taste tests between Coke 
and Pepsi--in which Pepsi was emphatically preferred by most cola 
drinkers--to change the recipe and create the marketing debacle 
that was New Coke. Still, even with a less preferred taste, Coke 
remains No. 1 in the soft-drink world. More recent research that 
was published after Gladwell's book was finished may explain 
why.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine offered 67 committed Coke 
and Pepsi drinkers a choice, and in blind testing, they preferred 
Pepsi. When they were shown the company logos before they drank, 
however, 3 out of 4 preferred Coke. The researchers scanned the 
brains of the participants during the test and discovered that the

Coke label created wild activity in the part of the brain 
associated with memories and self-image, while Pepsi, though 
tasting better to most, did little to these feel-good centers in 
the brain. P. Reed Montague, director of the Brown Foundation 
Human Neuroimaging laboratory at Baylor, explained when the study 
was released last October: "There's a huge effect of the Coke 
label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the 
dredging up of memories and self-image." The mere red-and-white 
image of Coke made the hippocampus, our brain's vault of memories, 
and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for 
many of our higher human brain functions like working memory and 
what is called executive function or control of behavior, light up. 
The point, says Montague, is that "there is a response in the brain 
which leads to a behavioral effect." And curiously, it has nothing 
to do with conscious preference.

The dog comes up and begins to sniff. If it remembers you, and you 
were a nice person, then instantly it wags its tail, perhaps even 
deigns to lick your wrist. It may avoid you. It may associate you 
with food or with a swift kick. And all those images, all those 
associations are evoked by one healthy whiff.

(Page 5 of 6)

Aside from the basic inhibition against walking up to someone and 
sniffing, humans are no different. "An odor is not just a 
name--it is a whole context," says psychiatrist Dolores Malaspina 
of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia 
University Medical Center. Olfactory information is 
"privileged," Malaspina explains, since it is the only one of our 
five senses that does not make a brief stop at the brain's relay 
station, the thalamus, before going to the ever so intellectual 
prefrontal cortex. Smell is unmediated, unfiltered, and it hits the 
prefrontal cortex with a wallop of intensity. Researchers have 
found that smell plays a strong role in our mating choices, even 
without our knowing it. And when female roommates synchronize their 
menstrual cycles, it is because the unconscious perception of odor 
sets off the endocrine system. Our brains, says Malaspina, 
"beginning with fetal development, are laid out to give precedence 
to olfactory perception."

But what happens if olfactory perception doesn't work 
properly? Malaspina and other researchers are looking at the 
olfactory sense in emotional disorders and have found some 
intriguing results. While schizophrenia is seen as a disorder of 
hallucinations and delusions, a more compelling and disruptive 
element of the disorder is social impairment. Some people with 
schizophrenia can't seem to read social cues, or manage social 
relationships, or summon a social context for whatever encounter 
they are experiencing. And while hallucinations and delusions can 
be controlled often through medication, these basic social 
impairments cause far more difficulty in dealing with the daily 
demands of life.

Research has shown that many people with schizophrenia can also 
suffer from "clinically meaningful olfactory impairment," which 
includes dysfunction in higher brain centers such as the parietal 
lobes--the part of the brain that's responsible for integrating 
sensory output so as to understand something, like reading social 
cues or contextualizing those cues. Just as a smell can elicit 
an immediate image of a particular time and place, lacking that 
ability can deprive someone of a basic social and emotional anchor 
in life. "What we are learning is that smell is a good window into 
the unconscious basis for sociability and social interest," says

Malaspina. "There is a tremendous explosion of interest in this 
forgotten sense. And it was under our noses all the time."
The scenario occurs in hospital rooms throughout the world, 
thousands of times every day. A brain-damaged father or mother 
or child lies in bed, not completely unconscious, not in a coma, 
but demonstrating only flickering consciousness, small behaviors 
that show there is some evidence of the person who once was there, 
some evidence that this person perhaps knows friends and family 
members are near by.

Medically, these patients are categorized as existing in a 
minimally conscious state of awareness; it is estimated that there 
are 100,000 to 300,000 Americans in such a state right now. 
Sometimes these patients are able to actually utter the name of an 
object or to follow a very simple command. But for friends and 
family, they are no longer themselves. And because they find 
language so difficult, it is also assumed that they are unlikely to 
follow conversations.

(Page 6 of 6)

The eye of the mind?

But in a stunning study published this month in the Journal 
Neurology, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging 
to study the brains of two minimally conscious patients and 
compared them with the brains of seven healthy men and woman. The 
scans revealed that the minimally conscious patients had less than 
half of the brain activity of the others. But then all the subjects 
were played a tape made by a family member or friend, recounting 
happy memories and shared experiences. One minimally conscious 
man listened to his sister reminiscing about her wedding and about 
the toast that he made. The result was astonishing: All those who 
were scanned, including the minimally conscious patients, shared 
similar brain activity, some with activation in the visual cortex.

"This shows that there is a life of the mind beyond what is 
apparent," says Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division 
of New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. But 
Fins, who was not involved in the study, points out that 
philosophical questions also emerge. "Does this mean that they are 
seeing words? Visualizing semantic concepts? Does this in some way 
conceptualize consciousness?" As Zaltman points out, language is 
only the narrowest determination of our thoughts. This study shows 
that our brains, even damaged brains, are exquisitely attuned to 
that fact.

For the brain damaged and for the healthy, despite the evidence of 
the prevalence of the unconscious in our daily lives, even as 
fervent a believer as Zaltman urges a bit of caution. "I don't 
think we know what the batting average is for purely rational 
reasons or reasons dressed up that way, or reasons dressed up as 
purely intuition. Both can get us into trouble--often do. And both 
serve us well." It is that great tension between the two, the 
intermingling of the known and the unknown, the conscious and the 
unconscious, the 5 percent and the 95 percent, that the pioneers 
exploring this vast and intricate universe of our minds will 
continue to probe. But there will most likely never be a complete 
understanding. After all, the enigmas of the mind, and the 
mechanics of the brain, will forever define the ultimate mystery of 
simply being human.*


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## Guest (Feb 26, 2005)

Despite evil rumors, I did NOT post that under Dreamer's name. I did see that article a few days ago, but chose to not share it, lol....

interesting stuff, true?

Best,
Janine


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## Dreamer (Aug 9, 2004)

JanineBaker said:


> Despite evil rumors, I did NOT post that under Dreamer's name. I did see that article a few days ago, but chose to not share it, lol....
> 
> interesting stuff, true?
> 
> ...


LOL. Cool stuff.
Best,
Janine :shock: 
I mean, Dreamer 8)


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## Monkeydust (Jan 12, 2005)

*Very* interesting stuff.

Personally, though, I actually prefer coke to pepsi, whatever they say.


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## Guest (Feb 1, 2006)

i understand completely consciously and unconsciously


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