The Conscious Dimension

by Allan Chubb

The View of the Psychologist

Psychology is a very extensive subject and fills many books and journals, but we will be looking at psychology from the point of view of consciousness.

The history of the way that the subject developed is useful in this respect.

Freud, Adler and Jung

The three founders of psychology, Freud ( 1856 – 1939), Adler (1870 – 1937) and Jung (1875 – 1971) were all very concerned with consciousness. Freud first became interested in psychological problems when, as a doctor, he was presented with patients suffering from some degree of hysteria and he realised that physical medicine did not really account for such problems. So began his investigations of the mind’s effect on health.

At that stage the thinking of the Greek philosophers was influential and Freud reasoned that the aspects of behaviour presented in communities must have their counterpart in individual psychology. The Greeks had observed both animal like behaviour and also rational behaviour in communities. They also recognised that communities had ideals and aspirations. From this Freud deduced that people have animal drives, which he called the id, rational thinking, which he called the ego, and ideas about themselves as to what they were and their aspirations, which he called the super-ego.

He had not been investigating these phenomena for long when he began to realise that the mind has an unconscious memory from the past, usually influenced by early childhood.The study of dreams and unusual errors in peoples speech, known as ‘Freudian slips’, began to throw light on the origin of some of those unconscious influences. In particular the early relationship with parents seemed to be important and he began to study the psychological influences affecting the development of children’s minds. He discovered that at a young age children explore their bodies and that those activities which give them pleasure dominate their thinking. Suckling is the first of these to develop, followed by the pleasure of relieving their bowels and then they discover the pleasure from the sex organs, which occurs at a surprisingly young age. Freud studied middle class Viennese society and concluded that at these early ages the child became attracted to the parent of the opposite sex and became afraid of repercussions from competition with the other parent. This was repressed at the time and became an important aspect of the unconscious mind. It should be noted that African psychologists studying tribal society did not find this repression.

The understanding of the unconscious mind became extended with time, greatly assisted by the study of dreams and later by a technique which Freud developed known as psychoanalysis. Freud realised that the thinking of the mind worked largely by association and this formed most of the basis of psychoanalysis. The technique is quite simple. It involves the subject making a fairly quick reply to a stimulus word. For example, if the stimulus word was ‘sun’ a subject might say “moon” or “star” or “hot”. If the stimulus word was ‘bat’ the reply might be “ball” or “pitch” or “court”. Psychoanalysis took the process a stage further requiring the subject to make a first response to a well chosen stimulus word and then to follow with all the words in sequence which came into the mind until no more came. In this way Freud hoped to probe the unconscious mind and in particular to note where the end of the sequence occurred suspecting that it indicated a mental block. Today it has been realised that the unconscious memory can change over time so it’s reliability is questionable. However, more sophisticated methods of association testing are employed today. Asking a person to play a role in which they are required to ad lib often rapidly brings problems to the surface.

The first psychologists tended to see psychological problems from a personal angle. Freud is usually remembered for his emphasis on sex. Jung came from a Swiss family in which there had been many Lutheran pastors, so he tended to emphasise religious aspects of consciousness. In fact, Freud used to say of Jung, “It’s religion, religion, religion” and Jung used to say of Freud, “It’s sex, sex, sex”.

We will look at Jung’s ideas in a while but let us consider the less well known of the three founders, Adler. Adler is known for recognising the inferiority complex. A complex is some collection of associations which cause a mental problem. Feelings of inferiority often limit a person’s activities and performance in life and so have become a focus for clinical psychologists. They seem to have both genetic and environmental contributions. It was fairly natural for Adler to recognise the inferiority complex since he was not a particularly confident person himself. When giving a lecture he would creep in from the back of the auditorium, while by comparison Freud would enter from the front.

Adler investigated how the inferiority complex developed by examining the development of children. He discovered that the early years were important and that by the age of 4 or 5 years, the foundation had been laid. He called this the prototype stage. Inferiority in itself is not a bad thing. Children naturally feel inferior as they are dependent on their parents for most things. In fact, feelings of inferiority are usually the motivator of future achievement. If a child or person has courage, this leads to achievement, the feeling of inferiority is usually overcome and can be replaced with feelings of superiority. The problem lies with the situation where the child or person cannot deal with the feelings of inferiority and it adversely affects their conscious life.

Up to the age of 4 or 5 years old, the emotions of the child are vulnerable as they have not matured at this stage. Adler was particularly interested in the Child’s position in the sequence of birth within the family. Only children are at the center of attention of the parents who of not have to handle the emotional problem of the parent’s attention being given to a new brother or sister. This, Adler believed was where inferiority begins. He studied the situation in families of various sizes. The only child and the last child are particular cases. Only children do not usually have to compete until they attend nursery or more particularly until they attend school. How well they fare there depends largely on their ability and temperament. The youngest have brothers and sisters to follow and a fair amount of their parent’s attention. In Adler’s day going to school was the first major adjustment.

Adler taught that teachers of the young should be taught to recognise early problems in adjustment and so prevent future problems. If corrections were made at this stage problems could be prevented when further adjustments were required later in life. He considered that these were, finding a job, a marriage relationship, and becoming a useful member of the community.

Adler was a contemporary of Freud and believed that actual and imagined dreams could reveal much about a person’s emotional state. Adler took the view that although his teaching was called individual psychology the individual was very much a member of his or her niche in society and should be seen in this way.

Although Adler realised that physical disabilities could present emotional problems perhaps he was a man of his time in understanding the extent to which genetic constitution played a part. It was left to later psychologists such as Eysenck to examine this aspect.

As a doctor, Jung also began to see patients whose problems he considered were not to be understood completely in physical terms. However, Jung was more inclined to recognise psychological factors which had some genetic basis. Perhaps he is best known for recognising that some of his patients were introverted and some were extroverted. Later work has shown a continuum between these two extremes, extroverts being more outgoing and introverts being more withdrawn. Contrary to popular belief the extroverts have a less reactive nervous system and therefore are more active in obtaining the nervous stimulation that they require. The introvert, by comparison, has a much more reactive nervous system and so tends to steer away from strong stimulation situations. This is obviously useful information to the clinical psychologist.

Jung also travelled widely and compared different cultures. On that basis he concluded that certain psychological factors were common to all cultures. He reasoned that evolution has embedded in human minds the tendency to recognise such archetypes as the father figure, the mother figure, the wise old man, the beautiful young woman or the handsome young man. He observed that we react to these archetypes without necessarily questioning their validity too much.

Jung was also interested in the origin of religion and the idea of a God figure. He traced this development in growing children from the basic erotic experiences of the child to a projection of the love instinct onto the figure of God. This develops considerably with the maturing mind and today people often come to reject such a belief. Jung was of the opinion that faith was often a way of resolving mental conflicts.

It should be noted that just as fish scales have been recognised as developing into teeth and still bear the mark of this in that they have both a pulp chamber and a nerve supply, teeth have developed into a structure in their own right. By analogy psychological phenomena, such as faith in God, may be traced to primitive beginnings in early childhood but when they develop into psychological phenomena in mature minds they should not be dismissed on that basis..

Like Freud, Jung was interested in dreams as a way of investigating the unconscious mind. He claimed that we dream all the time, even throughout the day and that consciousness during waking hours eclipses dreaming, as, by analogy, the sun eclipses the stars.

It would be instructive to consider the interaction of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind in our daily lives. We have already seen how the reductionists claim that all thinking and conscious behaviour is controlled by the electro chemical functioning of the nervous system. The unconscious mind is that activity which we do not suspect and the subconscious mind is that part of the mind which we might suspect if it was pointed out to us. Both the subconscious and unconscious aspects of the mind are the targets of the advertisers. Everything from unconscious insecurities to the ability of music to influence our conscious decisions are part of the advertisers strategy. At this point we will take a look at the course which psychology has taken in exploring the unconscious or physical working of the mind and then explore the relationship between the physical aspects of the mind and conscious awareness.

The Behaviourists

John Watson (1878 – 1958) set up the first psychological laboratory in 1908, and psychology took a turn away from consciousness, considering it not worthy of a scientific subject as not being rigorous enough compared with physics, chemistry or even biology. It is a trend which has continued to this day with psychology being defined as the study of behaviour (Behaviourism), since this is the only thing which can be observed. Only recently have some scientists regained an interest in the nature of consciousness.

Many experiments have been undertaken, too many for all to be mentioned. We will consider some of the main ones that chart the course of the development of psychology and the thinking that stems from them, in particular those experiments which illuminate our understanding of consciousness.

The experiments of the Russian psychologist, Pavlov (1849 – 1936), with dogs and their response to the sight of food started a chain of thought. Pavlov noted that dogs began to salivate at the sight of food. He decided to experiment with this and tried ringing a bell every time food was presented to the dogs. After a while he just rang the bell and found that the dogs salivated. He had demonstrated the conditioned reflex. It led to the idea that drives, mainly for essential processes, are built into animals nature and can become conditioned by experience. Much work followed with the work of psychologists like Skinner (1904 – 1990), who used various training schedules with food as a reward to train animals to perform tasks. Later punishment in the form of electric shocks was used to produce avoidance learning and in some learning schedules a combination of the two was used. Animals and birds were trained to perform tasks such as pressing levers or pecking at a target dot on a monitor, and to avoid behaviour in certain situations which they recognised by visual or sound clues.

Professor Skinner became famous for his use of these techniques in training animals and was employed to train the chimp which the Americans launched into orbit to test the feasibility of a manned satellite.The chimp was trained to respond to instruments and controls in the capsule and his responses were monitored with the results relayed to mission control.

The idea of the controlled use of reward and punishment began to be applied to human situations but with much more sophisticated rewards, punishment only being used in special cases. This became the basis of programmed learning, which is a course in a subject of an incremental nature leading to some goal at completion. It soon became computerised and learning programs on computers have become very common. Rewards could vary from visual images or pleasant sounds to knowledge of success at various stages of the program. Many subjects could be taught in this way including technical skills and construction and maintenance tasks. Even academic subjects such as mathematical skills have been taught in this way. Programs have also been developed to educate in management skills, so the range of tasks that can be taught this way has considerable scope. It should be emphasised that the primatologists studying the natural behaviour of monkeys and chimps lay stress on the animals inner thinking and often reach differing conclusions to the behaviourists.

Insightful learning

The behaviourist method does have limitations; whereas it is ideal for training a chimp for a space trip, it certainly will not produce an Einstein or a Darwin. Clearly other mental processes are at work here and psychologists have spent much time considering these more flexible and innovative forms of learning. It is found that insight and intuition play a considerable part in the thinking and behaviour of people, particularly the more able. Insight is the ability to suddenly realise the connection between two things which were previously not associated.

Psychologists wanted to know how far down the evolutionary ladder insightful learning occurred. They devised an interesting experiment with a chimp. A chimp was confronted with a banana placed behind a flame in a recessed cubicle. It was taught that it could put out the flame with a cup of water. Once the chimp had learned the task it was confronted with an identical set up on a raft afloat on a lake, but this time the cup was empty. Would the chimp realise that it could fill the cup with water from the lake and use it to put out the flame? The chimp failed at this task. However, it did succeed in reaching a banana suspended from a rope in a room containing boxes by piling the boxes in such a way that it was able to climb onto them to reach the banana.

People can obviously perform more complex insights but intellectual capacity varies and so does the range of tasks that insightful learning can achieve. There is no substitute for intelligence although previous experience is usually necessary. For example, learning to read is essential to the performance of many later tasks. Progress through life prepares us for later learning and this is true of insightful learning too.

Patrick Meredith had the idea that progress through life is like a time maze. We all travel individual time mazes taking on board experiences and learning of different kinds, meeting different situations and different people. Some people play an important part in our lives, such as family, friends and teachers, while others we meet occasionally or maybe never again. No two time mazes are identical but our memories retain a record of the past.

In learning situations insightful thinkers tend to use insight and intuition to gain an overall view of a situation and then use incremental learning to complete the detail. It should be emphasised that all forms of learning are dynamic processes.

This is well illustrated in a game which originated in China and taken to a high level in Japan named ‘Go’. It is a game played by two on a board with a 19×19 grid, 181 white stones and 180 black stones. The rules are very simple but the game involves every dimension of insightful thinking at the highest level. Because the game is so reliant on insight it has proved difficult to devise a computer program for playing it. While computers can play chess well, even a moderate ‘Go’ player will beat the best computer program. Computers do not do well with insightful learning. A programmer may put some of their insights into the program but this is far from adequate in the case of a dynamic situation such as ‘Go’. The thinking of men like Einstein and Darwin, shows clearly the scope of human intelligence.

The Unconscious Mind

Despite what we have just been considering about higher mental achievements, the reductionists emphasise the neuro-physiological processes that occur in the brain. The processes that occur in the brain before we become aware of them are termed subliminal and if sufficiently strong or important to us they become conscious, or liminal. Clearly much is going on in the brain before things become liminal. To relate a simple experiment which illustrates this, if the hand is touched or pricked with a needle and the electrical activity of the brain is recorded, indicating conscious awareness in the somesthetic sensory area of the brain, the time lag can be up to two seconds after the prick. Similar experiments could be performed in the other sense modalities also showing delays, although the length of the delay may vary. It is clear that as far as the process of perception is concerned, consciousness is on the end of the line, or even the tip of the iceberg. An immense amount of neurological activity goes on for every conscious experience. It is at this point that the reductionist, the epiphenomenal view and the non reductionist part company. The reductionist claims that all decisions are made electrochemically and that consciousness plays no part in decision making, while the non reductionist claims that at the conscious level value judgements are made in some, as yet undiscovered way.

It will be obvious that the reductionist view leaves no room for free will, viewing it as a delusion. This is their view whether considering the classical theory or the one put forward by Sir Roger Penrose which allows many more choices. In relation to decision making it should be realised that some choices are controlled by our physical nature, such as habits and pain, while choices such as what to do, where to go, philosophical thinking and beliefs are decided by the mind.

The work of Frederick Bartlett is important to the investigation into the vast amount of subliminal activity that goes on in the brain. He showed that each of us has in our subconscious mind, a set of schemata, partly laid down by inheritance and partly accumulated with experience. Schemata are networks of thoughts about things that are important to us or things which we as individuals are interested in, such as nature or architecture. An event which illustrates the effect of schemata concerns a native American and a New Yorker walking together down a tree lined avenue. Suddenly the native American stopped and listened. He heard a cricket chirping in a tree. The new Yorker and other town dwellers were oblivious to the sound. However, as they walked on someone dropped a dime and the New Yorker looked down. Clearly different schemata were being triggered in the two men. Some subliminal schemata are more active when your body is in a certain state. A hungry person notices eating places more readily than a person who has just had a good meal.

Patrick Meredith took Sir Frederick Bartlett’s schemata further by investigating the categories in which we store information. This is known as the study of epestemics. Four main categories were recognised: Living things, human constructions, the natural environment and ideas. This is not a study of locations in the brain where these schemata are stored but rather a system for classifying how we group our schemata. Such a study becomes important when we examine how retrieval systems work.

This is a complicated area and involves many aspects. We have already looked at the neurophysiology of short term, intermediate and long term memory. Long term memories are associated with strong emotions. We have also seen how in our minds we each have our own unique time maze memory. This all ties in with how our individual schemata become established.

Bruce Lipton has emphasised how, at all levels be it cells or the entire individual, we are directed by the stimuli which we receive from the environment. He points out that, while many people consider that the genes control the activity of the cell, it is in fact the membrane around the cell which performs this role by deciding what chemicals and radiation will be allowed to enter. This is the most important function since it determines which genes will be switched on or off, and thereby controls the cell. At various levels the whole genetic system is controlled in this way.

Experiments

An experiment performed by D. O. Hebb illustrates how individuals are dependant on the stimulation received from the environment. The experiment involved depriving the subject of all sensations except gravity. This was achieved by dressing them in a suit which barely touched the body and floating them in a pool of water.

The idea of the experiment was to see how long the subject could stand being so deprived. It turned out to be about 10 or 11 hours. This is what psychologists would call a poisonous experiment since it had an unfortunate effect on the subject. Clearly we need some sensory input to keep our minds in a healthy state. Our individual time mazes are a record of our engagement with the environment whether we are very conscious of our environment or lost in thought.

A number of other experiments have been illustrative in explaining how we perceive the world around us. An important question is whether we have maps in our brains, or minds, or whether we learn by chaining together responses, often muscular responses. It is a question related to whether we learn by insight or through gradual increments. An experiment devised to answer the question about maps in our minds involved someone who knew how to negotiate Hampton Court Maze pulling a person in a wheelchair backwards through the maze. Then they were tested to discover whether the person in the wheelchair had learned how to walk the maze. This should eliminate all possibilities of that person having learned the maze though chaining. It turns out that we do have maps in our minds or brains and are able to visualise things ‘in our mind’s eye’, as we put it. Muscular chaining does however sometimes occur and is a technique that teachers of severely mentally challenged children use to train them in simple tasks such as putting on their clothes. It was wondered how far down the evolutionary ladder animals used maps in the brain. An African rodent was filmed laying out and running a circuit of their territory with various interconnecting pathways. Usually the rodent ran round the outer circuit. On one occasion the rodent was being pursued by a much larger reptile. On the straight run the reptile was gaining on the rodent, but at the appropriate point the rodent turned down a side turning and escaped. This would suggest that the rodent had maps in the brain and so was able to visualise an alternative route in order to escape.

It should not be assumed that muscular and other forms of chaining in the body and nervous system are unimportant. An interesting experiment involving this can be set up by anyone with technical ability in audio equipment. The experiment records a person reading a script while the audio feedback is relayed to them, with half a second delay. If you are that person reading the script it is an uncanny experience to quickly find you are unable to continue and grind to a halt. Immediate feedback is obviously important in everyday life.

Perception is known as psychologist’s psychology as there are many subtle aspects to it which have required clever experiments to investigate. Michotte was interested in how we perceive causality, such as how we perceive the event when two billiard or snooker balls bounce off one another. He proceeded to set up an experiment in which two rectangles of colour appeared to move together, meet briefly and then return to their original position. Michotte found that people watching this felt that the two blocks of colour had bounced off one another. Somehow this feeling was built into our minds and seems to be an automatic response.

The perception of colour turns out to be not as straightforward as expected. Edwin Land used two projectors to project identical still life images in black and white in such a way that they completely overlapped on the screen. He then placed colour filters in front of the slides and observed the results on the screen. He found that if he used two different coloured filters in each projector and the two chosen filters where from the opposite sides of the spectrum around a mid point of the yellow part of the spectrum, then the viewer of the screen would see the still life in a range of colours representing the natural colours of the still life objects. The further apart the colours of the filters in the spectrum the more vivid were the colours of the still life, for example, red and green filters gave a more vivid image than two yellow filters which were either side of the pivotal point in the spectrum.

How we perceive different locations in our bodies remains something of a mystery. The semicircular canals in our inner ear give us some information but the real problem is how we know where a skin sensation comes from. Sperry performed an experiment with frogs which suggested that in the case of frogs there is some correspondence between sensors in the skin and the relevant somesthetic sensory areas in the brain. Areas of the brain which deal with different sensations have been well mapped and it is instructive to see how these are arranged.

The fact that specific information is processed in discrete areas of the brain creates a problem in the study of consciousness because most healthy people report that their conscious experience appears to them as a unity and not as disjointed experiences. This is known as the unity problem. Quantum theory may help with this.

The human brain contemplating itself is a fascinating subject. Lord Brain, for example, said that when we know everything about how the brain works we will understand mankind. Psychologists usually say that this is a categorical error. As Rita Carter in her book ‘Mapping the Mind’ says, the human brain might never understand itself but men will not stop trying. It is clearly a complex problem which may well be beyond the capacity of the human mind. Certainly most of the approaches to the subject are analytical but it is in reality a holistic phenomena. In conclusion, it should be noted that today psychologists have renewed interest in consciousness, largely due to experimental techniques which allow them to locate the specific areas in the brain where conscious activity is occurring. As we have seen some reductionists are interested the question, “What is consciousness?” However, in view of the problems that psychologists and other scientists are experiencing we must soon consider what the philosophers have to say on the subject.