Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous fdasf fdasf The subconscious: “an indispensable component” Nearly all of us have had the experience of riding on a train, a bus or a plane with no company, with no one to talk to, or at least sitting through a concert or lecture to which we were not really attentive, and meanwhile had fantastic fantasies and ideas running through our minds. This is the subconscious mind, taking advantage to the fullest of the relaxed state of the conscious mind. The term is used interchangeably with the unconscious mind. It is this part of our entity that is the creator of so many of the fabulous inventions. It is capable of doing much of our best thinking and helps us solve the most mind-boggling problems that we encounter; which had remained unsolved after hours of resolved focus with our thinking cap on. It has the extraordinary capability to bear on all our affairs far more wisdom and experience than our conscious minds command. Certainly there is a time for concentrated application to our problems. However there is also the time to stop and seemingly while away our time, when our subconscious mind is doing all the hard work. For it is accomplishment that every single one of us is after rather than sheer activity and hard work. Fehr, a French scientist who studied his contemporaries, said that nearly 75 per cent of the important discoveries of all scientists were made when they were not actively involved in their research. One night in 1920, Frederick Grant Banting, a young Canadian surgeon, with so little practice that he had to give lectures to eke out a living, was working over his next days lecture. His subject was diabetics. He went over it hour after hour. finally with his head brimming with a compendium of contradictory thoughts he went to bed. At two in the morning he got up, turned on the light and wrote three sentences in his notebook. Then he went back to bed and slept. Those three magic sentences lead to the discovery of insulin. Banting’s conscious mind had come to grips with one of the most baffling problems in medical science; his subconscious mind made the final and groundbreaking strokes. Underestimating the power of the subconscious we try to0 hard to extract our decisions through conscious endeavors, only unintentionally not getting the best there is. The trouble is we are only looking with half of our mind, and with less than half of our accumulated experience and judgement. As a consequence we cheat ourselves of many hours of entertainment, which if present would in itself add to the effectiveness of our thinking. The multiple-processing takes place at the subconscious level, whereas the conscious mind can only do serial processing. During the very first driving lessons the mind is focused only on the road and how one release’s the clutch in relation to the accelerator. However with the passage of time as one becomes more adept at the task, the driving part seems to go along by itself. One can perform other tasks and one sort of drives automatically. Similarly typists are well aware of this trait when they subconsciously type not knowing where their fingers are going. Only aware of what has to be typed. A hypnotist repeats his enchantment. But what is he really aiming to achieve? What he really wants to do is maybe to purge his patient from the fear of heights, which inhibits the patient from flying of to the graduation ceremony of her beloved son across the ocean. Once he could gain the access, he could literally transform the personality of the person; he could expurgate the fears of the entranced in a few sittings. but how does he do that? The access to the subconscious lets him perform these surreal tasks. Today as laboratory data and clinical experience is improving, the effectiveness of the practice mount. There is a growing awareness that for selected people hypnosis can be a powerful tool in controlling pain, phobias and habits. It can even cause physical occurrences that were they not well documented, would strain credulity. Infact even dreams can bring about those out of the world occurrences. There has been a known instance where a lady has gotten pregnant just by having dreams about conception. However such data might not be very credible. The powers of dreams have always been underestimated. There is a whole new world in the sub conscious Mind that helps us in a subtle way. The dreaming world could be a very powerful thing so much so that it causes a baby to be born because of lucid dreaming. In a true story taken from the book called Living with Dreams a woman dreamt that she just had a period in her dreams. This was so realistic that she actually thought she had a real period not one dreamt up in a dream when she woke up. A few days later she was thinking that it was the best time to have sex. Two or three weeks she felt something strange was happening and so consulted a doctor who said that she had become pregnant. All this happened just because of a dream. The conscious mind is really the tip of the iceberg, with the unconscious mind the predominant factor in deciding the course of our lives. The importance of this facet of our mind is seldom acknowledged by the layperson and usually remains hidden out of perspective of the ordinary person. Once humanity can comprehend the power of this faculty we would be able to reach greater heights of achievement. The difficulty in determining the role of the unconscious remains a difficulty, in that the exact involvement of it in some instance can not be exactly differetiated from the influence of the conscious part. Two methods have been adopted, one is introspective analysis and the other is behavioral analysis. Studies of unconscious perceptual processes based on introspective measures of awareness date from the very beginning of experimental psychology in North America. As an example of this general approach, consider an experiment conducted in the Psychological Laboratory at Harvard by Boris Sidis and reported in his 1898 monograph, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society . Sidis showed subjects cards containing a single printed digit or letter. "The subject was placed at such a distance from the card that the character was far out of his range of vision. He saw but a dim, blurred spot or dot" (p. 170). In fact, "the subjects often complained that they could not see anything at all; that even the black, blurred, dim spot often disappeared from their field of vision" (p. 171). However, when Sidis asked his subjects to name the characters on the cards, their responses were correct more often than would be expected on the basis of simple guessing, even though many subjects expressed the belief "that they might as well shut their eyes and guess" (p. 171). Sidis concluded that his experiments indicated "the presence within us of a secondary subwaking self that perceives things which the primary waking self is unable to get at" (p. 171). Many psychological studies of unconscious perception have attempted to prove the existence of unconscious perceptual processes by demonstrating that stimuli are perceived when subjects are not consciously aware of the stimuli. The basic strategy followed in these studies is to establish conditions under which conscious perception does not occur and then to demonstrate that stimuli can nevertheless be perceived under these conditions. The success of these studies depends completely on the acceptability of the method used to establish the absence of conscious perception. In the earliest studies, inferences concerning the absence of awareness were based on subjects' introspective reports. In general, if the subjects' statements indicated an absence of relevant conscious perceptual experiences, it was assumed that the subjects were in fact unaware of the stimuli. In more recent studies, the absence of relevant conscious experiences has been defined in terms of behavioral measures that indicate an inability to discriminate between alternative stimuli. Studies based on both types of measures have not led to completely convincing results because it is always possible to question whether the measure of conscious perception was successful in guaranteeing a complete absence of ALL relevant conscious experiences. Selling subliminal perception tapes has become a profitable business of late. It refers to the perception of messages about which we have seemingly no information. The stimulus could be anything ranging from sounds to as significant a thing as an odour. For example may report being unable perceive a word momentarily flashed on a screen in front of them. Later, though, they may behave in a way that indicates thet actually saw it, providing evidence for subliminal perception. Specifically, experiments have shown that people who are exposed so briefly to a descriptive label that they cannot report seeing t later form imprssions that are influenced by the label to which they were exposed ((barg&petromonaco,1982;Merikle,1992) Although we are able to percive at least some kinds of information about which we are unaware, such information appears to have little consequential effect. This had been tested by experimenters who manipulated labels on sublminal message tapes. Consequently some participants who thought they were getting a self-esteem enhancing tape were actually given a memory improving tape, and others who received a tape labeled as if it were a memory-improving tape and also the pther way round. To account for the control group some subjects were given correctly labeled tapes. The results did not give a variation in the changes between the experimental group and the control group. An excellent example of a study using a behavioral measure of awareness was reported by Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc in 1980. These investigators were interested in demonstrating that unconsciously perceived stimuli influence subsequent affective reactions. They designed an experiment to show that preferences for particular stimuli can be based on unconsciously perceived events. In their study, subjects were initially shown 10 meaningless, irregular, geometric shapes. Each shape was presented five times for 1-msec each time, and no subject ever reported seeing any of the shapes. Following these initial presentations, perception of the shapes was evaluated by both a forced-choice recognition task (i.e., the measure of awareness) and a forced-choice preference task (i.e., the measure of unconscious perception). For both tasks, the subjects were shown 10 pairs of shapes, with each pair consisting of one "old" shape that had been presented during the initial phase of the experiment and one "new" shape that had not been presented previously. For the recognition task, the subjects were instructed to select the member of each pair that had been presented previously, whereas for the preference task, the subjects were simply told to choose the shape that they preferred. The interesting result was that the subjects performed no better than chance (i.e., 50% correct) when they were asked to select the shape in each pair that had been presented previously, but they performed significantly better than chance (i.e., 60% correct) when they were asked to select the shape in each pair that they preferred. In other words, when the subjects were asked to discriminate "old" from "new" shapes, their performance suggested that they had never perceived the shapes. However, when the subjects were simply asked to select the shape they preferred, their performance revealed that the previous brief exposures influenced their affective reactions. If one accepts the assumption that forced-choice recognition provides an adequate measure of conscious perceptual experience, then these results provide strong support for the existence of unconscious perception. To overcome , which is unpleasant, Freud believed that people develop a reange of defense mechanisms to deal with it. Defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing the soure from themselves and others. the primary defense mechanism is repression, in which unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconsicous. For example, a college student who feels hatred for her mother might repress thses personally and socialy unacceptable feelings. They remain lodged within the id, since acknowledging then would provoke anxiety. This does not mean however, that they have no effect; true feelings might be revealed trrough dreams, slips of tongues , or symbolically in some other fashion. Freuds theories has not remained unsuccessful in finding its detractors. Furthermore , Freuds emphasis on the subconscious has been partially supported by some of the current research findings of cognitive psychologists. The research has shown that mental processes about which people are unaware have an important impact on thinking and actions. Later neo-freudian psychoanalysts unearthed the fact there is a basic trait which is inherited from the ancestors, known as collective unconscious., such as the love for mother, belief in a supreme king, and behavior as specific as fear of snakes. MIND POWER by Readers Digest. Took material from various articles in the compilation UNDERSTANDING PSYCHOLOGY by Robert S. Feldman topic on subliminal perception Freudian theory, neo-freudian theory and freudian theory http://watarts.uwaterloo.cd!pmerikle/papers/uncons-percept-full.htm Bibliography: Word Count: 2178
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