Clearly the article is getting overexcitedly wordy when we should really be dancing around in a circle chanting BOOMSHAGGAII!
― Gordon (Gordon), Tuesday, 17 December 2002 09:43 (twenty-three years ago)
Ah if only Siggy would have stuck with promoting that delightful drink Coca. heheh. It's a long time since I was so anti-Freudian that I dropped out of uni. Now I can (sort of!) understand his views - especially when considering he did not really venture out of his Jewish culture to see confirmation for his theories - but I still can't bring myself to embrace the subconscious. I CAN NOT SEE IT! heh. Anyway a friend said that apparently now there's a tendency to mix cognitive psychology with psychoanalysis.
― nathalie (nathalie), Tuesday, 17 December 2002 11:21 (twenty-three years ago)
nathalie, I am not sure if I am missing some subtlety here, since I never studied Freud or psychoanalytic theory. But, despite this lack, I would have to say that my own observations unquestionably confirm the existance of mental processes that take place below the level of conciousness.
The simplest way to confirm this for yourself is to examine your own brain's exceptional ability to exclude sensory input. At every moment of the day (and night) your ears are hearing, every square inch of your body is feeling, your nose is smelling and your mouth is tasting. Yet, I presume this flood of information does not distract your concious brain from focusing on the very small portion of that information that is of potential interest.
It is fairly easy to dismiss this mental operation of filteration as dull and unsophisticated - a simple gate that opens and closes. But I find it interesting to ask myself, how does my brain decide what is 'of potential interest' to my conciousness? Something is going on at a preconcious level there that can't be dismissed as unsophisticated.
Moreover, this filteration system learns from experience and applies a wide variety of lessons from a wide variety of inputs. It is clear to me that my preconcious (or subconcious) brain checks sensory input against a fairly long laundry list of factors before it opens the gate to my concious.
While none of this may resemble Freud's idiosyncratic version of the subconcious, it is something in our brains that deeply affects how we see the world, that we are rarely, if ever, concious of. That's all.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 17 December 2002 18:30 (twenty-three years ago)