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Evidence for Unconscious Math, Language Processing Abilities
the_newsbeagle writes "It's hard to determine what the unconscious brain is doing since, after all, we're not aware of it. But in a neat set of experiments, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's consciousness lab found evidence that the unconscious brain can parse language and perform simple arithmetic. The researchers flashed colorful patterns at test subjects that took up all their attention and allowed for the subliminal presentation of sentences or equations. In the language processing experiment, researchers found that subjects became consciously aware of a sentence sooner if it was jarring and nonsensical (like, for example, the sentence 'I ironed coffee')."
They made your brain throw an exception
OFC it will come up a few layers
Doesn't everyone iron their coffee?
Now spelling for me correlates with awakeness (sleepy => many spelling misteaks [sic, for humor], awake => fewer spellin errors), but math seems to do fine even when I'm tired and barely conscious.
Leave a crossword for half and hour come back and it seems your brain has been in action while you were away - revealing new clues No such faculty seems to assist sudoku - it's harder when you start up again - (YMMV) A basic Math/Language difference? Test material: http://www.guardian.co.uk/crosswords/quick/13265 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/13/sudoku-2343-medium (hope these links link!)
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
I ironed coffee.
Yeah, I used to make coffee like that, in college.
If you must stop and point out humour, you have already blown it !! Get a monkey to go with that organ/grinder you think you have !! Call him, Mini-Me !!
http://www.mopo.ca/hello/1907759/1024/spellingdoesntmatter-2005.06.26-08.55.22.jpg
public education has proved people can learn in their sleep for over a century. this isn't news
I feel when you get to around level 5 or higher in dual-n back you realize unconscious abilities because you just don't know why you know it's a match but you can feel it is a match. It really gets kind of weird like some sort of intuition.
By that logic most people are too dumb to play the violin. Doing anything to a high degree of proficiency requires frequent 'practice'.
Students who learn piano are often taught to take breaks between practice sessions (or even just 2 half hour sessions per day instead of one single hour session). As a piano teacher myself, I've recently encouraged my own students to take 5 minutes breaks, and even 5-20 second breaks WITHIN a session to allow the subconscious mind to make more sense of a passage or scale etc. Not sure how popular this kind of technique across other teaching disciplines is.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
This is just the nature of intelligence, it is just data compression. We parse the incoming data by fitting it to an internal model built up over time and try to optimize the compression by changing the model (learning) or changing the data (action). Small variations to the model (novelty) are inherently interesting as they provide the model-update mechanics something to work on. When the data is overly compressed we get artifacts like optical illusions, ghosts, cargo cult etc
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The sensory-brain system is actually an integrating machine in that it integrates time-variant functions (physical phenomena) into constants.
For example:
Pressure wave > sound of a certain pitch
EM wave in the visible spectrum > color
Heck, even an electric current > taste (We've all stuck a 9V battery on your tongue, right?)
Set your phasers on "funky"!
And also danube tulips and actualize green colorless radishes furiously.
What's so nonsensical about that?
Think about all you do during the day, and how many of those things you do without really thinking about them. Some of it is learned through practice, but all of it isn't.
Even something as simple (on the surface) as driving is really complex, and you're constantly doing advanced math in your head without doing it consciously. Next time you're in heavy traffic going 70 mph, try consciously thinking about every move you're making and the move every other vehicle is making or about to make. It will make your head explode.
Lacan: "the unconscious is structured like a language."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
I must object! I iron coffee all the time!
If we're going to talk "worth" of people, I'd say character is orders of magnitude more important than intelligence or expertise in specific areas.. Guess who's projecting and the weakest link? Have a nice day.
As an ex high school mathematics teacher and current tutor. I have consistently found that almost every student can improve there marks 30% (assuming there is room to do so) with the right tutor / attitude.
With language you really do want to drill yourself on things to the point where you don't think the correct phrase just pops out. Some people do that in a literal way, and others just do that by talking a lot and hopefully using the constructs enough to make it natural. But, in either case, one isn't truly fluent if they are thinking about individual word choice constantly and writing sentences in their head before they speak.
I once knew a guy who was strongly Aspergers'; couldn't make smalltalk to save his life, but was a MACHINE when it came to mental arithmetic.
He taught himself a load of number theory without ever reading a book on the subject, would do cube and fifth roots in his head, and multiply two ten digit numbers almost effortlessly. And it wasn't like he was sitting there cranking through the answers, -- he reckoned he could just 'see' the answers.
improve there marks 30%
Just mathematics or spelling too?
A typical debugging session would be like, I will be banging by head against a wall "why the hell this stupid insertion to this std::set fails?" all day. At the end of the day, I would give up, pack my bag, and plan rest of the evening. "OK, Tuesday, so Karate class. Pick up dry-cleaning while the $kid is practicing chandan-up-chuggee. No mowing today. Clear couple of episodes of $episode from TiVo...". Just as I am in the vicinity of that coffee shop, suddenly I go, "Oh! Holycrap. I am cycling through the set in foo(), this calls goo() which inserted an element and changed the sorting order. foo() crashes at the start of next iteration through the loop!"
Next time, I am going to the coffee shop and stand nearby and think. I will tell my boss, "I am letting my subconscious do the debugging! I am working boss. You think I am sipping a latte and checking my facebook on free wifi. But it is work!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I often had the experience at work that someone was talking to someone else on the other side of a noisy room, and I was busy doing something and totally unaware of the conversation until my name was mentioned. Then it occurred to me that I also knew the last several words leading up to my name being spoken. Paying 100% attention unconsciously even though barely able to hear.
We have always been fascinated at the weird, wild and nearly random experiences we have in dreams. When weird sentences such as "I ironed coffee" are most noted, it seems to indicate something about the way our dreams are handled and why they are so damned weird at times. (For example, last night I saw old TRS-80 computers which I had never seen before... even a color version of the model 2... geek dream, but it stuck in my head where other dreams don't) Perhaps that is simply the most effective means by which the subconscious communicates with the conscious?
Shouldn't this read 'subconscious' rather than 'unconscious'? I doubt the students in these trials were hit in the head with baseball bats.
I am sorry a thread but, honestly do we really need to replace the meaning of one word for the meaning of another. Subconscious has a pretty clear definition. Why do we have to start using that definition for the word unconscious. I wonder if it is because someone was to lazy to pick up a dictionary.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
It seems to me that this is not really news. When I was studying Linguistics many, many years ago, it was pointed out to me that we shape entire sentences in our brain before we become aware of them and before we speak the words. This is how we can make unintentional errors when we speak - spoonerisms for example, where the initial sounds of one word are substituted with that of a subsequent word (Wikipedia gives this example: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" (dear old queen, referring to Queen Victoria)).
Since we are unaware of these errors prior to speaking them, it seems only logical that the subconscious/unconscious mind has the ability to recognize grammatical mistakes, since it has the capacity to formulate them. The human mind seems to be *built* to absorb rules of grammar and vocabulary at a very low level. We learn the rules of whatever language(s) we grow up speaking subconsciously by hearing them applied by those around us. Sure, people correct pronunciation and grammar in the young from time to time but a lot of it is just seemingly absorbed at a young age. After age 8 or so, you need to really study to learn a language in most cases, before that you can learn up to 3 languages at the same time apparently - although usually only if you speak each one to an individual that uses that language exclusively with you.
So this seems interesting but not all that earth shattering to me at least. Although of course this is /. so I didn't RTFA :p
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
"researchers found that subjects became consciously aware of a sentence sooner if it was jarring and nonsensical (like, for example, the sentence 'I ironed coffee')."
That's a perfectly cromulent sentence.
I have known this for years.. If given a large math problem, ( simple math not Calc), that as long as I dont actually do the math in my head I can pull the answer out of no where. Now I am not right all the time, as if I think too much about the problem or "try" to do it on purpose, it wont work. Its more like a quick guess, that turns out to be right, a most of the time, well at least enough times to raise one eye brow, and lower the other of the people who know the circumstances of the problem I just randomly solved.
/. might as well run more articles along the lines of "Astronomical research finds evidence of stars."
Since when is redundant research into the very obvious news?
Hell, Carl Jung had this pretty much worked out decades ago.
Maybe some brilliant new detailed insights into the chemical workings of thought centers might be newsworthy, but this?
Come on, /.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I'd say it's fairly obvious the sub-conscious mind can before higher math and language functions. In college i dreamed a couple of times of solutions to programming problems. Every so often I have dreams in which I've written things. Last week I had a dream in which I created a pun, which is a fairly complex language concept. I guess it's nice there is scientific evidence for these things, but I don't think anyone will be surprised by the findings.
That reminds me of something that happened to me once:
I was chasing a nasty bug in a piece of code I had written for some simulation in physics.
I could not find the bug for a long time, close to two weeks, but I had managed to narrow
it down to a function that was about 20 lines long. But still I could not find it, and this was
becoming pretty obsessive. At the end, I knew the code in this function by heart, to the point
that it was haunting my dreams.
And I found the bug while sleeping. When I woke up, I remembered enough of it, went
straight to my computer, changed a couple of lines, compiled. And it worked...
That's why I'm curious to know what the authors mean by 'semantic violation'. I would also be fairly unsurprised to hear that we flag grammatical violations, at least in languages we speak fluently, unconsciously. Being able to flag grammatically perfect, but non-meaningful, sentences would imply unconscious access to grammar and vocabulary, and an unconscious understanding of category errors and the like. Certainly not impossible; but rather more notable than just flagging grammar.
Like: Disney buys Star Wars?
Its not the unconscious mind, it is the subconscious mind. See article starting on page 73 http://www.iamb.net/IJMB/journal/IJMB_Vol_3_1.pdf
I remember when I decided to learn how to juggle over Christmas break. I got a juggling kit for Christmas that included some bean bags and a video, and one of the things they suggested was to practice before you went to bed at night, because they said your mind would work on how to juggle while you were sleeping. Sure enough, the next morning when I tried I found I was able to do a much better job than I did the night before. I don't know if it was due to my unconscious working on it, or if it was the power of suggestion, but there seems to be something to it.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's just as much a part of consciousness as consciousness itself. How silly these hairless apes are to make such strong dividing lines between consciousness and subconsciousness -- Why, do they think shifting a car's gears while driving is a conscious act? (For most it is not, though it was at first, it has migrated to a "subconscious" routine you label "muscle memory" -- like fools... muscles have no memory, only minds do). To hear them speak of "Sentience" instead of a scale of awareness, or "Sub-Conscious" instead of a scale of self-awareness is quaint. You first memorize your multiplication tables -- But today, must you consciously perform multiple additions or recall from a table the answer to, "What is 7 times 6?"
I have a high degree of synesthesia -- Strong audible signals cascade into my visual cortex, so I see loud or sudden noises. When my mind is under the influence of Delta Waves, near and during sleep, I experience sleep paralysis, hear an audible "wave-crashing" sound corresponding to the 0 to 4 hz wave, and also see seemingly random white flashes around my central field of vision in the shape of a neuron or tree like structure. Typically I'll watch them a few minuets before I allow myself to fall into sleep.
Other times I lay there actually in between asleep and awake, fully conscious yet paralyzed, unable to move or even scream (these result in twitches and murmurs); I'm then conscious of some of my "higher order sub-conscious" mind's activities (see, there is no boundary). Vivid momentary Auditory and Visual hallucinations are triggered of seemingly random real or unreal events occasionally related to the events in my short term memory. That's while I still have full control over my eye muscles. After a while the repetitive crashing / flashing pulses change and I lose motor control of my eyes. It's then I see, hear, and sometimes smell or taste or feel random unrelated hallucinations. I think what's happening is that since neurons become hyper active and sensitive if they don't recieve inputs and begin firing randomly, my mind is randomly firing off synapses triggering these experiences -- The random firing that triggers cascades and experiences strengthens those pathways, while scrubbing away the other non-important experiences of my short term memory (equalizing the day's fired and non fired neural pathways by firing them all at random).
Usually, I'd have succumbed to sleep and "dreaming" by then -- stitching the hallucinations into a connected series of experiences, filling in the gaps with imagination, but I can force my consciousness to persist even through this state. I can remain fully consciously aware in my mind during sleep, and use the time to come up with solutions to programming problems -- These are hard to remember unless I write them down immediately after I awake since they don't benefit from the "dream strengthening" of wakeful experiences. I sometimes accept the hallucinations and welcome them into a lucid dream state where I consciously interact with what I know not to be real. My imagination becomes mostly real to my senses, and I can command anything to happen in that place. I do not ever have nightmares, such primitive things are beneath me, I merely cancel them, or give myself ever more impressive weapons to combat the hordes of zombies, or giant alien space-brains, etc. (It the best damn video game there is).
There is no "subconsciousness" that I can not be aware of in some way -- Indeed, I can now even affect my heart rate and body temperature with my mind alone, it only took a few weeks or so of practice. I can halt unwanted badder and bowel contractions, and even calm hiccups by mere thought -- I am in control of my own mind and body, not it over me.
Oh Shit, Quick, Hide this from the advertisers.
Gosh, I hope Trinity and Neo can help this time!
This underlines my paranoid suspicion that in the future, my brain will be kept in a jar, but only in order to do low-level cognitive processing work, enslaved inside some kind of factory.
As a linguist, there are few sentences that DON'T trip me up. There's an alternate reading for everything.
Witness:
"I ironed coffee." (in order to capture carbon dioxide, and I immediately saw a spike in the level of sub-coffee-eatic organisms.)
your coffee never needs ironing.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
They're obviously not spelling poorly, it's just that their word choice isn't all there.
When I was studying Linguistics many, many years ago, it was pointed out to me that we shape entire sentences in our brain before we become aware of them and before we speak the words. T
If you ever want to drive yourself moderately crazy, listen to your thoughts some time. You'll notice that you seem to think each thing twice - once in a kind of background precursor thought, then again right on top if it in the foreground.
Or maybe I've just spent too much time listening, as it were, to the voices in my head.
Racket sports for example. Say you play table tennis, or squash or whatever.
I recall reading many years ago, about some study that found that if you picture yourself playing the sport for 15 minutes before falling asleep (imagining yourself reacting to various situations, making various shots etc). it was almost as effective at training your motor memory and your unconscious decision-making for that sport, as actually physically practicing it.
And I believe it too, because I've experienced this myself with badminton and table tennis. And even with more abstract games such as Tetris -- I'm convinced that I became a better Tetris player just by visualizing myself playing Tetris for a while before falling asleep. ...The really funny thing is that as I fall asleep, I tend to picture myself playing whatever video game or sport I was doing a lot of that day, and what always happens, is that as I drift off to sleep, I start to get sluggish in my movements, I start to have trouble reacting in time to the puzzle pieces or opponent's shot etc. And just as I'm about to get overwhelmed, I seem to drift off to sleep. I've had this experience over and over with many different games and sports, and its always the same. Its quite weird! (And then sometimes I dream about playing them after falling asleep, but that is usually even more surreal).
I've always recognized two levels of voice in my head. One that speaks in full words, often in full sentences, and in a lot of cases is mostly like me rehearsing what I'm going to say before I'm saying it, or me talking to myself, but not out loud. It's slow-ish, in that it operates more or less at the pace of speech.
Below that there's also a very vast, very whispery, voice that may not work in words at all - it may be working in impressions or emotions, or simple flags (e.g.: that's not right; that sounds good; let's go that way), though in some cases I think there are words but it's rarely lengthy sentences.
I became aware of these different levels when trying to meditate. I could keep the first voice quiet enough, but that second little flickery one would pop up with "don't think" and then "ack, a thought!" and then "no, more thoughts!" over and over until the first voice came in and said, "Darn it, this isn't working at all, I think I'm going to go play a video game." Years later I think I've concluded that when it comes to meditating if you silence (or focus, with a key word) the first voice, you're just supposed to ignore the second voice because it's sort of always on. I could be wrong, though, because I've never gotten the knack of meditation.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Below that there's also a very vast, very whispery, voice that may not work in words at all - it may be working in impressions or emotions, or simple flags (e.g.: that's not right; that sounds good; let's go that way), though in some cases I think there are words but it's rarely lengthy sentences.
Or you might just have a Rat King living in your cellar.
Maybe I practice a different kind of meditation than the one that you were trying to practice, but when I'm meditating, the second voice that you're speaking of is actually a rather large piece of the meditation. I actually do start out with that first voice mostly, setting up my mental "meditation environment" (for me, I imagine a scene that, at this point, has become very detailed, using all 5 senses, that I associate with peace, love, calmness, being content, and other such good feelings) which sets me at a calm, peaceful level where I can listen to the second voice more clearly and respond to it appropriately. So, really, for me, the meditation ends up being a lot more about allowing the thoughts of that second voice to come and go, paying attention to them, accepting them, and letting them go. In a sense it's "clearing the mind", but really, it's letting the subconscious mind flow as it will and meeting it with conscious acceptance. I will say that it actually puts me in the exact same state as the few times I've been hypnotized, so it's kind of like self-hypnosis--in fact, the times I've been hypnotized utilized the exact thing I'm talking about, and I've found I can be more suggestible to my own conscious thoughts in this meditation as well, although it really only sticks if I continue consciously wanting it to after the fact as well (just like hypnotism has been for me)...
Heh, that's more or less exactly my experience. And has also stopped me from meditating very effectively.
It becomes almost an between the first and second (lower) voice. Feels like if I could stop the second voice I could stop the first voice, but then I realize that thought itself came from the second voice, then I realize THAT thought also started there, then AAAARG skip it!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dr. Davis's honors calculus class at the University of Texas trains your unconscious brain to perform calculus. http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/davis_site/Kathy_Davis_Homepage.html When I took this class years ago, there was a very difficult take-home test every week, handed out on Monday and collected eight days later on Tuesday. She instructed us to review the test before going to sleep on the first day and on the first morning work on the solution for just a few minutes. Every day we were told to work on it a little more before bed and just after waking. She would drop hints during the lecture, and laugh. If I remember correctly, some of the homework problems were originally solved over decades by famous mathematicians -- real mind f'ers. After two semesters of this, solving calculus proofs in this way became almost second nature. Dr. Davis is one of those instructors that repeatedly wins "best professor" awards. (She was actually a he when I took the class, but that’s a whole other story).
I have consistently found that almost every student can improve there marks 30%
The fact that people are capable of improving their grades isn't impressive to me; after all, I have no idea what tests or assignments are given to them. For all I know, all they're doing is memorizing equations, and that means that they don't truly understand any of it.
By that logic most people are too dumb to play the violin.
Must people do seem incapable of understanding the abstract. No, I'm not referring to memorizing equations or routines; I'm referring to truly understanding the material (i.e. why it works).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I perform better when i'm conscious after giving REST to my brain.......dont know what happens when i'm unconscious
Must people do seem incapable of understanding the abstract.
Are most people incapable of it, or are they just not being taught properly? It could very well be the latter.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Actually, some of us are not conscious. I have no conscious level of thought. Rather 'I' am aware of my many conscious levels, each of which is a different stream. These are what some other people call unconscious thoughts. Most of the time 'I' work together to present a unified front that appears to others as a single person.
Growing up I thought everyone was that way. I was shocked to learn that other people are all alone in their heads. Until I was in my teens I thought that when someone said 'I' they meant all of the internal consciousnesses that operate together to make their world presentation. Then I realized later that they are just like me but they're not aware of themselves. They assign the name 'unconsciousness' to their parts that they're not aware of.
Three of my parts deal with logic and math. Each one processes things slightly differently. When I want to 'do math' all three of them, if they are so incline, work on the problem independently and stream the answers. I'm fully aware of all three routes. The result is I'm very fast at math. For most stuff I am actually faster than a calculator. I can brute force math with other parts like it is taught in school but that is so slow and non-intuitive.
Another big surprise? Apparently most people think in language. To me that is totally alien. I discovered one day that other people actually think the way they talk. I translate everything outgoing into spoken or signed language. I have two separate language centers that do this and even they don't 'think' in language - it is something they do, creating language, not how they think. I also treat language as a math database problem. Its an encryption / decryption process. Because of this in about ten minutes I'm able to learn hundreds of words a new language by listening and watching a video or being around people speaking it as their native tongue. Spoken language is not native to me but I can crack languages with ease. They're mere database problems. Cryptograms and crossword puzzles are also obvious. I just brute force them.
I use the same techniques for programming. I can pickup a device and figure out how to use it very fast by pressing the buttons and remembering everything that results in what ever patterns. My wife says this works in part because I remember everything. She says she can't do it because she just doesn't remember all the combinations she tries. Likewise puzzles and games easy for me if they rely on that sort of thinking. I remember almost everything back to birth and different parts of me do different memory sets.
Another process set is spatial and those two also handle vision. Incoming sound is a completely separate process. Defense is another process. That part of me handles things before the rest of me even becomes aware of the issue. This results in very fast reflexes. My wife jokes that I'm clumsy but fast. The result is I might drop something but I catch it before it hits the ground.
I'm willing to bet that everyone has this but it is hidden by their 'conscious' mind. I'm also willing to bet that there are a lot of people like me out there who are not unconscious but are fully aware of their many 'levels' or parts. But like me they hide it because people don't react well to differences. One learns to blend or pays a hard price.
The hell are you guys talking about? I have a naration in my head, but it acts as if I were talking aloud in my brain.Often, I'm talking to myself but I always drive the conversation. It's almost like talking inside your head. Never had a second incoherent uncontrollable voice, but a lot of times I can't even tell when I'm stressed out until my body starts breaking down.
I take great exception, as someone who commonly irons his coffee.
"Women. Can't live with 'em. Pass the beer nuts." -Norm
Neurologists and Psychiatrists say: What took you so long?
See also: Libet and Bereitschaftspotential.
Da Blog
You aren't supposed to silence anything*. You are supposed to observe without interference, which can often lead to silence. Silence is not required, observation is. (*Not really sure how to word this properly. You need to observe the 2nd voice, which will more or less never stop, but the first voice should be quiet.)
"Feels like if I could stop the second voice I could stop the first voice"
This and the relationship between the two voices observed in the GP is providing a MASSIVE clue - observe if you are prepared to jump down the rabbit hole in a very serious way. In short this one possible entry to the chain of observations that will lead to the discovery of the true nature of the 2nd voice - it is not a part of you, it arises of its own accord and cannot be controlled.
This book explains it far better than I can: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB
In particular, I am talking about the section on the progress of insight, but the whole thing cannot be recommended highly enough..
Intriguing, thanks for the info/link.