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Dear murugappan,

You have asked me more about  unconscious  in your reply to my descriptions on them. I try to give you more elaborations of the same now,

21^st century trends in unconscious studies: implicit memory, implicit perception, implicit learning, implicit thought, implicit motives and implicit emotions:

The rediscovery of the unconscious  have gotten a late start. By early 21 century  the increasingly powerful role played by the concept of automaticity in personality, social, and clinical psychology came to be published in popular media as well.

The general argument is that some attitudes, impressions, and other social judgments, as well as aggression, compliance, prejudice, and other social behaviors, are typically mediated by automatic processes which operate outside phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. To some extent, which I have come to think of as the automaticity juggernaut seems to represent a reaction to a cognitive view of social interaction which seems, to some, to inappropriately emphasize conscious, rational, cognitive processes, at the expense of the unconscious, irrational, emotive, and conative. In addition, the popularity of automaticity seems to represent a reversion to earlier, pre-cognitive, situationist(relating to the belief that people are more influenced by external, situational factors than by internal ones)views within social psychology.

After all, the concept of automaticity (the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice) is at least tacitly(in a way that is understood or implied without being directly stated) modeled on innate stimulus-response connections such as reflexes, taxes, and instincts, as well as those acquired through classical and instrumental conditioning. The automaticity juggernaut is not behaviorism (learning based on the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Conditioning occurs through interaction with the environment), because it entails internal mental representations and processes intervening between stimulus and response, but it is close: if the cognitive processes underlying social cognition and social behavior are indeed largely automatic, then not too much thought has gone into them.

HIDDEN MEMORY:

Like automaticity, the concept of implicit memory has received a huge amount of attention in the field. A whole industry has developed around implicit memory, involving amnesic and demented neurological patients; dissociative disorders such as psychogenic amnesia, fugue, and multiple personality; children and the healthy aged; depressed patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy; surgical patients receiving general anesthesia or conscious sedation; hypnotized subjects (but apparently not sleepers); and even college students who have all their wits about them.

Still, there are some important issues that have to be addressed by further research. For example, almost all the evidence on implicit memory has been collected within a single narrow paradigm, repetition priming, leading to theories of implicit memory which emphasize relatively low-level perceptual processes. But semantic priming occurs too, not just in posthypnotic amnesia but in organic amnesia as well, suggesting that these perception-based theories are not adequate to the phenomenon. Similarly, while explicit and implicit memory are dissociable, they also interact, requiring revisions in theories which hold that these two expressions of memory are mediated by separate memory systems in the brain.

Despite these and other persisting questions, the general acceptance of the distinction between explicit, conscious and implicit, unconscious expressions of memory opens the door to extensions of the explicit-implicit distinction to other domains of mental life.

HIDDEN PERCEPTION:

Implicit perception subsumes so-called "subliminal" perception, involving the processing of stimuli which are degraded beyond conscious perception by low intensities, brief durations, or masking stimuli. But it goes beyond the subliminal to include neurological syndromes such as blindsight and neglect, where the stimuli are in no sense subliminal: they are perfectly visible to everyone but the brain-damaged subject. So too, in the conversion syndromes of "hysterical" deafness, blindness, and anesthesia. Similarly, in hypnotic blindness, deafness, anesthesia, and analgesia, the subjects would be clearly aware of the stimuli in question were it not for the hypnotist’s suggestion. On the fringes of consciousness, are cases of so-called pre-attentive processing, where the stimulus in question is nominally supraliminal, but escapes focal awareness by virtue of para-foveal presentation, or presentation over the unattended channel in the dichotic listening or shadowing paradigm. Thus, the term implicit perception captures a broader range of phenomena than is covered by the term subliminal perception, because it covers the processing, outside of conscious awareness, of stimulus events which are clearly perceptible in terms of intensity, duration, and other characteristics. It also has the extra advantage of skirting the difficult psychophysical concept of the limen.

What all of these phenomena have in common is a dissociation between explicit and implicit perception, analogous to the dissociation between explicit and implicit memory: the subject’s experience, thought, and action is affected by some event in the current stimulus environment, in the absence of conscious perception.

HIDDEN LEARNING:

Continuing the elaboration of the explicit-implicit distinction to other domains, we can define implicit learning as the acquisition of new knowledge and patterns of behavior through experience, in the absence of awareness of the knowledge or behavior so acquired. As it happens, the term "implicit learning" antedates implicit memory.

In some respects, the learning of artificial grammars appears similar to the acquisition of syntax in natural language. After all, we are perfectly fluent speakers and interpreters of our native language long before we learn the rules of grammar in elementary school. But implicit learning has also been observed in a wide variety of other paradigms, including classical and instrumental conditioning, control of complex systems, and the learning of categories and sequential relationships. In each of these cases, the claim is that people's behavior is shaped by prior experience – the classical definition of learning -- even though they are unaware of what they have learned.

As with implicit perception, however, the border between implicit learning and implicit memory is a little vague. Of course, this is as it should be: memory provides the cognitive basis for learning in the first place, and whatever is learned has to be stored in memory. But the problem goes deeper than that. When normal subjects learn an artificial grammar, they certainly remember being asked to study the sample strings, and they may even remember the strings themselves, even if they are unaware of what they have evidently learned about the structure of the grammar itself. By contrast, when brain-damaged amnesic patients acquire new patterns of behavior from experience, they are amnesic for the whole learning experience. In amnesia, the occurrence of implicit learning also gives evidence of preserved implicit memory, but I prefer to reserve the term implicit memory for effects which occur in the absence of conscious memory for the original experience. By the same token, I reserve implicit learning to abilities and patterns of response that are acquired through learning experiences, in the absence of conscious awareness of what has been learned.

There is a continuing debate over whether implicit learning is really unconscious in any meaningful sense of the term. It just may be too much to expect subjects to be able to articulate an entire Markov-process artificial grammar, but subjects might be consciously aware of just enough of the rule to permit them to discriminate at above-chance levels between grammatical and ungrammatical strings. Perhaps this debate will be resolved if we pay a little more attention to the format in which the newly acquired knowledge is represented. Perhaps, as implied by the original artificial grammar studies, the subject acquires a whole system of If-Then productions and this procedural knowledge, like all procedural knowledge, is inaccessible to conscious introspection. On the other hand, perhaps the knowledge isn’t procedural at all, but declarative in nature. For example, subjects might abstract from the learning trials a prototype of a grammatical string; alternatively, they may simply memorize the instances on the study list. In either case, they may make relatively accurate grammaticality judgments by consciously comparing test items to the summary prototype, or to the specific exemplars they’ve memorized. We just don’t know yet. But what we do know is that amnesic patients can learn from their experience without remembering the learning experience itself, and in that sense, at least, implicit learning gives evidence of unconscious influence.

If the concept of implicit learning is more controversial than those of implicit memory or implicit perception, the concept of implicit thought is even more so. Still, the literature contains some favorable evidence, if only just a little. Accordingly, I have defined implicit thought as the influence of some cognitive representation, itself neither a percept nor an episodic memory, on experience, thought or action, in the absence of conscious awareness of that representation.

HIDDEN THOUGHT:

Implicit thought may well underlie some of the most interesting facets of creative thought. In this view, intuition reflects a priming-based "feeling of knowing" similar to what we commonly see in studies of memory; incubation reflects the gradual accumulation of strength of this primed idea; and insight reflects the emergence of the pre-conscious idea into the full daylight of consciousness.

Along with automaticity, implicit memory, implicit perception, implicit learning, and implicit thought comprise the cognitive unconscious. But cognition is not all there is to mental life, and so we are led to ask whether there is an affective unconscious, and a conative unconscious, as well. Of course, emotional and motivational states may arise automatically, and in that sense result from unconscious processes. But can motives and emotions themselves be unconscious, in the same way that implicit memories can?

HIDDEN MOTIVES:

In fact, the late David McClelland and his associates have articulated a concept of implicit motives – interestingly, without overt reference to the concept of implicit memory. Explicit motivation might be defined as the conscious representation of a conative state, or the desire to engage in some particular activity, as represented by a craving for food, yearning for love, and the like. By contrast, implicit motivation would refer to any change in experience, thought, or action which is attributable to one’s motivational state, in the absence of conscious awareness of that state.

We are admittedly verging near Freudian territory here, but the motives in question are not seething sexual and aggressive impulses arising from the id; they are motives for achievement, power, affiliation, and intimacy. Moreover, explicit motives are self-attributed: the person is aware of the motive, can reflect on it, and can report its presence in interviews or on personality questionnaires. Implicit motives, by contrast, are inferred from the person’s performance .

HIDDEN EMOTIONS:

Turning to the affective domain, we seek dissociations between explicit and implicit emotions. Again paralleling the vocabulary of the cognitive unconscious, we define explicit emotion as the person’s conscious awareness of an emotion, feeling, or mood state; implicit emotion, then, refers to changes in experience, thought, or action which are attributable to one’s emotional state, in the absence of conscious awareness of that state.

With respect to the proposition that people can be unaware of emotional states which nonetheless influence their ongoing experience, thought, and action.  Multiple-systems theory of emotion postulates that every emotional response consists of three components:

-verbal-cognitive, corresponding to a subjective feeling state such as fear;

-overt motor, corresponding to a behavioral response such as escape or avoidance;

-and covert physiological, corresponding to a change in some autonomic index such as skin conductance or heart rate.

These three components or systems usually covary, but under some circumstances they can move in different directions – a state as labeled desynchrony.  I am especially interested in a particular form of desynchrony: in which explicit emotion, as represented by the conscious, subjective feeling state is absent, but behavioral and somatic signs of emotion persist. Neuroscientific theory aside, a potentially interesting approach to implicit emotion has been offered in their application of the explicit-implicit distinction to the social-psychological concept of attitude. Experimental approach to implicit emotion is very promising.

The initial discovery of the unconscious, which was consolidated at the turn of the 20th century, has been revived, and the process of rediscovery is well along as we turn to the 21st. In my view, there is incontrovertible evidence for automatic mental processes and for implicit memories. Implicit perception is, perhaps, less convincingly established at this point, and implicit learning remains controversial as well. Still the evidence favoring both concepts cannot be dismissed out of hand. Research on implicit thought is admittedly immature, but the evidence in hand is quite provocative.

Based on the evidence for the cognitive unconscious, implicit motivation and implicit emotion cannot be dismissed out of hand, but we still require convincing evidence that they can be dissociated from their explicit counterparts. Still, it is clear that the paradigms developed in the study of implicit memory provide a vehicle for exploring all aspects of the psychological unconscious. In response to Immanuel Kant, we can say that priming and other methodologies do in fact enable us to infer that that we have ideas, even though we are not conscious of them. And in response to William James, we can say that these same methodologies, rigorously applied, will prevent us from believing whatever we like about the unconscious mind.

In that respect, I must emphasize that the scope of the psychological unconscious, broad as it is, does not appear to be so broad as to encompass the unconscious of psychoanalytic theory. There is no evidence, in any of the science I have summarized today, favoring Freud’s view that the unconscious is the repository of primitive, infantile, irrational, sexual and aggressive impulses, repressed in a defensive maneuver to avoid conflict and anxiety. Nor is there any evidence to support the more extreme clinical lore concerning unconscious representations of trauma, or the excesses of the recovered memory movement in psychotherapy. In this case, as James warned, the unconscious does indeed seem to be a tumbling-ground for whimsies.

In any event, the evidence of unconscious mental life is so vast, so convincing, increasing and strengthening so much with each new issue of our best journals, that we are in danger of coming full circle, to the position of conscious in essentialism that Owen Flanagan has discussed. Some philosophers and psychologists have concluded that automaticity and priming dominate our behavior, so that consciousness is an illusion -- at best a commentary on what is going on down below, at worst a delusion that gets in the way of adaptive action (not to mention a proper scientific understanding of mind and behavior). I think we see this trend clearly in the "automaticity juggernaut" that I described earlier. As someone who has devoted virtually his entire career to getting people to take the psychological unconscious seriously, I am reminded of St. Theresa’s warning: we should be careful what we pray for, because we just might get it.

As a fervent supporter of the cognitive revolution in psychology, I am reminded that the French revolution of 1789 replaced one despotism with another. Is this what we overthrew behaviorism for: to be told that we are all automatons after all – that consciousness is a charming feature of human brain activity, but that in the final analysis it doesn’t buy us anything? I don’t think so. Like language and intelligence, consciousness is too great an achievement of human evolution to be useless, much less maladaptive. Consciousness allows us to be aware of the present, and to reflect on our past, so we can plan for our futures. Without consciousness there can be no culture – no way of deliberately sharing our knowledge, experiences, and ideas with others of our species. We now know that the psychological unconscious is real and dynamically active. But so is consciousness, and if we ignore this central fact of human existence we will never achieve a satisfactory science of mental life.

Thus we had extensive discussion on the unconscious in the modern context. As it says what Freud could observe was just an iceberg of it. We shall see in out next letter what he said about unconscious!

Affectionately,

Gandhibabu.