The Unconscious and Homework

Daily living is sort of like being captain of a ship. From the bridge, you can see the ocean ahead, and there are several subordinates who give you hopefully accurate information from their instruments, and respond -- usually with apparent diligence -- to your instructions. Below the bridge, all sorts of things are going on which you might (or might not) know about in principle, but which you do not see -- although you sometimes can see the effects sooner or later. The captain is in charge, and is traditionally responsible, for a massive operation of which the captain has limited awareness or control. This is inevitable, since running a ship requires a vast amount of attention in a number of quarters.

The analogy to humans is pretty good. The massive processing in the mid-brain creates the illusion of seeing what is there, when in fact the image seen is reconstructed from many pictures seen by two eyes (each of which has good vision only in a very narrow range, the eyes making up for that by frequent shifts) and glued together to create an apparently seamless whole. The result is that we seem to sit inside our head -- much like a captain in a ship's bridge -- and see and hear preprocessed sights and sounds (and the strange chemical data streams from taste and smell), and from a greater distance deal with a variety of tactile sensations. We instruct our limbs to move and they move -- but perhaps not quite as desired: actually, we tell a limb to do something (pick up that pin) and some subordinate tells the upper arm to position the forearm as the forearm muscles position the fingers to ...). Even more strangely, memory works the same way. We try to recall ... something ... and maybe that something is presented to us, and maybe not. Meanwhile, we say or do things that may or may not come out right, and we wonder, "where did that come from?"

Philosophers have long made a big deal out of the fact that we are mysteries to ourselves; we are like ship captains who only have a dim idea of what our ships look like, much less how they work. This can cause problems: no navy in the world would let anyone ignorant of shipcraft captain a ship. But we have evolved or been designed to be able to function without knowing, say, that the red liquid inside of us is pumped by an organ in the center of our chest. But still, we clearly can function better if we know how we work. Which brings us to the mind: we don't really know how it works. But it does appear to be as ship-like as the body: we are aware of and have control of only a bridge-like center, while we feel only dimly the rumbles of mysterious engines in the depths below.

Sigmund Freud formally introduced the notion of an Unconscious to psychology. His experience with many patients convinced him that someone could be psychologically traumatized, and instead of resolving the trauma, cover the wound up so that it became "unconscious", and so not be directly aware of it even though the trauma remained, causing problems. Imagine a captain of a ship, told that they've hit a rock: the captain might say, I can't deal with this right now so use some spare lumber to patch up the hole; we all know that sometime later, the hole will leak. Freud's method of psychoanalysis was based on the idea that if you could locate these traumas (poorly patched holes), then they could be more soundly repaired. Unfortunately, Freud never did go into the details of how repairs could be effected -- psychoanalysis does not have an impressive cure rate -- and then there was the hysteria affair. Freud theorized that (sexual) child abuse occurred in nice, middle class families; members of the medical community objected to his theory; Freud changed his mind, proposing that a number of "complexes" (Mr. Oedipus, Ms. Electra, etc.) that he claimed spontaneously generated traumas, like on-board termites, and that these complexes generated the false evidence of childhood abuse. These complexes read like fiction, the evidence of their existence was very soft, and Freud's own motives for creating them were too apparent, and besides there was forensic evidence that the abuse was real. All this had the effect of undermining Freud's credibility (see, e.g., the squabble started by Jeffrey Masson's book Assault on Truth and reactions from some critics in Human Nature Review), and psychoanalysis is not taken as seriously as it once was.

But returning to the ship, let's figure out what you actually do in daily life. The captain is on deck, relying on officers and crew, and things are running routinely as you are doing your homework. You look at a problem, and, inside your head (the bridge of your ship), an unseen ensign suggests that the exercise might be something like one of the examples in the text. So you flip back a few pages (actually you order your hands and arms to flip the pages and don't really notice how that is done --- think of all those instructions to all the individual muscles of your hands, arms, and shoulders) and ...

• You scan page after page, looking for the word "example." That is, you watch while a helmsman slowly flips pages and an ensign looks for the word "example."

• The ensign spots the word, you order the helmsman to stop, and an analysis of the example begins, comparing the example with the current homework problem. This is quite complicated: the business of recognizing and assembling letters into words, symbols and terms into formulas, and pieces of diagrams, is mostly unconscious.

• What you, the captain, oversee is the association of terms of the example with terms of the exercise, following some conscious or unconscious program, until somehow you are satisfied: some officer whispers that the association satisfies the criteria of equivalence. (You may have noticed that this whisperer is subject to fits of optimism or superstitious anxiety or both.)

• Unless you are on very good relations with the whisperer, or have very conscious control over the program for establishing equivalence, what you have is not so much an association so much as a feeling that the example is like the exercise. Now comes the fun part of translating the terms of the exercise into that of the example, and vice versa, using the example as a template for generating a solution to the exercise. It feels as if you are making the associations yourself, this term in the example with that term in the exercise, as that is where your attention is focussed.

And in less intense situations, you relax and let the bridge crew generate rote responses to Aunt Mathilda's queries about how you are doing, assured that her bridge crew is generating those rote questions, and you both know -- your respective bridge crews both know -- this routine by heart. In a sense, we spend most of our lives on autopilot, not really that cognizant of the fact that we are not really hearing every word, not seeing every sight, and not screening every thing we say or even every thing we do. There is some evidence that:

• The crew is aware of things that they don't tell the captain. Ever since the 1950s, there has been a lot of research into "subliminal messages," i.e., messages somehow rapidly and directly communicated to a person's Unconscious, circumventing conscious awareness. In the 1950s, advertizers would arrange to have pictures of, say, candy bars and soft drinks inserted in a motion picture film. As a typical film flashes perhaps 60 stills a second, this individual picture would not consciously register, but it might have an effect.
  Subliminal transmission has gotten more sophisticated since then, with clearly displayed items in ads, that are not consciously noted but are unconsciously observed. And the effect is not just in advertizing: there has been a lot of research into how we see what we want to see; somehow the crew knows what the captain wants to see, and that is somehow what the captain winds up seeing.

• The crew reacts faster than the captain. Most of us know the difference between the following two reactions to the question, "do you like my hair cut?"
  1. "Very nice."
  2. Pause, and then, "Very nice."
  There is something insulting about that pause, as if you had to think about it, or perhaps you were thinking of a white lie, or whatever. We automatically know what Freud made very clear: it takes a few moments for the bridge crew to advise the captain and get an answer, so an immediate answer comes from the bridge crew, while a delayed answer comes from the captain. This is true in doing exercises: some are "easy" in that when we do them, we always know what to do next, the solution following readily: virtually all the captain has to do is watch. The "hard" exercises are those in which we have to figure out what to do next, when we have to push the bridge crew into saying something (relevant): the captain has to stand at the bridge, barking out orders that may or may not lead to the production of an answer.

• Solutions to hard problems come from the Unconscious. The great mathematician Henri Poincare described in Mathematical Creation how he was working on a very hard problem, went on a vacation, and the solution occurred to him while on vacation. Poincare proposed that he was unconsciously working on the problem: that some apparatus was working, constructing possible solutions out of basic components -- primitive ideas floating around in the back of his mind. (For more on this, see the page on building solutions.) This often happens: we mull over a problem for a long time, getting, inspecting, and rejecting ideas that "come to us" from bridge crew members, until one works reasonably well.

But suppose you followed the advice of Thales of Miletus to "know thyself." How would you do that?

Unlike Occidental philosophy, with is obsessed with truth, Oriental philosophy is more concerned with how to use one's head. Thus the Orientals have a more sophisticated approach to understanding onesself, and what they propose is essentially ... observation. A number of philosophies have proposed "self-cultivation" as a major activity of one's life; the idea is to be aware of what one does and what one thinks. (This is unusual as most of us are not particularly aware of what we do or think, and religious leaders through the ages have contended that such inattention lies at the root of a lot of our misery.)

• One traditional approach is to maintain a mental state of mindfulness. With mindfulness, one maintains an emotional distance from the external and internal world, noting what is happening. For example, if you are in a state of mindfulness, and someone angers you, you note that you feel anger as if that anger was in some way external. (This is not artificial: remembering the role of the captain of the ship, emotions are the great rumbling engines beneath the decks, and it is sometimes best to dispassionately notice the rumbles.) The advantage of mindfulness is that you gain greater self-control, and greater self-awareness. The difficulty is that a state of mindfulness is not effortless to maintain.
• A more ... scientific ... approach may be to keep charts. This is not incompatible with mindfulness, and it does produce records, and some people find interesting patterns emerge when they keep records. One popular kind of record is the journal, with dated entries. Some therapists recommend generating numerical data --- rate each day from 1 to 5 --- and then graph the data against events and therapies.

Then there's the question: once we know how the mind works, how can we make it work better? Or at least, how can we cure the neuroses, psychoses, etc., that have us pigging out on brownies while we watch television in anxious fifteen-minute intervals postponing the act of getting down and ... doing ... or at least gazing anxiously at ... our homework? Actually, psychiatry is about where physical medicine was in the Nineteenth century: we are learning more about what is going on, but there the treatments are not particularly successful except for some specific ailments. At the moment, counseling can provide some assistance, as can careful self-observation.

For similar visions of the mind, see:

• The original and strangely obsessive Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud, who attempts to work out the hidden motivations of the crew.
• A more coherent and polemical view is the more abstract proposal of John Dewey, who sees us as creatures of habit. Dewey sees habits as the mediators between will and action in his Human Nature and Conduct, and he contends that, "When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit," and he rejects as delusory the idea that habits are external things when they hold us back from our goals.
• The most celebrated attempt to view the crew as ants, by the eminent cognitive scientist, Marvin Minsky: The Society of Mind.
• Neurobiologist Bernard Baars looks at the human mind as, most likely, Shakespeare did, with actors performing In the Theatre of Consciousness.
• And one must not overlook what is commonly, and I believe, erroneously regarded as a dissenting opinion. While Freud and Dewey was convinced that there was a forest out there, B. F. Skinner saw no forest, but only trees. For a "behaviorist" polemic on trees in the absence of any forest, see Beyond Freedom and Dignity.