Consciousness

The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness

Freud’s notion of a dark, libidinous unconscious is obsolete. A new theory holds that the brain produces a continuous stream of unconscious predictions

• By Steve Ayan on December 19, 2018

Research on the unconscious mind has shown that the brain makes judgments and decisions quickly and automatically. It continuously makes predictions about future events.

According to the theory of the “predictive mind,” consciousness arises only when the brain’s implicit expectations fail to materialize.

Higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex can occur without consciousness. The regions of the brain responsible for the emotions and motives, not the cortex, direct our conscious attention.

In 1909 five men converged on Clark University in Massachusetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the head of this little troupe was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Ten years earlier Freud had introduced a new treatment for what was called “hysteria” in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This work also introduced a scandalous view of the human psyche: underneath the surface of consciousness roils a largely inaccessible cauldron of deeply rooted drives, especially of sexual energy (the libido). These drives, held in check by socially inculcated morality, vent themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams and neuroses. The slips in turn provide evidence of the unconscious mind.

The brain’s outer rind—the cerebral cortex—is the seat of higher mental functions in traditional views of the brain. But in a model proposed by Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, consciousness arises from activity in lower regions, such as the reticular activating system, the ventral tegmentum and the thalamus. For instance, sensory information—all of which passes through the thalamus—becomes conscious only when it is emotionally or motivationally relevant, in which case the prefrontal and the cingulate cortex direct our attention to it. Meanwhile the striatum and the precuneus play a role in automatic movement control and orientation, which enable us to interact with our environment without giving it a conscious thought. Credit: Falconieri Visuals

 Unconscious processes greatly control our consciousness. Where you direct your attention, what you remember and the ideas you have, what you filter out from the flood of stimuli that bombard you, how you interpret them and what goals you pursue—all these result from automatic processes.