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Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious
lee1 writes "Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (by masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences."
Like when my wife insists that we had an entire conversation about taking out the trash while I was playing a video game.
They know how it works.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My students can't even do this consciously. :)
Calling this unconscious just goes a bit too far. Had they knocked out parts of the brain with TMS, I would have had a better time stomaching the article suggestion.
I'm not sure their method for suppressing consciousness is as locked down as they believe it is. Someone with a near-eidetic memory could take a "snapshot" of the static image in one eye, and hold it in conscious memory even while dealing with the images in the other eye. (Frankly, video games have taught us how to do this sort of stuff quite well.)
And even if this is the case, I'm not sure what, if any, useful information we can extra from the study, other than "this is cool."
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
My unconscious what?
I do believe you meant "subconscious".
Dupe
Christ on a crutch, this was posted 5 days ago!
Sounds like trying to read or do math while dreaming. I can do it, but only for short sentences and very simple problems. Otherwise stuff sort of blurs out.
This is a dupe: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0330209/evidence-for-unconscious-math-language-processing-abilities
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Imagine your brain as a multithreaded program. Each thought runs on its own CPU set. The thalamus acts as the debugger, and can step through one thread at a time. When you are "debugging" a thought, that is your conscious thought. Unsupervised thoughts tend to wander around randomly and seldom produce anything useful. These are your unconscious thoughts. Unconscious thoughts are no less capable than the conscious ones, and as the experiment indicates are perfectly capable of thinking through any problem. The difference is that the outputs are not stored properly because that requires attention. In the experiment the researchers were able to get the background thoughts to write memories into some location where they could later be found. Because you do not consciously tell them to do so, you are not aware of this happening, much like having a memory corruption problem when a thread runs amok while you are debugging another one.
That's dupe: evidence for unconscious math language processing abilities
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Looks pretty consistent with the kind of view of human conciousness, as forms the core of Peter Watts' "Blindsight". The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.
If the subject interests you I highly recommend reading the book. It's available free from author's homepage: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
is just a test of memory, not reasoning.
In psycho-linguistics, it has always been understood that parsing is an sub-conscious, automatic process. Parsing sentences consciously is extremely slow, as every 2nd language learner knows, and we can do it at a speed of about 4 words per second without any problem. But the experiments as described in the extract do not warrant the conclusions. Effects of lexical priming have been known for a looooong time (since the 1930s, I think), and it remains to be seen if none of the results can be attributed to any other kind of information that precise computation of the arithmetic problem or perfect understanding of the sentence.
There's a lot of cognitive science I could ramble on about here, but the fact is that the conclusion stated in the summary is obvious to anyone who has studied brain function in detail.
Putting aside the debate over whether or not consciousness is an epiphenomenon, just about the only part of thought that we are consciously aware of is information that takes a trip through short-term memory. Everything else is in dedicated (innate or due to learning) circuitry that just computes what we've learned and either spoon-feeds our consciousness with the results or directly interacts with the sensory and motor systems. (In other words, we are only consciously aware of punctuations in multi-step processes.)
Consider when you first learn a new skill. At that time, it's entirely conscious, because we have to pay special attention to every step. Like when we're new to cooking and baking some new recipe, we consciously reason over each step in preparation. But when we've gotten really expert at something ("unconsciously competent"), most of it goes on automatic. We don't think so much about the steps; we just execute them, and our conscious mind can wander off on something else. By that point, many of us have forgotten what we went through when learning and generally have a challenge explaining how we're doing what we're doing.
Other examples: Playing an instrument -- really experienced players practice so much that the motor system is completely on automatic, while the conscious mind is (often to a very limited extent) focusing on the sheet music and timing reference (conductor or percussion). Reading radiology images -- an experienced doctor can show you a lesion they've observed, and after it's pointed out, you can sorta see it, but finding it in the first place is a well-honed skill that can be very difficult to explain; how do you tell that that one extremely vague splotch is a lesion while one nearby is normal?
The really interesting bit is this: Most people can explain more or less how they do something. But none of that is from direct access to how we ACTUALLY process the information. Rather, our explanation about how we THINK we do something is based on conscious theories we construct to explain behaviors we've observed in others and ourselves. In other words, our "skills" and our "'mental models' of our skills" are stored in entirely different parts of our memory.
It's also interesting to study teachers. Really good teachers (particularly on subjects more abstract than what you get in grade school, which are mostly rote learning from books) are people who have some combination of a good memory about how they learned something and a really good takent for self-observation when they perform a skill (i.e. a good conscious mental model of their otherwise unconscious skill).
The next level up is teachers who are good at teaching how to teach. :)
So, to address the article here: Our unconscious minds can read and do math, because the unconscious mind is what already does those things anyway. (Once you're past elementary school.)
I'm constantly bewildered by the inclination of humans to assign, for various reasons, less than extraordinary capabilities (such as 'not possible to do arithmetic') to such faculties of our bodies that run things like intercellular communication and maintain proper heartbeats and fuel/oxygen mix ratios etc. Why would the framework (the thing that contains all the rules) be something less than that which it produced? SMH... Now if we could begin to look at the sum total of processes as being derivations of both unconscious as well as subconscious, perhaps we could see that the end points are only small parts of the whole to which we could be *shrugs* 'using' should we acknowledge it's existence and learn to work with it as well...i've seen Freud mentioned in a couple comments...unification of the Id, Ego and Superego, by preventing one from looking down on the others...
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
"it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences"
It's certainly not widely believed by programmers. I, and many programmers I know, deliberately turn particularly difficult design and troubleshooting problems over to our subconscious minds by studying the outlines of the problem - preparing the input deck if you will - then sleeping on it. For some, the invaluable output is available on waking. For others, it comes in the shower or on the toilet or during the commute, but it generally works the same way for many of us.
maybe this is part of why some folks can look at a pattern and then KNOW that say A B C D F G H J is "missing" parts (and what those parts are).
The geek thing of What happens if we do THIS can also be included in this
(and YesHOLD MY BEER and watch this is NOT part of this)
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We have several "mental organs", performing different functions. Lumping them all together as "the Subconscious" retards our understanding of thought processes.
Sounds like an S.E.P. field to me...
I can do this. I remember as a kid having to write out the numbers 1-100 in a 10x10 grid so I just started doing it and got almost immediately distracted thinking about something else and the next thing I know it's done, sort of. For some reason, I managed to skip a few numbers here and there and had to rub it out and do it again, painstakingly trying not to get distracted.
Same with the maths question sheets they used to give us in primary school. Done with barely a conscious thought, but riddled with off-by-one and forgot-to-carry-the-seven errors.
I can do this, just not very well.
They should do the same thing with a traditional dot-on-the-forehead mirror self recognition test instead of numbers and words. It would be very interesting to see if self-awareness exists below the threshold of conscious perception. Don't know how you'd engineer such a test, but I'm sure there's a way :P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
The ability to do this has faded over time, but I will tell you how I got through random 100 and 200 level lecture classes whose exams were full of recall of lists and diagrams and definitions and such.
I would type up course notes, like about 20-30 pages of them. I would be careful to uniquely format them. For example, a list would be indented under the title of the list; I gave each page a unique look by spacing, whether the page had a graphic or not, etc. THEN I would take out the highlighers and color-code information by whatever categorization made sense. Each page had a unique color look as well as a unique layout. Then I'd look at the pages a few times and familiarize myself with what kind of information was on each page.
Class day, I'd sit up the back. I'd stare at the wall above the board and superimpose the images I recalled of my notes on the blank wall there. I would literally "flip through" the pages until I found the one containing the information I required, then (wish I was kidding with this, as it sounds bizarre, but this is truly how it worked) squint until the words came into focus. I would then *read the words* off the blank wall and write them down. There was stunningly little cognition required for this process; it was 80% visualization.
It once freaked a prof out that I kept staring at the wall, so I stayed after class to demonstrate it to him by reading a page off the wall and scribbling it down, then producing the original page from my notebook to prove the truth of my claim that I didn't, for example, have notes hidden above his head. He didn't like it, as he, too, recognized that I hadn't so much mastered the material as much as I was just using a brain trick, but there was nothing he could do about it. I really do believe that I had just figured out a way to tap into my visual processing ability a bit more efficiently than most -- as indicated by the absolute fact that squinting often made unreadable -- IMAGINARY -- text clear.
It's just not true to say that eidetic memory doesn't exist, because I *know* it was a different method of memory/recall than others used, AND it's different from what I do today, which involves more conventional techniques.
Looks pretty consistent with the kind of view of human consciousness, as forms the core of Peter Watts' "Blindsight".
I just realized that the main charter in Blindsight is named "Siri", same as the Apple search app. Although, considering that his book came out in 2006, it would seem it pre-dates the Apple term.
I would like to think that what we like to call emotions, is basicly a direct consequence of juxapositions of expectations, as interpreted by the brain well worth mentioning; with the brain being a pattern maker and pattern matcher, fused with overlapping sensory input to mix it all up. I don't believe memories are stored in specific locations in the brain, nor do I believe that memories are stored as some kind of entity, being purely contextual, meaning that memories really exist virtually, that could never exsist wtih some minimum level of brain functioning. Don't really know what to think about consciousness, except perhaps that consciousness can perhaps be thought of as a leftover process, that just happens to work well for the human body in moving about and living its life, sustaining the (whatever) workings of the brain in an individual.
Math operations are just patterns themselves aren't they?
The ability to do this has faded over time, but I will tell you how I got through random 100 and 200 level lecture classes whose exams were full of recall of lists and diagrams and definitions and such.
You are so fucking full of shit. Give it up.
We have various sensory inputs from all over our body that give us a very incomplete view of our bodies current state. I think it best to think of consciousness as our sense of what's going on in our brains -- not the boss of what's going on -- but an incomplete sense of what's going on. From this point of view, if the conscious mind is distracted it doesn't prevent other parts from still working.
Come on, this is not new knowledge. We all, or at least a lot of people, are well aware that if you leave the radio on at night tuned to a talk station, the content of the talk gets worked into your dreams.
So what does that mean? Well, Unconscious? Check. Parsing sentences? Check. Integrating those the semantic content of those sentences into your dreams into the "plot" of your dream-or in other words "problem solving" - check.
On the last point- yes, it is problem solving. Getting the meaning out of a stream of sentences is the kind of problem solving that's so sophisticated, a computer can't yet do it. A computer can't read the paper and understand the it's meaning or listen the a radio broadcast and understand it's meaning . Intelligence agencies would love to have a computer that can read the world's papers and automatically process their contents. The technology isn't there yet, which is another way of saying that the problem isn't solved, so that's problem solving in your sleep, not to mention the problem solving of working a narrative around what it is your unconscious mind is listening to.
Is this story from some grad student trolling for fame ?
His basic argument is that prior to some point (and that 'point' is actually a slow shift across generations) we were not conscious in the sense that we now mean, that is reflectively aware of our inner life as we process, and interact with, the world around us. Since the ability to perform complex tasks is usually associated with that 'reflective awareness', Jaynes takes quite a bit of time covering experiences and experiments which show the range of things which we can do entirely unconsciously. Some of the most eerie are the experiments done with epilepsy patients who have had their Corpus Callasum cut. He details multiple experiments showing how the side of the brain without strong language skills is able to understand and respond without the other half knowing what it has done. The subject having done something of minor complexity is unable to articulate it and may even deny having done it.
He further argues that even now, with our 'integrated' awareness, much of what we consider deeply human capabilities such as solving a complex problem whose answer is not deduced but arrived at creatively, is actually done unconsciously and only afterwards is the solution presented to 'conscious' thought as an already solved problem. This sounds precisely like what was described in the article.