SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
The mysterious voice that whispers the best solutions to our ears. Is it brain? Subconsciousness? Or maybe it is intuition telling us what to do? Did you ever wonder what the realization of your goals depends on? What makes you choose one thing over another? Can you predict your behavior? How do you know how to act? Why some of your behaviors are obvious and seem right? And why some choices are so difficult?
A human being exists in a context and it cannot be taken out from it. We are born and grow up in a specific environment. Genetics and biological conditions explain only about half of our behaviors and opinions. This half is dependent on our temperamental traits, which are thought to be rather stable than prone to change. Every person or event in our lifetime leaves a small trace in our either conscious or unconscious memory. And one day, at a certain time, our organism lets us know that a similar event already took place.
Memory is the ability to store and retrieve information. We can draw a distinction between different types of memory according to different criteria, such as capacity or duration. The distinction proposed by Squire and Zol-Morgan (1991) seems to be particularly interesting. According to this distinction all of our knowledge can be divided into two forms: declarative (explicit), and non-declarative( implicit; procedural). The declarative knowledge contains facts and events.
The implicit one contains information about skills and habits. We acquire it by priming, classical conditioning, and unassociative learning through habituation or sensitization. Perhaps that is where our feeling of uncertainty comes from, when we think that we know how to do something in a specific moment, but we cannot explain why. Content of non-declarative memory is acquired by multiple repetitions or implicit learning. Representation of behavioral sequences triggered in specific conditions is stored. Thus, consciousness is not necessary for retrieval of this knowledge, as it is triggered automatically. Jackoby (1996) showed that two different types of context influence are possible: automatic and a controlled one. The procedure of processes splitting enables retrieving the context, as well as constant measurements of unconscious influences.It happens independently of the possible growth of conscious level of recall. It works this way, because memory contains sets of operations which were previously performed simultaneously. We can not fully recall events from the past, but similar contexts and attitudes appear quite often. Such conceptualizations help us making our choices intentionally, though we perceive only the importance of the current event (Toth and Reingold, 2004).
Our memory is, in a way, of unlimited capacity. We will always remember a certain percent of the material we are trying to memorize, regardless of how vast the material is. Thus, we have possibly infinite resources on our hands and enormous knowledge, and quite often we are not aware of this. Our decisions seem to depend on constantly forming memory capacities.
In common knowledge, subconscious acting is often perceived as an intuitive one. What is intuition, then? Actually it is a philosophical term referring to instant recognition of an idea, without any conscious analyzing (Dorfman et al,. 2004). Bowers (1994) says that intuition is a person’s feeling or belief that her or his solution is correct, despite any evidence for such conclusion is available. Intuition is then also a form of self-meta-knowledge reflecting knowledge or attitudes concerning our own states and cognitive functions (Flavell, 1979). The key aspect of intuition is that it allows the human mind to function without fully recognizing reasons, motives or mechanisms of actions (Myers, 2002). Intuition is also one of the forms of decision making, when we lack of concrete, verbalized data.
Decision is a choice between at least two of the possible courses of action. Making a choice does not automatically mean taking an action. For action to be taken an appropriate motivation and an objective possibility of realizing the decision is needed (Necka, 2006). Because the process of decision making is quite often difficult, our mind has developed methods for shortening the time needed to make a choice. Instead of conducting complicated and complex analysis each time, we implement the so-called heuristics, which are simplified rules for reasoning, enabling us to quickly form an opinion, which is accompanied by subjective feeling of correctness (Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). Another form of decision making when there are no certain clues is basing on affect. Shortage of premises, or when they are vague and unclear are the conditions for an affect-based behavior. This situation can also occur when the attentional resources are absorbed by other meaningful activity.
According to Kelly (1955, 1970) the prototype of human behaviors is the exploring activity and the most rudimentary psychic process is anticipation. Kelly refers to the personal constructs term. According to his theory, gathering the experience is based on creating dichotimic reality projections (black-white, big-small, sad-happy, etc.). These projections have dynamic character: during our lifetime we gather more and more experience and it is more internally consistent. The behaviors stem from the substance of these projections.
The important notions, that commonly are associated with the subconscious problem solving, are incubation and insight. The incubation is a spontaneous or meaningful pause in the problem solving process. Such a pause appears when we are unable to find solution (deadlock). Usually it precedes finding the solution via an insight. The solution is incubating, hatching when we reckon, that our finding has came to an end. This pause is not automatically triggered, but it incites us to look for clues in the surrounding environment. Not always it acts consciously (Necka et al., 2006). The insight is a radical and sudden change in perception of the problem, that leads to the understanding of its nature. The essential feature of insight is its immediacy as we experience kind of enlightenment. This sudden illumination is possible thanks to clues that are processed automatically. They lead us to the solution, but not always we are aware of that. That is why we tend to interpret it as a subconscious process.
To sum it up, subconsciousness, that has an important role in our behavior, always have its origin in some traces in memory. Despite we feel like guessing, our intuition often proves to be correct. This is because intuition stems from subconscious learning and from associations with similar objects or situations encountered in the past. Most commonly our intuition is triggered by context or situation similarity. Therefore, we should not hesitate and trust the intuition and our choices.
Literature:
Browers, K.S. (1994). Intuition. W: R.J. Steinberg (red.), Encyclopedia of intelligence (s. 613-617). New York: Macmillan.
Dorfman, J., Shames, V.A. I Kihlstrom, J.F. (2004). Intuicja, inkubacja i wgląd: udział ukrytego poznania w rozwiązywaniu problemów. [W:] G. Underwood (red.) Poznawcza psychologia nieświadomości, Gdańsk. GWP.
Kelly, G.A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. (t. I I II). New York: Norton.
Kelly, G.A. (1970). A brief introduction to personal construct theory. W: D. Bannister (red.), Perspectives in personal construct theory (s. 1-30). London: Academic Press.
Nęcka, E., Orzechowski, J., Szymura, B. (2006). Psychologia poznawcza. Warszawa. Wydawnictwo naukowe PWN.
Squire, L.R., Zola-Morgan, S. (1991). The medial temporal lobe memory system. Science, 253, 1380-1387
Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. W: D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, A. Tversky (red.), Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases (s. 3-20). Cambridge University Press.
