Alternatives To Scientology 3 Subliminal 2

The Alternatives To Scientology series Subliminal is based on the chapters in the book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow and should definitely be read in order from number 2 to number 11. If read out of order they definitely won't make sense.

In trying to understand the human mind philosophers from the time of the ancient Greeks tried to describe the subconscious mind and could use whatever ideas they dreamed up to answer questions about the mind.

It was thought by philosophers as far as the 1800s that the human mind couldn't be examined with empirical evidence like other subjects. German philosopher Immanuel Kant felt we construct our view of the world but it couldn't be verified scientifically.

In 1834 physiologist E.H. Weber did experiments on the sense of touch and demonstrated that through scientific experiments measurable and repeatable evidence regarding the mind can be found.

In 1879 German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt  established the world's first psychology laboratory and a Harvard MD and professor William James also set up a lab.

From the experiments these two pioneered psychology the New Psychology emerged that would revolutionize the field.

From his book Subliminal Leonard Mlodinow wrote, (quoting British psychologist William Carpenter from his 1874 book Principles Of Mental Physiology) "two distinct trains of Mental action are carried on simultaneously, one consciously, the other unconsciously," and that the more thoroughly we examine the mechanisms of the mind , the clearer it becomes "that not only an automatic, but unconscious action enters largely into all its processes."(Page 32)

The subconscious or unconscious mind has been described as entirely necessary but usually overlooked. It's like a hundred behind the scenes people putting on a show in which only the star in the spotlight is usually seen.

Mlodinow wrote, "According to a textbook on human physiology, the human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second"..."The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second."(Page 33)

We don't usually think about it but usually our bodies have a tremendous number of sensory inputs to evaluate and respond to. We have senses of balance, pressure, heat, taste, smell, and many fine details we don't usually consider like our breathing, heartbeat and many functions. We have glands that secrete a variety of hormones and neurons and neurotransmitters that carry messages to receptors that receive those messages. And many other things I haven't even touched on.

Perhaps over 95 percent of our mental processes are unconscious and less than 5 percent are conscious, some scientists say less than 2 or even 1 percent of our mind is conscious.

That's like a tiny piece of ice being visible and something you can easily inspect with a giant mammoth mountain of an iceberg below the depths and unseen. If you thought the movement and actions of the tiny sliver that can be seen above explains everything, you would be incorrect regarding many things like the momentum and inertia of this ice.

You would be wrong about how it would affect what it interacts with and how it is affected.

Mlodinow referred to the case of a man called TN who is famous in literature on neuroscience. I will briefly recap, and hopefully not butcher, a few facts about TN. He was a fifty two year old man that was a doctor and unfortunately had several strokes that knocked out functions in his occipital lobes, brain portions crucial for processing visual information from the eyes and getting it to the conscious mind.

His eyes worked and his unconscious mind received the information but sadly it didn't make it the rest of the way to his conscious mind. He was tested and his total blindness was established.

Through brain injuries to other people and creatures disabling vision a lot of supporting evidence has been established for this result.

So TN had an intact optical system but a completely destroyed visual cortex, to paraphrase Mlodinow.

Researchers used forced choice experiments - make the blind TN sit in front of a computer with pictures and have him guess details about the pictures. See if a blind man can see or be guided by his subconscious.

First he was given geometric shapes to guess, and got them right about half the time. That's what you expect from a blind man. But they presented him faces and asked if they were happy or angry. Evaluating faces is crucial to human survival. You look for love or hate, honesty or deception, safety or danger in a face. That evaluation, sometimes in a second is crucial to survival.

We even have a portion of our brains specifically set aside to recognize faces and expressions and interpret the meaning of them. Vision in general is so important about a third of our brains are devoted to the task.

This blind man could use the specialized area focused on faces in the brain - the fusiform face area - to guess facial expressions correctly nearly two out of three times, despite not seeing anything.

Some researchers heard of these results and got an idea for another experiment. They created a corridor filled with obstacles that a sighted person would simply walk around and eventually convinced TN to try to walk through it with a person that would trail him to catch him if he fell and see what happened.

TN walked down the corridor and reportedly walked around a garbage can, a stack of paper, and several boxes. He reportedly didn't stumble or collide with any objects. He had no idea how he had done this.

This phenomena has come to be called blindsight. Wounds experienced by many soldiers during World War I in the occipital lobe well established that the occipital lobe is crucial to processing vision. Hundreds of soldiers were shot in this region and survived. The bullets used in World War I were significantly different than most modern bullets and didn't do the tremendous damage modern bullets do, so this type of wound provided a lot of opportunities to research which brain sections are associated with which functions, by seeing what functions are knocked out by removing or damaging which portion of the brain occurs.

The function of the unconscious in processing sensory information and filling in gaps has a lot of other evidence. We can have a portion of a word dropped out in a phone conversation and from the context our mind can guess the appropriate sound to complete the word. It can do it so subtly we don't recognize the dropped out portion as being missing. Similarly we can be missing a portion of what we see do to poor lighting, shadows, eye movement and other causes and our unconscious can fill in the blanks often to see the most likely or appropriate view in our opinions, unconscious opinions.

Mlodinow wrote, "The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data." (Page 50)

Mlodinow sums up the second chapter (Sense Plus Mind Equals Reality) with, "That brings up a question to which we will return again and again, in contexts ranging from vision to memory to the way we judge the people we meet: If a central function of the unconscious is to fill in the blanks when there is incomplete information in order to construct a useful picture of reality, how much of that picture is accurate ?" (Page 51)

A question that is of particular relevance to Scientologists and ex Scientologists is how can the unconscious shape, alter or influence memories ? And how can influence of the unseen unconscious be unseen influence of memory ?

That's the subject of the next chapter.