The subconscious mind: Your unsung hero

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Earlier this year I found myself thinking about thinking. Specifically, what is it that makes the human mind so special? Like many people, I have always believed that the answer lies in our capacity for conscious thought. But listening to speakers at a recent Ernst Strungmann Forum in Frankfurt, Germany, I began to wonder if there might be more to it than that. It was a discussion entitled "Better than conscious" that had me intrigued. The more I listened to what the assembled scientists had to say and talked to them about their work, the more it seemed that our higher consciousness alone is not what sets us apart from other animals. In fact, far from playing second fiddle to the conscious mind, subconscious thought processes may play a crucial role in many of the mental facilities we prize as uniquely human, including creativity, memory, learning and language. Modern notions of the subconscious were invented by Sigmund Freud as part of his now-discredited theory of psychoanalysis. These days the subconscious is on a firmer scientific footing - although many neurobiologists avoid the word "subconscious", preferring "non-conscious", "pre-conscious" or "unconscious" to describe thought processes that happen outside consciousness. Where Freud and his followers saw the subconscious as little more than an emotional and impulsive force in a constant tug of war with the more logical and detached conscious mind, we now know that this view is too simplistic. Our subconscious is not an unthinking autopilot that needs to be subjugated by rationality, but a purposeful, active and independent guide to behaviour. Some scientists go so far as to believe that it is responsible for the vast majority of our day-to-day activity and that we are nothing more than "zombies" guided by our subconscious. This is an extreme point of view, but in the past few years, researchers trying to understand the nature of human consciousness and how it differs from the subconscious have made some surprising discoveries. Put the findings of many studies together and another picture emerges. There is more to being human than consciousness. To get to this new view of the subconscious, neuroscientists and psychologists have had to fight hard to overcome a major barrier. So far, there is no reliable way to distinguish between conscious and subconscious thought processes. They can be described easily enough - psychologists use terms such as explicit/implicit, procedural/declarative or automatic/controlled to distinguish between the thought process. Explicit, declarative - or conscious - thoughts are those that can easily be expressed in words, for example, whereas subconscious ones are hard to articulate. Conscious thought processes are disrupted if you are forced to direct your attention elsewhere. Subconscious ones are not. But as yet you cannot simply look at an image of the brain and say what kind of thought process is being used. The subconscious mind may even have a hand in our unique talent for language. Often we are only consciously aware of words as we speak them. So does that make language the mouthpiece of the non-conscious mind? And what about the process of learning to speak? Infants do not need tutoring to acquire their native language; they pick it up subconsciously. What's more they do this with remarkably little linguistic data - what the Harvard University linguist Noam Chomsky has called the "poverty of stimulus" - suggesting that this subconscious learning allows youngsters to use information very efficiently. Perhaps this also explains why new languages are more difficult to acquire after about the age of 8 - if we then gradually lose that subconscious ability and so have to learn language in a more formal, didactic and conscious way. These questions remain unanswered, and perhaps that is not surprising. As Dayan points out, we still have a long way to go before we fully understand the various components of subconscious thought. "The aspects of learning that lead us to acquire a language may have nothing whatsoever in common with other non-conscious facets," he says. The subconscious mind may even have a hand in our unique talent for language. Often we are only consciously aware of words as we speak them. So does that make language the mouthpiece of the non-conscious mind? And what about the process of learning to speak? Infants do not need tutoring to acquire their native language; they pick it up subconsciously. What's more they do this with remarkably little linguistic data - what the Harvard University linguist Noam Chomsky has called the "poverty of stimulus" - suggesting that this subconscious learning allows youngsters to use information very efficiently. Perhaps this also explains why new languages are more difficult to acquire after about the age of 8 - if we then gradually lose that subconscious ability and so have to learn language in a more formal, didactic and conscious way. These questions remain unanswered, and perhaps that is not surprising. As Dayan points out, we still have a long way to go before we fully understand the various components of subconscious thought. "The aspects of learning that lead us to acquire a language may have nothing whatsoever in common with other non-conscious facets," he says. It is intriguing to wonder whether the human subconscious mind is different from that of other animals. Is there a human "higher subconscious" on a par with our "higher consciousness"? Given the difficulties of even pinning down the nature of consciousness, it is far too early to start elevating the subconscious to such heights. Still, if there is one thing everyone in Frankfurt agreed on, it is that our non-conscious thought processes are a lot cleverer than we once realised.