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."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is a dupe: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0330209/evidence-for-unconscious-math-language-processing-abilities

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Re:There's that Ego again...

[Hatta]

Why would the framework (the thing that contains all the rules) be something less than that which it produced?

Because properties emerge from complex systems. Just because it occurs at one level doesn't mean the building blocks that level is made of can do it too. A transistor can't add, groups of transistors can.