Today, there is an opinion that we know our mind. In everyday life, we often come across thoughts like, “What would you like for lunch?” or “Why did she do that?” and try to consciously find answers. It seems to us that the experience of conscious reflection is a complete record of the workings of the mind. This is quite natural, but it is wrong. There is a “lower mind,” and all psychologists agree with this, an area of the subconscious mind that performs a huge amount of hard work in the process of thinking. Ask yourself what the capital of France is called, the answer will come by itself.: Paris. Wiggle your fingers and they will start moving back and forth in a complex pattern that you did not consciously prepare: it was kindly provided by the subconscious. The big question that causes a lot of controversy in the field of psychology is what happens due to the subconscious mind and what happens due to conscious reflection. Or, to use the title of one of the first revolutionary studies conducted in 1992, “Is the subconscious mind intelligent or stupid?” There is a popular belief that the subconscious mind is only capable of preparing simple actions in the form of a “stimulus-response”, providing basic facts, identifying objects and helping us with movements that we have already performed in the past. Complex cognitive skills, including planning, logical thinking, and the ability to connect concepts, on the contrary, require the participation of the conscious sphere. Recent experiments by a group of Israeli scientists have cast doubt on this point of view. To do this, Ran Hassin and his colleagues, specialists from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, used a subtle visual technique: “continuous suppression of the outbreak.” He made it possible to convey information to the participants of the experiment, despite the fact that they did not realize it. It may sound unpleasant, but in fact, everything is quite simple. The technology relies on the fact that each of us has two eyes, and our brain is constantly trying to combine the two images into one coherent picture. As part of the experiment, light-bending glasses were used, which caused the eyes of each participant to see completely different images. The first eye received a series of bright spots that quickly replaced each other. It was so distracting that when the second eye was provided with genuine information, the person did not immediately begin to realize it. It turned out that in this case, an image that we could easily see takes a few seconds to reach consciousness (but if you close one eye and get rid of the bright spots, you will immediately see a “depressed” image). As part of Hassin’s main experiment, participants were “subconsciously” offered arithmetic examples, such as “9 — 3 — 4 = ?”. Each example was followed by a slide with a clear image of the number that was supposed to be the result. The subjects were asked to read it aloud as quickly as possible. Sometimes the answer was correct (for example, “2”), and sometimes it was not (for example, “1”). The result was amazing, because the participants in the experiment reacted much faster if they had the correct number in front of them. Their minds solved mathematical problems, even if people didn’t realize it. The results show that the subconscious mind has much more sophisticated abilities than many of us might have thought. Unlike other studies of unconscious activity, there were no automatic responses to stimuli: to get a correct decision, it was necessary to use the rules of arithmetic, which, as previously thought, was possible only through balanced reflection. The authors of the study are confident that the technology they use can “change the rules of the game when it comes to exploring the subconscious mind.” They claim that “the subconscious mind is capable of performing any fundamental tasks that the conscious mind can do.” These are serious claims, and experts say that we have a lot of work ahead of us if we decide to explore the power and scope of our subconscious. As in the case of an iceberg, most of the operations that our mind performs are outside our field of vision. And yet, experiments allow us to take a fleeting look at what lies underwater. Source: Theory and Practice