Well, welcome to the profound health conscious mini series of the year.
This is our second year and it's great to see you all.
Before I begin, I'll just explain housekeeping and a few people so are also in pop up who can be in on the series.
And here we are, Dr. Simon Katz, who is with me and at the end, this pro organiser.
So if you have any questions about the seminar series or you'd like to be more formally involved, please get in touch with any three of us today.
But this year we mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's essay on the unconscious.
I'm speaking on this topic of the unconscious. We have cognitive neuroscientist because as you may recall,
scholar Dr. Andrew Nichols cancer and Remains has been in search of the human memory Manchester since 1977.
He works with amnesic patients and through lesion studies and for my research has illuminated the neural bases of humanity.
Dr. Nichols is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture
at Queen Mary London and its EDS thinking in the unconscious 19th century.
So to have here which is a terrific, terrific book.
If you're interested in the whole histories and theories of the development of the unconscious,
and they'll be discussing the unconscious both as a scientific concept and as a metaphor today.
So please help me welcome, professor. Thanks very much.
What I'm going to do is talk about the neural basis of unconscious memory and the relationship between unconscious memory and conscious memory.
When we recall and recognise fast and personal events, natural psychologists as semantic and episodic memory.
A person is not going to be aware of what is being recalled or recognised, but also that memory of something is occurring.
They're aware of that as well. Now, even without the classic kind of awareness,
previous encounters with stimuli can change the way we behave towards those stimuli when their next encounter.
This is the kind of unconscious memory known as priming.
It's not just the behaviour that can be changed when the stimulus is seen again.
It's cognition can be influenced and also feeling emotional.
In addition to finding other sorts of unconscious memory into it known to exist.
And this has been believed and this has come really known as the standard view for the last 30 or 40 years,
so that our kinds of unconscious memory, other than priming and these include habits, skills, and these can affect cognition directly.
You can develop a habit of attending to certain things when you're acute in particular, and not be aware of this at all.
And with skills they can be not just motor skills like learning to drive a bike,
but they can be perceptual skills, like learning to read automatically and fast,
but also cognitive skills so that you feel you can intuitively solve things but not be quite aware how you're doing it.
And there are other kinds of unconscious memory as well, simple forms of conditioning as well as sensory learning.
That is to say an example would be if you perceive two very similar length lines,
you can get very good at judging, which is the longer, whereas previously you might have practically a chance.
You learn this and it's automatic and it's unconscious. And another example, habituation, when a stimulus is repeatedly presented,
may be quite big gaps between presentations, even if you're not attending to it.
After a while, you cease to not just as a tool.
Now these distinctions between long term memory are described in this diagram that really comes from that response group from many years ago.
This has been around for 30 years at least. This diagram illustrates what I've just said.
So long term memory, that is to say memory, which you might well think of as long term,
but it's memory after at least a few seconds when you've been distracted from the thing that you've just been encountering,
and that's referred to as long term memory, that's declarative memory, which is the conscious form of memory.
When you are recalling and recognising and know that you're remembering,
which includes memory for personal events, episodic memory and memory for any kind of fact.
But on the other side, does this these non declarative kinds of memory, which comprise things like skills,
conditioning and priming and other things as well, which in of illustrated here.
But the bottom part of the figure actually indicates the regions of the brain which when damaged selectively, in fact these kinds of memories.
So declarative memory is particularly affected.
That's the conscious kind of memory by damage to the medial temporal lobes.
I'll show you where they are in the second.
But if you look at the unconscious kinds of memory, different areas of brain damage, I'm just very quickly covering this up.
Produce impairments selectively in these kinds of memory.
So conscious and unconscious memory are disrupted by different brain regions and activate.
This is the second part and activate correspondingly different brain regions.
So if a kind of conscious memory is impaired by hippocampal damage, when you do brain imaging and imaged the activity of nerve cells in the brain,
which we can do indirectly by measuring blood oxygenation with an MRI scanner,
you expect to see campus activity change in normal people, just as if that structure is damaged.
The hippocampus, that sort of memory will go down. Conscious memory.
Okay. So I'm coming back to the unconscious part of memory as well as the conscious, just to say this in a tiny bit more detail.
Lesions of the cerebellum, which is a big structure.
Most neurones in the brain are here at the back of the head.
Yeah. Damage to the cerebellum disrupts what's referred to as some metric classical conditioning.
An example of that would be if anyone experiences a puff of air in the eye, you blink automatically if that's immediately preceded by a tone, a sound.
After a while of pairing, the two leads to a situation in which if you just present the tone, you think even if you don't have the following in there,
that's simple conditioning, but it's impaired both the learning and retention of it's impaired by cerebellar damage.
But cerebellar damage does not impair skill, memory, declarative memory priming, any other kind of unconscious memory or conscious memory.
Medial temporal lobe damage, as I just mentioned, is known to impact conscious memory.
It's related to a well-known syndrome called organic amnesia.
Most famous patients who have medial temporal lobe damage as a result of surgical intervention to treat temporal lobe epilepsy was the famous patient,
H.M. Henry Mollison, who died in 2008 after being studied for over 50 years by neuroscientists and psychologists.
And he had a selective impairment in conscious or declarative memory.
Now briefly lesions of the basal ganglia, which are structures important in particular kinds of movement control,
just as the cerebellum is important for other kinds of movement control lesions of the basal ganglia in past skill,
memory, dancing path, commentary of classical conditioning that just affect skill, memory and finally,
lesions of the visual cortex of the back of the head that impair visual item priming.
In other words, you present the stimulus visually and you have damage in this region.
That's the part that's damaged now. This is part of the standard view, the view that's been believed by many scientists for the last 30 to 40 years.
I'll just illustrate these structures in a little bit more detail.
If you view the brains stripping away the skull from the left hand side, what you can see here is that the structure I've already mentioned,
the hippocampus, it runs from back to front on both sides of the brain, right deep in the brain, near the midline of the brain.
And it links to a fibre tract here of white matter called the full neck switched projects to the anterior thalamus
here and further down in the brain at the base of the forebrain to a structure called the memory bodies.
They're part of the hippocampal declarative memory system or circuit damage to any of them impairs conscious memory selectively.
So the Standard View says, But I want you to note that underneath the hippocampus here,
there's another area which is actually grey matter, but it's pictured here.
I don't I never know. My colour knowledge is terrible. What would you describe that is vaguely yellow.
That that colour, this region here, that's the near quarter neocortex.
This is neocortex as well, but this is neocortex and I'll show that again in this slide,
this time you're seeing a scan, something like a scan from an MRI machine cut through the brain like this.
That's called a coronial slice. It's about here. It's going through the frontal regions of the temporal lobe and this side is blown up here.
So here in blue, you see the hippocampus.
And these underneath it are the neocortical parts of the medial temporal lobes.
So in particular, I want you to note, I always get this machine misbehaving.
There it is, that region point of view, that region is the brain, the cortex, and this region is the part hippocampal cortex.
Often, as in the case of H.M., the surgeon damaged all these regions and got a very severe will down counties here.
Now, the standard view in this view, which is developed over the last 30, 40 years, says particular things,
particularly about habits and skills as well as other forms of unconscious memory.
And this is the basis really of saying these are unconscious forms of memory.
Talk about priming, particularly in more detail.
Habits and skills are learned normally by amnesic.
So as I've already implied, they're not impaired learning these skills under most circumstances at all in the same way.
But they are normally, in general, according to the standard view, at learning any kind of unconscious memory and in healthy people,
performance is interfered with, not facilitated by trying to recall or think about what to do next.
There are lots of stories about this how if you have a fairly automatic habit or skill,
if you try and think about what you should be doing next, it actually does interfere with what you are doing.
This indicates to some degree that habits and skills are independent of each other and are learned independently of skill,
of declarative memory, the conscious kind of memory.
So a lot of this stuff happens automatically without thinking about it.
However, even though it may happen automatically and perhaps relatively unconscious, all these kinds of memories,
habits and skills, influence, often without being aware of it, what we think and when we think it, as well as what we do.
So our consciousness is constantly being influenced by these different kinds of unconscious memory.
Okay. Now I'm going to focus on priming because a lot of the work showing that it's unconscious has been done in more detail with priming,
and it's a very selective kind of unconscious memory.
So. Sorry. It's failed.
I'm picking up. It's already passed. It wouldn't be accepted. Okay.
So stimuli can be either items like a word or a face for an object picture or associations between light.
And so it might be an association between two words or to automatically stimulate when they present.
It could be novel. In other words, you haven't encountered them before, or they can have been previously not.
You've had previous exposure to those, and it might be a familiar face or face you've never seen before.
Secondly, stimuli can be studied and tested with or without awareness.
The experiments that I'm going to describe as the thing subjects are not aware of the stimuli at all.
So when they first present it, they're not aware of them.
They couldn't say what they've been shown and that test, they're not showing them in a way they're conscious of.
Nevertheless, that behaviour is influenced. However, you can have awareness for the stimuli and still get unconscious memory priming.
Okay. So the first kind is where your aware stimuli study and test is called separate move about threshold,
be aware memory and the other sort where you're never aware of the stimuli or shown either a study or a test.
It's called subliminal. That's just a shorthand. Okay, now with priming that test,
unconscious memory is shown even when there's no record of recognition by change processing of I've to stimulate that it's quantity dependent
said the evidence goes of recall and recognition and it can include this change in behaviour can include faster making of judgements.
So the next time you see something you may make a decision about it, which is faster than it would have been if you hadn't just been shown it,
or if the stimulus is shown only briefly, you may more accurately judge what you've just been shown.
Or again, when you're showing it again, even actually, sometimes if you weren't aware of it at all, you may prefer it.
The effect of seeing it, even though you're not aware of this, is to change your preference.
You like it more, or sometimes under some circumstances you like it less.
But this is an influence of the previous exposure of which you are not aware.
Okay. And there are other effects as well which are quite interesting.
Duration is mentioned that you can test with these thing and you can present them very briefly, but for make variable intervals of time,
fractions of a second I'm talking about and the feeling that you have and it affects your judgements is that the stimulus,
if it's been shown before, is on the screen for longer.
Not to do with how long it's on the screen. I think I've actually described that the wrong way around.
If you work it out, you can see why. Because what happens is if it's shown before, the next time you see it, you process it faster.
So what would the effect on your your judgement of how long it's on the screen be?
It feels as if it's been on the screen longer. So I was right first time.
It feels as if it's on the screen already. It's an illusion, but it's a compelling illusion.
And another compelling illusion is the second thing about background noise.
You can speak complex sentences and up to a week later if you present them again and it's done in noise of different levels.
So you hear a sentence and in the background your hands like that.
The background noise varies in intensity because the second time you hear the sentence, it's easier to process.
Even though you don't recognise it, you don't think you've ever seen it before.
You process faster and the background noise sounds to you subjectively quieter.
And even if you're told this is the effect of all this illusion guard against it, it's very difficult to guard against it.
You can't help but feel it's quieter.
The background noise as a result of having been shouting the sentence up to a week before.
So that's not sure after you've lost quite a long time. Okay.
So unconscious memory that is in third.
And this is a very important point. We don't know it directly because of course it's unconscious,
but it's inferred from changes in the way we behave or our cognition changes or in our emotional behaviour or preferences.
These things change and the only explanation is it's an unconscious form of memory and other influences of which where I'm unconscious.
Mm hmm. Okay. Now, I want to describe two challenges to the standard view, which is basically that if you have medial temporal lobe damage,
there's no impairment of these sorts of memory, these kinds of priming.
They're not affected by medial temporal lobe damage. There's been a lot of change back here in the last ten years.
Okay. So I'll just illustrate this with two studies.
So the evidence that amnesic may be impaired priming of novel items and novel associations is actually quite strong.
So if you have damage to the structures provided the information is novel,
particularly evidence is sensitive information to items associated together at the study time.
Medial temporal lobe damage appears to impact memory.
It also, of course, impairs conscious memory for associations, recognition and record of association.
My research student, Carlos Gomez, and I used unrelated pairs of object pictures about which people make relative size judgements.
So I've got some examples here.
Train an elephant. What you what you have to do is press the button under the stimulus, which you think is bigger of the two.
It's a relative size up and obviously you say train and here can be jam press on two and
here pineapple and 90 but hopefully press on the pineapple and test you repeat that action.
But here's the twist. This is the time associative memory for object for pictures that are paired together and also for individual object pictures.
So you can see here you will be shown train in which you store a few minutes before and
you have to do the same judgement which is better train your quicker at doing that.
Now these you seen cabbage in baby bird and you seen pineapple on that, but you didn't see them together.
You saw cabbage with ant and pineapple with lady, but they'd been recombined.
What that means is you would have been exposed to the.
The stimuli, the objects, but not together.
So the difference between the recombined lot and the intact lot is not that you've got memory for the items that's matched.
The only difference is that the intact ones have the additional associative memory for it, but they didn't pass.
And finally, stapler dog that wasn't shown in the study.
So that new items. So the items are new and the association is new.
And the difference between the recombined and the new is simply the item memory, which is unconscious.
So if you compare recombined and intact, you're looking at associative memory.
If you compare recombined to new, you're looking at item memory for these objects.
I've got a picture of what these are.
So this this just shows you we ran this in the brain scanning, set up an MRI setup, particularly looking at activity in the medial temporal lobes,
because we wanted to see whether the evidence that damaging the medial temporal lobes in pairs,
these kinds of memory was consistent with what we'd see in brain imaging.
What we'd expect to see is that the same brain regions change activity where damage impairs performance in patients.
So that's the train, elephant, cabbage and pineapple, etc., etc.
So you're seeing now that's what people actually saw. They didn't see words.
They saw the optic pictures. And what we got was that associative priming occurred.
So they did best it. In fact, they were fastest at making those judgements next, fastest at the recombined and slowest with the completely new pairs.
So there's evidence, behavioural evidence, that's the point.
Behavioural evidence for both associative and item priming.
Now when we look at the brain and we particularly look at the hippocampus because that's the big issue, particularly with us.
Associations. What we see is that the hippocampus with associative priming make this judgement faster, reduces in activity.
And one thing I missed from the previous slide was that we also ran a recognition test for associations with a different set of object pairs.
They were matched in in difficulty. We actually did a complex counterbalancing procedure, but that's the key point.
If you look at recognition, that's air.
So this here just a p, the shorthand is the associative priming and you get a reduction in hippocampal activity,
but with recognition you get an increase. So the effects go in opposite ways.
The hippocampus isn't working apparently in quite the same way, but it's the same region of the hippocampus.
They perfectly overlap, so it's very likely it's the same neurones which when you prime seem to decrease in activity,
but when for associations you have a recognition they increase in activity.
If you look at the neocortical structures, which I showed you a picture of the Perry Rhino and the parrot hippocampal cortices,
they don't change activity at all either for associative priming or associative recognition.
And I'll only briefly mention this, but as I said, we looked at object picture,
individual item priming, and with that, neither for recognition nor for item priming.
The single item was not the association. There was no change in hippocampal activity.
But interestingly, that was a change I can't show.
It's our point that in the paradigm and power of hippocampal cortices, there's a reduction in activity.
So that's referred to by psychologists. There's a double dissociation between the two.
Associative priming reduces activity in the hippocampus, not the now cortical structures.
Item priming for the individual pictures doesn't affect the hippocampus, but does affect produces activity in the cortex.
So how do we interpret this associative priming?
Obviously deactivates the same hippocampal region that associative recognition activates,
and this suggests that this region of the hippocampus is involved in storing and associative representation of this object.
But the unconscious memory may retrieve this representation in a different way from what happens with conscious memory, that is to say, recognition.
And the reason that said is that the activity of the neurones goes in opposite directions.
With priming, it seems to reduce and with recognition it seems to increase unconscious memory, it reduces punctures, it increase it.
We don't actually know why.
And it's controversial, but it's possible that the retrieval processes are different for unconscious stimulus memory and conscious stimulus memory.
Okay, now the final example comes from the group of Catarina Hanke working in Switzerland with quite a large group of associates,
and they've been looking at memory, false stimuli, which is completely unconscious.
You're never aware, having seen this data, how do they do this?
They present usually words, but sometimes they share in faces or objects.
You present them very briefly for about 17 milliseconds.
You can do it multiple times, but you precede the presentation of the target.
Similarly with what's called a visual mask.
It's a passive mask which is shown immediately before you present the target and immediately afterwards the result is,
and this is demonstrated in their experiments,
you're not aware that there's a stimulus in the middle of the target stimulus, which would be these work parts.
You're not aware of seeing them at all. You can't identify them consciously.
You're completely unconscious. That's a study later test.
You don't actually test the items themselves, but you you test items or associates which are linked to them, related to them in a particular way.
So although you see those items, they are not the same items.
However, what happens is, although you are never aware of the items, you show a change judgement for the related associations.
Now I'm going to illustrate that with one of their experiments in which they did both.
Functional and structural as well as brain imaging.
But also they looked at patients with damage to the hippocampal system, the hippocampus and structures that it relates to very closely.
And this is important because it combines both the approaches that I've described.
Brain lesions in a particular site should impair a particular kind of memory if they're involved with it.
But also when you show that particular kind of memory, the brain region should change activity.
And that's what they've shown in this experiment I'm going to describe.
So it's slightly complicated to describe. So I'm probably overrunning as again, I'll be as creative as I can have this.
Okay, so study what they did was show pairs of items, words which came from different categories.
So there were string instruments here you see them citrus fruits, you see them and vehicles and a lot of other categories as well.
They never had more than a few stimuli in each category.
Now if you take the first example of instruments, violin and the first example of citrus fruits.
LEMON, That's that would be typical of what they did.
Then you might take the first example of vehicles and with the first example of a new category, which I haven't shown.
So that's how they presented their study test.
They didn't show violin and lemon again.
What did they show? They showed actually, it's the second item from each of those categories.
They showed cello and Mandarin, an instrument, a string instrument and a citrus fruit.
They also showed harp. Now that's being presented on trunk, but that wasn't a category that had been presented.
So Harp should have gone with a citrus fruit, but it's actually being now paired with a vehicle.
So they're unrelated. Now what happens at test is you don't know whether the two words, so that would be violin and lemon study.
But at test it would be cello and Mandarin are cello and Mandarin and semantically related you're you're they're not potentially related.
So in order to get judgements which are roughly half the time they are related and roughly half the time they're not,
subjects are encouraged to be very lenient in their criteria so that they make about equal numbers of judgements.
And what happens is with related paths you're more likely to say they are semantically related.
So cello and Mandarin, you'll be more likely to say you're semantic related.
You're never aware of having seen violin and lemon at all.
If they're unrelated, there's no effect on your semantic preferences whatsoever.
They showed that, but only after the stimuli had been shown unconsciously, quite a lot of times.
Okay, I want to mention this because this is item priming.
Let's just concentrate on the associated with associative priming.
What they found was they had control subjects that just healthy people and they found that they showed promise,
but only if they were shown the stimuli paired together quite a few times, never being aware of them.
They didn't find this in a group of 11 amnesic who had damage various degrees of severity to the hippocampal system,
not just the hippocampus, but the structures next to.
And they didn't show any associative priming at all, apart from three patients who had very mild hippocampal damage.
Now, these three patients were very impaired at conscious associative memory.
They couldn't recall or recognise associations between words that had been shown recently.
They were very impaired of that, but they performed normally this unconscious memory task.
Now, in addition to that, the healthy subjects showed activity,
increased activity in the hippocampus and temporal cortex and also in a temporal cortex.
It was a temporal cortex, semantic processing region.
The three and Ne6, who were intact on associative priming, showed weaker activity in these regions.
So they were showing some activity. It wasn't normal, it was reduced.
This suggests associative priming and recognition. Both involve the hippocampus and probably in the same way.
So this is a new suggestion now, the interpretation of sense.
Some of these things. And I just want to emphasise one point and that is that unconscious memory is a weaker form than is conscious memory.
Is it shown in this study? Yeah. It's one thing I never unconsciously kind how to control this thing.
It just doesn't behave. The point being, you don't need much hippocampus to perform the unconscious tasks.
Normally you need a lot of hippocampus to be intact, to perform the conscious memory tasks.
Normally, when you do the unconscious memory task, there's much less hippocampal activity than there is when you do the conscious memory task.
So what that suggest is they can use the same region of the brain.
This is contrary to all the stuff I told you earlier about the standard view,
and what that suggests is that they're just a very weak form of the same sort of thing as conscious memory.
The same regions of the brain are involved, but you need less of those brain regions to get normal working,
and that suggests it's a continuum rather than completely different things.
And that is very different from what a lot of people believe about these forms of memory.
Okay. Quick conclusion that the evidence about priming is not yet universally agreed.
It isn't standardised. There are still a lot of uncertainties that haven't been resolved and that's what I really want to emphasise.
That isn't universal agreement yet about the neural basis of conscious and unconscious memory and how they relate to each other.
Secondly, this form of unconscious memory priming may be similar to conscious memory,
but in some sense, as I've just said, it's weaker, so it might be like a continuum.
However, I'm unconscious. Memory of all kinds may be heterogeneous and even within priming.
The sort that I described earlier super-luminova. But threshold when you're aware of signalling may be carried out in a different way.
So maybe it isn't just weak memory, but it is actually rather different from conscious memory.
And the final point, which is a more general one, which relates to everything I'm saying, it is that most brain activity is unconscious.
We are never aware of the processing that is carried out by most parts of the brain.
Most of the time, however, this processing quite possibly works differently from conscious processing.
Nevertheless, it must input into conscious memory.
It influences it the whole time. So we could see conscious memory and consciousness in general.
Perhaps like the tip of an iceberg.
The stuff under the surface of the water is the majority of stuff and it may work slightly differently from the stuff above the surface.
Thanks very much. Thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm going to be doing something very different because I'm an intellectual historian and a literary scholar.
And part of what inspired this talk was thinking about this book that someone mentioned earlier.
This was the face of a conference that we did in 2007,
and it came out in 2010 and see that we chose these things because we have the threshold and we have the unconscious underneath the see there.
So in a way, Andrew's talk demonstrated when you you're talking about things beneath the surface and above the surface.
Our language we're talking about the unconscious is state remarkably similar across a number of centuries.
I wanted to reflect on this book to begin with, which I co-edited with my sleep, Lucia,
because some of the methodological issues that the book confronted are ones that I might handle differently now.
I had the opportunity to do so. My main claim in this short paper will be that the unconscious, whatever that is,
is something that presents a particular problem for the standard type of conceptual history that we offered in this book.
So this was a fairly traditional history of concepts in Germany called this philosophy shifter.
You find a concept like the unconscious or like genius or like causality, and you look at the way in which that concept has changed historically.
And this is the approach that we took in this particular book.
And it's predicated on the notion that a concept is something that refers to a relatively stable category or a recognisable range of phenomena,
or to a certain class of objects.
And the reason for that is that the enlightenment's general criteria for a functioning concept are those that we have inherited from Descartes,
and they are clarity and distinctness.
So when I use the concepts such as Lief, for example, we have a fairly clear image in our minds what that is referring to.
We know that there are many different kinds of leads, but we have a fairly distinct and clear notion about what that concept refers to.
Similarly, when I use a concept like causality, even though that is an abstract concept,
which is which does not coincide with any particular empirical object,
when I use that concept, we are also fairly familiar with the notion that there are certain events which lead to certain other events.
X leads to Y. So even when we come to abstract concepts, we generally have a fairly clear and distinct idea about how they work.
Now the history of Concepts examines how such concepts change over time by taking into account alterations in the things to which they refer.
And my claim today is that the unconscious does not and cannot really conform to this mode of doing the history of concepts.
Why is that the case? Well, if the worse criteria for concern for conceptual status have traditionally been those of clarity and distinctness,
then the unconscious is a special case precisely because,
at least since blindness, it has been described as referring to those mental contents that fail to achieve clarity and distinctness.
In other words, the unconscious has never really been a concept.
It is much more a philosophical, whole or problem which various thinkers have tried to fill or explain.
It now seems to me that a conceptual history of the unconscious would need to be not only a conceptual history, but also a history of metaphors.
Because often the way that the unconscious has been spoken about has been in a metaphorical way, like I'm speaking here.
This is what the philosopher Hans Blumenfeld, about whom I've subsequently written a book called Metaphor oLogy.
And Metaphor oLogy was a way of doing intellectual history,
which did not always that the concepts that looked at metaphors and how they form concepts.
And I'll talk about that a little bit more later. So the implication of this would be that prior to the elaboration of clear and distinct concepts,
there is more pretty conceptual or primordial work going on, namely the work of metaphor.
And it's that possibility that I want to talk about today. My paper will be in two parts.
First of all, I'm going to talk about the unconscious as a philosophical problem that the West inherited from Descartes.
And on this whistle stop tour, it's going to be a very quick tour throughout a number of centuries.
I have three main thinkers. They are like this Fisher, who is the father of psycho physics and Freud.
In the second part of my paper, I'm going to talk about mineralogy as a way of doing intellectual history,
and I'm going to look at one of the best known metaphorical descriptions of the
unconscious in the German tradition offered by Kahn's in his anthropology.
From a pragmatic point of view, extending beyond account.
I will also address Hunt's to index project of a metaphor ology.
In his proposition Cogito sum Descartes associates four modes of thinking with consciousness,
since the subject's awareness of itself as a thinking substance underpins its ontological existence.
It is literally impossible for Descartes to conceive of modes of thought of which one would not be aware of unconscious thoughts.
These were the problems inherited by the German tradition after Descartes.
Namely, what happens within the subject when it is not conscious?
And what is the relationship between thinking, substance, culture, tongues and extended substance extends up.
The solution proposed by lightness was to was to replace dualism with monism within its moralistic system.
The individual soul or monad is an individual thing which mirrors the entire universe from its own perspective,
and which is characterised by an internal motion, a partition or striving.
The individual strivings of each monad are regulated by what?
By what life is caused, create established harmony, established by God.
So these are your monads. And loaded is always active, even even when asleep.
And the relations between monads are always underpinned by this notion of pre-established harmony,
because the individual soul or monad is always connected to the universe.
It is always subject to perceptions, even when asleep.
So we are always thinking, how is it possible for a monad to have perceptions without being aware of them?
LYDEN His answer to this particular question provided the dominant framework for theories
of the unconscious in German idealism and in general psychology of the 19th century,
all the way up to Freud. It is in many ways the inaugural moment of German psychology.
And that point number one, do you have your hands out for you?
Everybody has a hand up. Okay. Do we have any at the front of the room?
All right. Okay. Actually, I'm not [INAUDIBLE] doing. So this is the first place where the hand of.
And you'll see that for living in unconscious perceptions are particular perceptions or small perceptions
with perceptions that are not strong enough to penetrate above the threshold of conscious awareness.
Conscious thoughts are referred to as our perception because they fulfil these criteria from Descartes.
They are clear and they are distinct. So here's an example.
This is a Queen Mary example.
I'm in my office on the modelling road I'm writing.
I can hear the hum of traffic in the background. If I focus upon my writing, then the hum of the traffic kind of drops away.
But if I decide to focus upon the traffic on the road, then I hear that traffic.
So the question of the intensity of a particular perception is often the question of focus.
And of course, when we're asleep, we're not focussed at all. So this is interestingly enough, not a repression model of the unconscious.
This is very different from Freud's particular understanding of the unconscious.
It's all to do with the intensity of the perception, and if the perception crosses over a particular threshold for conscious awareness or not.
Now, to cut a very long story short,
this basic threshold model of consciousness was extremely influential within the German tradition and dominated the 19th century.
And here the key text is a text by two started off elemental to psychophysical elements of psycho physics,
and he was an experimental psychologist and pin up point number two.
He was very much concerned with presenting as a scientifically measurable and viable understanding of the unconscious.
So no longer could you talk about monads and pre-established harmony.
All this metaphysical speculation have to go and instead tell that point number two psycho physics would be
an exact theory about the functional connections or the connections of dependency between body and soul,
or in more general terms, between the corporeal and the mental, the physical and the psychical worlds.
So a natural scientific psychology would need to demonstrate that all mental
states could be understood in terms of the physical states that underlie them.
And these physical impulses should be empirically measurable.
The unconscious would therefore need to be part of a natural scientific research program in so far as those
physical or nerve impulses that do not achieve sufficient intensity would fall below the measurable threshold.
So you can see here A, B is the threshold.
These are the parts or these are the impulses that emerge above the threshold.
And this material here amounts only to a kind of negative reading.
You're not this is not a positive result, as it were.
It's only these peaks here that achieve the level of consciousness or of going above the threshold.
Now, this diagram or this way of thinking about the unconscious came to dominate all the ways of thinking about it.
This is Freud's photo topic, or the second topographic model for late Freud's second model of the unconscious.
You can see here that he retains the threshold. It's here.
Here we have the escalated, as he calls it. We have the unconscious here.
This material here is being fed, linked or repressed.
Here we have the pretty conscious. The conscious.
Then we have the Q that is here, or the superego, which is unique in its capability to spend both the unconscious and the conscious.
And in the early Freud,
there is much confidence that those elements of the psychical system that lie beneath this this threshold could be made knowable,
hand out point number three. This is the very famous project for Scientific Psychology of 1895, which sounds very much like fictional.
He says that this project will, quote, furnish us with a psychology.
Finish us with this psychology, which will be a natural science.
Its aim is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of.
Of all material particles. All very ambitious, as in the case of Fishman.
It is assumed that even if the particles of which Freud speaks are not directly visible,
they nonetheless exist so that the unconscious expressed in the form of a substantive,
refers to a real place, a location in the mind that can be mapped, hand out point in the form 420 years later.
Freud has become much less confident about this, right?
He says in this particular essay on instincts,
and that is that youths that instincts can be known only by their aims and not in relation to their purported chemical or mechanical origins.
Right. So the whole through the kind of retreating away from this notion that we could specify material
particles or chemical impulses or mechanical processes that would be associated with the unconscious.
So in other words, this map of the line is still being used,
but it is now conceded that there are areas on this map which are unknown and which may remain unknowable,
or to quote that great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, they might be known unknowns.
Right. So we know that they're there, but we don't know much about them.
Right. So let me summarise what I have established so far.
I began by saying that the function of a concept according to the Cartesian criteria
would be that of referring to objects or phenomena that are clear and distinct.
A conceptual history of the unconscious would therefore need to be based upon the assumption
that the term the unconscious refers to something objectively existent in the real world.
Yet so far, our investigations have shown that this is very far from being the case.
Likeness. Unconscious perceptions are simply those that remain below the threshold of consciousness.
Similarly in fish, they are impulses that are insufficiently powerful to penetrate above the threshold of
awareness and which therefore fall below that particular threshold of measure ability.
And in Freud, the unconscious is a known unknown, the existence of which can only be inferred rather than directly demonstrated.
So if the concept of the unconscious cannot refer to any stable class of objects or to any directly observable range of phenomena,
then maybe a conceptual history of the unconscious will only be partially successful
in helping us to understand how this term is functioning in our tradition.
Alright, now I'm going to talk about metaphors now.
Well, having read his impulse conceptual history, let us now consider how the unconscious might be more of a metaphor than it is a concept.
Hunter Blue. My dad wrote a book in 1960 called Paradigms for a Metaphor oLogy.
He was the one that was involved with a group that worked on the history of concepts.
And he proposed that if you focus only on the conceptual level,
then what you leave out is the pretty conceptual work that gets done before a conceptual system even exists.
Right. So he's interested in a more primordial, if you like, German philosophers of the mid 20th century, loved primordial things.
He was concerned with a more primordial approach to the to the idea of how to research conceptual history.
His main claim is that metaphors precede concepts and in fact, make conceptual systems possible.
So in Bloomberg's view, the more primordial approach to intellectual history would be to see what the
background metaphors are that make philosophical concepts possible in the first place.
And metaphor ology is an anthropological theory based upon the idea that humans require
a basic level of orientation in order to establish a conceptual system at all.
And this is done by way of what Bloomberg refers to as absolute metaphors.
This is hand out point number five absolute metaphors.
Answer the supposedly naive in principle, unanswerable questions whose relevance lies simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside.
Since we do not pose them ourselves, but find them already posed in the ground of our existence,
no examples and absolute metaphors would be ones like the world as a machine or a clock.
So mechanistic philosophers like Descartes and Newton often use this particular idea to describe how the world fits together as an overall thing.
And Bloomberg's point is that you can never experience the whole world, right?
It's impossible to do that.
But you have to have an overall picture of what the whole world is in order to have a functioning conceptual system through which to understand it.
So in order to have an overall orientation, you need an overall world picture.
Now, the problem is that absolute metaphors cannot be cashed out conceptually because they do not refer to any specific empirical thing.
Rather, they make possible a very general sense of orientation and metaphors for the unconscious also abound,
and they also tend to be very topographic, as in this very well-known example from Karnes.
And when reading this passage, I like to show this. This is a map of the United States.
It's not particularly relevant to what Kansas saying, but you'll see what I mean when I am reading this quote.
This is coming from the anthropology, the field of sensuous intuitions and sensations of which we are not conscious,
even though we can undoubtedly conclude that we have them.
That is obscure representations is a makes clear representations, on the other hand,
contain only infinitely few points of this field which lie open to consciousness so that,
as it were, only a few places on the vast map of our minds are illuminated.
Right. So everything that is black here is unconscious. There's few points.
I would probably say fewer than those are those which we are aware of.
And here we see that card is actually using the language of Descartes and lightness,
obscure or in in in the German don't call dark representations are simply not clear enough to be regarded as conscious representations.
And this is one of the examples that he uses.
If I see a person or what I think is a person, maybe 200 metres away on a meadow, and I think that it's a human being,
but I'm not close enough to them to distinguish different parts of their body, so I can't make that judgement.
Then that full count is an unconscious representation because there's no clarity and distinctness to that particular mode of perception.
Only when I get closer. Am I able to actually see the different features and make a clear judgement that this is actually a human being.
Right. So you can see again, that count is using this Descartes system, which is has nothing to do with Freud.
The unconscious is not does not have anything to do with repression or guilt or.
Or any of those things. It's purely deciding how clear and distinct a certain mode of perception is.
The more general problem, though,
faced by Karl Rove and the reason why he regarded the map of the mind as overwhelmingly shrouded in darkness is that for current,
our awareness of ourselves is also at bottom obscure counts, famous pink or the thinker.
The ground of our subjectivity, the place where everything works and is put together with something that he
thought is only available to us at the level of intuition and not conceptual.
Okay. So again, can't is struggling to understand what is going on within human subjectivity.
Okay, what's the point? Why is it important to think of the unconscious as a metaphor instead of a concept?
Well, it has implications, not so much for what Andrew's doing,
but certainly for the types of epistemological claims that were made about the unconscious bias,
psychoanalysis, the traditional criteria for concepts, those of clarity and stiffness function according to a corresponding theory of truth.
For a concept to work. According to this theory, it must correspond in some way to the objects to which it refers.
Now, this cannot be the case with respect to the unconscious, because the unconscious is not an object.
Or if the unconscious is a concept, then it is a concept which creates its own object rather than referring to a pre-existing object.
So just think about that. Is it possible for a concept to create an object to which it prefers?
This is the way that doing that puts it in a book entitled The Theory of Non Conceptual.
This is point number seven on your handout concepts to not only refer to objects.
Rather they also constitute objects. So it is with the concept of the unconscious.
Strictly speaking,
the concept of the unconscious is a procedural rule which specifies how one should react when confronted by a particular form of consciousness.
The unconscious is an auxiliary concept, a health of life in Germany, a helping concept used for specific technical operations.
It indicates the totality of consciousness which no memory or or expectation and no form of self consciousness can verify.
So for blooming back the unconscious borders upon myth and this is in no way pejorative when he says this,
it borders upon myth upon the act of naming those particular aspects of our experience that we cannot control,
but which we imagine influence our lives. Presented with particular contents of consciousness, like dreams, for example,
we surmise that they are attributable to the operations of the unconscious.
To have an unconscious is thus to have a particular view of one's own subjectivity.
To have a narrative about oneself which cannot be positively verified or refuted.
Now, seen in this light, the question about whether one has an unconscious or not is not really a useful question,
because it could not be answered, but maybe it can be answered in the way that Andrew is shown today.
Certainly at Freud's time, it it couldn't be.
The question must rather be, is it helpful for me to think that I have an unconscious or put more generally?
Does psychoanalysis work? This is, by the way, why Martin and I called a book Thinking the Unconscious.
Its main precursor was this study by Ellenberger, the discovery of the unconscious, published in 1970 and the very title of this book,
The Discovery of the Unconscious presuppose that the unconscious is a thing in the world which you can discover by Munson's view.
And my view was much more that this type of realism about the unconscious is a little bit naive
because we have to see the extent to which ideas about the unconscious actually created the object,
the unconscious mind, and certainly the way that that Andrew has talked about the unconscious today.
This is a very British way of talking about it.
If you look at the history of the unconscious, the Germans tended to want to maintain that there was the unconscious, this place or territory.
British thinkers tended more to say there are unconscious phenomena without
necessarily attributing them to a place or a region or a particular topography.
So this was the reason why we called our book Thinking the Unconscious,
but because we chose to leave open the question as to as to whether the unconscious as a thing exists and therefore,
whether it can be discovered as a thing at all. Thank you very much.