The Language of the Unconscious Mind
cake, not carrots
Last summer I was cycling home on quiet back streets, following my husband as we returned from a long trail ride. We were a few blocks from home, a neighbourhood I know well. At a stop sign and he said, “Didn’t you see the fireman’s dummy on the road back there?”
Did I what? Was he joking? I could not have missed...ah, but I had. Completely. I explain it now as being tired. I was following my husband’s lead home and letting my mind wander. There are times when my mind is occupied and I am on autopilot. So this leads me to this column, an explanation of how we are able to function when our attention is elsewhere. It is the story of turning carrots into carrot cake.
Attention is a limited resource. Multitasking is a myth. In order to focus the mind on something, we need a method to monitor the surrounding environment but keep it in the background. So, when we are busy thinking, our minds generate a background by way of a process known as prediction. Think of it as a mentally generated virtual reality. It is not unlike peripheral vision. It is a type of mirage that gives us the reassuring experience of knowing what is around us without actually focussing on it. The prediction process constantly monitors for change, allowing it to keep up with you and important signals like a crying baby to get through.
How this prediction is created in our minds is not really well understood, but might go something like this. We absorb a lot of information in our lives, beginning with raw sensation and building to complex learning. That information does not float loose around our minds. It is organized in ways that improve memory and use. We start with simple cognitive analyses for location, size, shape, colour, movement, name and feel. The results are grouped into categories such as concrete (buildings, toys) and abstract (living things, activities, emotions). The categories form systems of understanding (how planets move, political structures). These systems encompass a lifetime of experience and information, and provide structures by which to view the world. These structures become rules to live by.
Unconscious information processing takes what we learn and builds models of the world: what it looks like and how it works. This is an automatic process that can then use those models to tell you what you can reasonably expect of the environment around you. This leaves you free to pay attention to something specific without constant distraction. It is background information. In the example above, my prediction model included the street I was on, where I was going and how I would get there. It did not include a fireman’s dummy lying by the curb. I missed seeing it because my mind was elsewhere and I did not need to see it to get safely home.
In a similar example, one crucial skill when learning to drive is to shut out distractions while attending to the road and traffic. It is not that you are blind to the surrounding buildings, it is that you must stay focussed on cars, traffic signals, road signs and pedestrians. The unconscious organizational models act like virtual reality, keeping the background stable while you attend to the task at hand. The prediction function is constantly communicating with your conscious mind with expectations of reality. It is not static, but constantly shifting and reorganizing. As you move and switch your focus of attention, it shifts with you.
Information you learned consciously now has to serve another function, which is rather like world building in fantasy novels and on line games. It will be used to build predictive models and that means reorganizing basic information. There is a word in German, gestalt, which is when data points shift into a configuration that takes on new meaning. Someone’s nose, eyes, cheeks and lips become a recognizable face. The sum of the parts takes on a new character.
What the unconscious mind is doing in prediction is providing a seamless working model of reality. The process requires that information is transformed into an organized body of knowledge, a gestalt understanding of the world as you know it. It is this meaningful configuration of facts that your unconscious communicates to you.
What your unconscious can not do is speak to you directly in linear, logical language with nouns and verbs. Your unconscious mind does not speak English. Any language, in fact. It is doing something with information so foreign to our usual way of thinking that we may be quite oblivious to what it has to say.
If I go back to the restaurant model from the last column (The Front of the House), the dishes that come out of the kitchen are not like the basic ingredients that were shipped in. Trying to describe carrot cake as carrots, oil, sugar, eggs, flour and spices does nothing to convey the experience of a piece of carrot cake. The final product has gone through so many stages of change that the end result is not recognizable as a pile of raw carrots.
A carrot cake model is simplistic but it demonstrates the profound transformation that occurs in the unconscious mind as it takes in the analyzed information from the conscious mind and builds something...else. This end product is no longer couched in the language of the conscious mind. The products of unconscious processing are integrative, not analytical. As in carrot cake, do not hunt for the carrots; they are not there anymore. Focus on the cake, because that is the reality now.
The language of the unconscious has a recognizable style. For example, people speak of the difference between seeing a floor plan of a house compared to the more impressive experience of walking through the finished house. Seeing the northern lights is very different from reading a description. There is a sense of the whole which is not felt in the parts. It is the difference between information and knowledge.
Another way to recognize the products of unconscious activity is that they arrive in the form of a solution, not an analysis. The answer is not in the pieces of the puzzle, it is in how they fit together.
I wrote about the ring of truth in Mind Phases (2022) as another hallmark. When the unconscious serves up a solution to a problem, it comes with a sense of accuracy and reality. Another indicator of unconscious information processing is that the missing or incorrect part is identified. It answers the conscious question of, what is wrong here?
Closely associated with the missing or erroneous element and the sense of truth is that unconscious processing demonstrates how something will work. It becomes clear when elements come together into a coherent whole.
This is the phenomenom of consolidating new learning after a good night’s sleep. Students who get a good night’s sleep before an exam perform reliably better than those who pull an all night study binge. It is why sleeping on a problem works. Effectively, stopping conscious work on a problem allows unconscious processes to get to work.
On a conceptual level, the unconscious can provide an overall grasp of a problem. It illuminates a path forward or a method to resolve a complex problem. The conscious mind handles analyses and simpler connections very well. For a truly complicated problem with many moving parts, the unconscious has the better tools for the job. It appears to be adept at identifying potential connections and building new ones. It generates the whole piece where the conscious mind sees the parts.
The conscious mind speaks in terms of carrots; the unconscious mind shows you carrot cake.