1 00:00:03,250 --> 00:00:10,530 Well, welcome to the profound health conscious mini series of the year. 2 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:13,410 This is our second year and it's great to see you all. 3 00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:21,810 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. 4 00:00:22,110 --> 00:00:28,920 And here we are, Dr. Simon Katz, who is with me and at the end, this pro organiser. 5 00:00:29,670 --> 00:00:39,450 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. 6 00:00:40,200 --> 00:00:45,900 But this year we mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's essay on the unconscious. 7 00:00:46,290 --> 00:00:53,270 I'm speaking on this topic of the unconscious. We have cognitive neuroscientist because as you may recall, 8 00:00:53,320 --> 00:01:02,310 scholar Dr. Andrew Nichols cancer and Remains has been in search of the human memory Manchester since 1977. 9 00:01:02,730 --> 00:01:12,540 He works with amnesic patients and through lesion studies and for my research has illuminated the neural bases of humanity. 10 00:01:13,410 --> 00:01:17,879 Dr. Nichols is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture 11 00:01:17,880 --> 00:01:23,370 at Queen Mary London and its EDS thinking in the unconscious 19th century. 12 00:01:23,370 --> 00:01:26,730 So to have here which is a terrific, terrific book. 13 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:31,200 If you're interested in the whole histories and theories of the development of the unconscious, 14 00:01:31,470 --> 00:01:37,790 and they'll be discussing the unconscious both as a scientific concept and as a metaphor today. 15 00:01:37,980 --> 00:01:45,080 So please help me welcome, professor. Thanks very much. 16 00:01:46,100 --> 00:01:56,180 What I'm going to do is talk about the neural basis of unconscious memory and the relationship between unconscious memory and conscious memory. 17 00:01:58,790 --> 00:02:08,780 When we recall and recognise fast and personal events, natural psychologists as semantic and episodic memory. 18 00:02:09,590 --> 00:02:20,210 A person is not going to be aware of what is being recalled or recognised, but also that memory of something is occurring. 19 00:02:20,240 --> 00:02:27,350 They're aware of that as well. Now, even without the classic kind of awareness, 20 00:02:27,650 --> 00:02:36,200 previous encounters with stimuli can change the way we behave towards those stimuli when their next encounter. 21 00:02:37,280 --> 00:02:40,820 This is the kind of unconscious memory known as priming. 22 00:02:41,750 --> 00:02:46,200 It's not just the behaviour that can be changed when the stimulus is seen again. 23 00:02:46,220 --> 00:02:50,800 It's cognition can be influenced and also feeling emotional. 24 00:02:54,410 --> 00:03:02,450 In addition to finding other sorts of unconscious memory into it known to exist. 25 00:03:02,750 --> 00:03:09,980 And this has been believed and this has come really known as the standard view for the last 30 or 40 years, 26 00:03:10,970 --> 00:03:23,410 so that our kinds of unconscious memory, other than priming and these include habits, skills, and these can affect cognition directly. 27 00:03:23,420 --> 00:03:31,040 You can develop a habit of attending to certain things when you're acute in particular, and not be aware of this at all. 28 00:03:32,600 --> 00:03:38,780 And with skills they can be not just motor skills like learning to drive a bike, 29 00:03:38,780 --> 00:03:43,400 but they can be perceptual skills, like learning to read automatically and fast, 30 00:03:44,600 --> 00:03:51,050 but also cognitive skills so that you feel you can intuitively solve things but not be quite aware how you're doing it. 31 00:03:52,580 --> 00:04:01,489 And there are other kinds of unconscious memory as well, simple forms of conditioning as well as sensory learning. 32 00:04:01,490 --> 00:04:07,549 That is to say an example would be if you perceive two very similar length lines, 33 00:04:07,550 --> 00:04:14,150 you can get very good at judging, which is the longer, whereas previously you might have practically a chance. 34 00:04:14,480 --> 00:04:23,030 You learn this and it's automatic and it's unconscious. And another example, habituation, when a stimulus is repeatedly presented, 35 00:04:23,030 --> 00:04:28,160 may be quite big gaps between presentations, even if you're not attending to it. 36 00:04:28,190 --> 00:04:31,940 After a while, you cease to not just as a tool. 37 00:04:35,470 --> 00:04:48,850 Now these distinctions between long term memory are described in this diagram that really comes from that response group from many years ago. 38 00:04:48,850 --> 00:04:53,260 This has been around for 30 years at least. This diagram illustrates what I've just said. 39 00:04:53,950 --> 00:04:58,899 So long term memory, that is to say memory, which you might well think of as long term, 40 00:04:58,900 --> 00:05:05,830 but it's memory after at least a few seconds when you've been distracted from the thing that you've just been encountering, 41 00:05:06,660 --> 00:05:12,010 and that's referred to as long term memory, that's declarative memory, which is the conscious form of memory. 42 00:05:12,010 --> 00:05:16,060 When you are recalling and recognising and know that you're remembering, 43 00:05:16,720 --> 00:05:23,890 which includes memory for personal events, episodic memory and memory for any kind of fact. 44 00:05:24,250 --> 00:05:31,899 But on the other side, does this these non declarative kinds of memory, which comprise things like skills, 45 00:05:31,900 --> 00:05:35,380 conditioning and priming and other things as well, which in of illustrated here. 46 00:05:35,830 --> 00:05:46,959 But the bottom part of the figure actually indicates the regions of the brain which when damaged selectively, in fact these kinds of memories. 47 00:05:46,960 --> 00:05:51,010 So declarative memory is particularly affected. 48 00:05:52,180 --> 00:05:56,649 That's the conscious kind of memory by damage to the medial temporal lobes. 49 00:05:56,650 --> 00:05:58,150 I'll show you where they are in the second. 50 00:05:59,650 --> 00:06:09,200 But if you look at the unconscious kinds of memory, different areas of brain damage, I'm just very quickly covering this up. 51 00:06:09,310 --> 00:06:13,330 Produce impairments selectively in these kinds of memory. 52 00:06:15,240 --> 00:06:21,000 So conscious and unconscious memory are disrupted by different brain regions and activate. 53 00:06:21,060 --> 00:06:25,620 This is the second part and activate correspondingly different brain regions. 54 00:06:26,010 --> 00:06:36,510 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, 55 00:06:36,510 --> 00:06:42,060 which we can do indirectly by measuring blood oxygenation with an MRI scanner, 56 00:06:43,290 --> 00:06:49,980 you expect to see campus activity change in normal people, just as if that structure is damaged. 57 00:06:49,990 --> 00:06:53,670 The hippocampus, that sort of memory will go down. Conscious memory. 58 00:06:55,790 --> 00:07:04,610 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. 59 00:07:04,910 --> 00:07:08,510 Lesions of the cerebellum, which is a big structure. 60 00:07:08,630 --> 00:07:12,020 Most neurones in the brain are here at the back of the head. 61 00:07:12,260 --> 00:07:19,520 Yeah. Damage to the cerebellum disrupts what's referred to as some metric classical conditioning. 62 00:07:20,030 --> 00:07:31,490 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. 63 00:07:32,570 --> 00:07:43,350 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, 64 00:07:43,490 --> 00:07:49,640 that's simple conditioning, but it's impaired both the learning and retention of it's impaired by cerebellar damage. 65 00:07:49,970 --> 00:08:00,110 But cerebellar damage does not impair skill, memory, declarative memory priming, any other kind of unconscious memory or conscious memory. 66 00:08:01,670 --> 00:08:07,640 Medial temporal lobe damage, as I just mentioned, is known to impact conscious memory. 67 00:08:08,180 --> 00:08:13,790 It's related to a well-known syndrome called organic amnesia. 68 00:08:13,940 --> 00:08:23,000 Most famous patients who have medial temporal lobe damage as a result of surgical intervention to treat temporal lobe epilepsy was the famous patient, 69 00:08:23,270 --> 00:08:32,060 H.M. Henry Mollison, who died in 2008 after being studied for over 50 years by neuroscientists and psychologists. 70 00:08:33,050 --> 00:08:39,890 And he had a selective impairment in conscious or declarative memory. 71 00:08:41,590 --> 00:08:49,330 Now briefly lesions of the basal ganglia, which are structures important in particular kinds of movement control, 72 00:08:49,540 --> 00:08:57,429 just as the cerebellum is important for other kinds of movement control lesions of the basal ganglia in past skill, 73 00:08:57,430 --> 00:09:04,540 memory, dancing path, commentary of classical conditioning that just affect skill, memory and finally, 74 00:09:05,350 --> 00:09:15,579 lesions of the visual cortex of the back of the head that impair visual item priming. 75 00:09:15,580 --> 00:09:21,160 In other words, you present the stimulus visually and you have damage in this region. 76 00:09:22,240 --> 00:09:33,220 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. 77 00:09:34,570 --> 00:09:37,450 I'll just illustrate these structures in a little bit more detail. 78 00:09:37,450 --> 00:09:45,879 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, 79 00:09:45,880 --> 00:09:53,470 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. 80 00:09:54,310 --> 00:10:03,700 And it links to a fibre tract here of white matter called the full neck switched projects to the anterior thalamus 81 00:10:03,700 --> 00:10:10,780 here and further down in the brain at the base of the forebrain to a structure called the memory bodies. 82 00:10:11,230 --> 00:10:22,000 They're part of the hippocampal declarative memory system or circuit damage to any of them impairs conscious memory selectively. 83 00:10:22,120 --> 00:10:28,480 So the Standard View says, But I want you to note that underneath the hippocampus here, 84 00:10:28,540 --> 00:10:32,169 there's another area which is actually grey matter, but it's pictured here. 85 00:10:32,170 --> 00:10:36,399 I don't I never know. My colour knowledge is terrible. What would you describe that is vaguely yellow. 86 00:10:36,400 --> 00:10:42,400 That that colour, this region here, that's the near quarter neocortex. 87 00:10:42,400 --> 00:10:48,070 This is neocortex as well, but this is neocortex and I'll show that again in this slide, 88 00:10:48,670 --> 00:10:56,229 this time you're seeing a scan, something like a scan from an MRI machine cut through the brain like this. 89 00:10:56,230 --> 00:11:07,720 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. 90 00:11:07,930 --> 00:11:11,080 So here in blue, you see the hippocampus. 91 00:11:11,560 --> 00:11:18,370 And these underneath it are the neocortical parts of the medial temporal lobes. 92 00:11:18,760 --> 00:11:25,440 So in particular, I want you to note, I always get this machine misbehaving. 93 00:11:25,540 --> 00:11:36,010 There it is, that region point of view, that region is the brain, the cortex, and this region is the part hippocampal cortex. 94 00:11:36,340 --> 00:11:44,650 Often, as in the case of H.M., the surgeon damaged all these regions and got a very severe will down counties here. 95 00:11:47,660 --> 00:11:55,670 Now, the standard view in this view, which is developed over the last 30, 40 years, says particular things, 96 00:11:55,670 --> 00:12:00,799 particularly about habits and skills as well as other forms of unconscious memory. 97 00:12:00,800 --> 00:12:05,180 And this is the basis really of saying these are unconscious forms of memory. 98 00:12:05,600 --> 00:12:11,420 Talk about priming, particularly in more detail. 99 00:12:12,230 --> 00:12:16,370 Habits and skills are learned normally by amnesic. 100 00:12:16,370 --> 00:12:24,349 So as I've already implied, they're not impaired learning these skills under most circumstances at all in the same way. 101 00:12:24,350 --> 00:12:34,100 But they are normally, in general, according to the standard view, at learning any kind of unconscious memory and in healthy people, 102 00:12:34,100 --> 00:12:41,989 performance is interfered with, not facilitated by trying to recall or think about what to do next. 103 00:12:41,990 --> 00:12:46,280 There are lots of stories about this how if you have a fairly automatic habit or skill, 104 00:12:46,820 --> 00:12:52,250 if you try and think about what you should be doing next, it actually does interfere with what you are doing. 105 00:12:52,490 --> 00:13:03,470 This indicates to some degree that habits and skills are independent of each other and are learned independently of skill, 106 00:13:03,740 --> 00:13:06,980 of declarative memory, the conscious kind of memory. 107 00:13:07,430 --> 00:13:10,850 So a lot of this stuff happens automatically without thinking about it. 108 00:13:12,780 --> 00:13:19,470 However, even though it may happen automatically and perhaps relatively unconscious, all these kinds of memories, 109 00:13:19,560 --> 00:13:32,400 habits and skills, influence, often without being aware of it, what we think and when we think it, as well as what we do. 110 00:13:32,680 --> 00:13:41,010 So our consciousness is constantly being influenced by these different kinds of unconscious memory. 111 00:13:44,510 --> 00:13:53,600 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, 112 00:13:53,870 --> 00:13:57,560 and it's a very selective kind of unconscious memory. 113 00:13:59,030 --> 00:14:02,480 So. Sorry. It's failed. 114 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:06,430 I'm picking up. It's already passed. It wouldn't be accepted. Okay. 115 00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:17,290 So stimuli can be either items like a word or a face for an object picture or associations between light. 116 00:14:17,290 --> 00:14:23,829 And so it might be an association between two words or to automatically stimulate when they present. 117 00:14:23,830 --> 00:14:30,340 It could be novel. In other words, you haven't encountered them before, or they can have been previously not. 118 00:14:30,340 --> 00:14:35,230 You've had previous exposure to those, and it might be a familiar face or face you've never seen before. 119 00:14:37,270 --> 00:14:44,800 Secondly, stimuli can be studied and tested with or without awareness. 120 00:14:45,760 --> 00:14:53,230 The experiments that I'm going to describe as the thing subjects are not aware of the stimuli at all. 121 00:14:53,650 --> 00:14:56,130 So when they first present it, they're not aware of them. 122 00:14:56,170 --> 00:15:03,010 They couldn't say what they've been shown and that test, they're not showing them in a way they're conscious of. 123 00:15:03,220 --> 00:15:11,830 Nevertheless, that behaviour is influenced. However, you can have awareness for the stimuli and still get unconscious memory priming. 124 00:15:12,800 --> 00:15:21,720 Okay. So the first kind is where your aware stimuli study and test is called separate move about threshold, 125 00:15:21,750 --> 00:15:30,550 be aware memory and the other sort where you're never aware of the stimuli or shown either a study or a test. 126 00:15:31,240 --> 00:15:37,570 It's called subliminal. That's just a shorthand. Okay, now with priming that test, 127 00:15:38,290 --> 00:15:49,359 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 128 00:15:49,360 --> 00:15:58,540 said the evidence goes of recall and recognition and it can include this change in behaviour can include faster making of judgements. 129 00:15:58,540 --> 00:16:05,920 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, 130 00:16:07,030 --> 00:16:14,830 or if the stimulus is shown only briefly, you may more accurately judge what you've just been shown. 131 00:16:17,050 --> 00:16:26,590 Or again, when you're showing it again, even actually, sometimes if you weren't aware of it at all, you may prefer it. 132 00:16:27,880 --> 00:16:33,130 The effect of seeing it, even though you're not aware of this, is to change your preference. 133 00:16:33,130 --> 00:16:37,120 You like it more, or sometimes under some circumstances you like it less. 134 00:16:37,120 --> 00:16:42,100 But this is an influence of the previous exposure of which you are not aware. 135 00:16:44,530 --> 00:16:47,890 Okay. And there are other effects as well which are quite interesting. 136 00:16:48,760 --> 00:16:56,570 Duration is mentioned that you can test with these thing and you can present them very briefly, but for make variable intervals of time, 137 00:16:56,590 --> 00:17:03,129 fractions of a second I'm talking about and the feeling that you have and it affects your judgements is that the stimulus, 138 00:17:03,130 --> 00:17:06,430 if it's been shown before, is on the screen for longer. 139 00:17:06,550 --> 00:17:12,310 Not to do with how long it's on the screen. I think I've actually described that the wrong way around. 140 00:17:12,310 --> 00:17:20,320 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. 141 00:17:21,430 --> 00:17:25,690 So what would the effect on your your judgement of how long it's on the screen be? 142 00:17:26,170 --> 00:17:29,500 It feels as if it's been on the screen longer. So I was right first time. 143 00:17:29,740 --> 00:17:34,630 It feels as if it's on the screen already. It's an illusion, but it's a compelling illusion. 144 00:17:34,810 --> 00:17:38,230 And another compelling illusion is the second thing about background noise. 145 00:17:38,470 --> 00:17:47,740 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. 146 00:17:47,740 --> 00:17:51,490 So you hear a sentence and in the background your hands like that. 147 00:17:52,420 --> 00:18:00,370 The background noise varies in intensity because the second time you hear the sentence, it's easier to process. 148 00:18:00,370 --> 00:18:04,090 Even though you don't recognise it, you don't think you've ever seen it before. 149 00:18:04,540 --> 00:18:12,280 You process faster and the background noise sounds to you subjectively quieter. 150 00:18:12,550 --> 00:18:20,530 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. 151 00:18:20,530 --> 00:18:24,310 You can't help but feel it's quieter. 152 00:18:24,760 --> 00:18:28,690 The background noise as a result of having been shouting the sentence up to a week before. 153 00:18:28,870 --> 00:18:33,870 So that's not sure after you've lost quite a long time. Okay. 154 00:18:34,830 --> 00:18:38,670 So unconscious memory that is in third. 155 00:18:38,760 --> 00:18:43,589 And this is a very important point. We don't know it directly because of course it's unconscious, 156 00:18:43,590 --> 00:18:54,690 but it's inferred from changes in the way we behave or our cognition changes or in our emotional behaviour or preferences. 157 00:18:55,320 --> 00:19:02,610 These things change and the only explanation is it's an unconscious form of memory and other influences of which where I'm unconscious. 158 00:19:03,670 --> 00:19:12,840 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, 159 00:19:13,080 --> 00:19:17,460 there's no impairment of these sorts of memory, these kinds of priming. 160 00:19:18,030 --> 00:19:23,130 They're not affected by medial temporal lobe damage. There's been a lot of change back here in the last ten years. 161 00:19:23,340 --> 00:19:25,740 Okay. So I'll just illustrate this with two studies. 162 00:19:27,810 --> 00:19:37,560 So the evidence that amnesic may be impaired priming of novel items and novel associations is actually quite strong. 163 00:19:37,890 --> 00:19:42,030 So if you have damage to the structures provided the information is novel, 164 00:19:42,030 --> 00:19:48,120 particularly evidence is sensitive information to items associated together at the study time. 165 00:19:49,020 --> 00:19:52,260 Medial temporal lobe damage appears to impact memory. 166 00:19:52,530 --> 00:19:58,860 It also, of course, impairs conscious memory for associations, recognition and record of association. 167 00:19:59,400 --> 00:20:10,260 My research student, Carlos Gomez, and I used unrelated pairs of object pictures about which people make relative size judgements. 168 00:20:10,470 --> 00:20:15,330 So I've got some examples here. 169 00:20:15,840 --> 00:20:22,829 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. 170 00:20:22,830 --> 00:20:29,070 It's a relative size up and obviously you say train and here can be jam press on two and 171 00:20:29,460 --> 00:20:39,480 here pineapple and 90 but hopefully press on the pineapple and test you repeat that action. 172 00:20:40,050 --> 00:20:49,710 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. 173 00:20:49,890 --> 00:21:01,170 So you can see here you will be shown train in which you store a few minutes before and 174 00:21:01,470 --> 00:21:05,970 you have to do the same judgement which is better train your quicker at doing that. 175 00:21:06,510 --> 00:21:13,190 Now these you seen cabbage in baby bird and you seen pineapple on that, but you didn't see them together. 176 00:21:13,200 --> 00:21:19,140 You saw cabbage with ant and pineapple with lady, but they'd been recombined. 177 00:21:19,320 --> 00:21:22,800 What that means is you would have been exposed to the. 178 00:21:22,920 --> 00:21:25,530 The stimuli, the objects, but not together. 179 00:21:26,070 --> 00:21:35,160 So the difference between the recombined lot and the intact lot is not that you've got memory for the items that's matched. 180 00:21:35,580 --> 00:21:44,570 The only difference is that the intact ones have the additional associative memory for it, but they didn't pass. 181 00:21:45,030 --> 00:21:48,540 And finally, stapler dog that wasn't shown in the study. 182 00:21:48,540 --> 00:21:53,280 So that new items. So the items are new and the association is new. 183 00:21:53,520 --> 00:22:00,270 And the difference between the recombined and the new is simply the item memory, which is unconscious. 184 00:22:01,380 --> 00:22:07,470 So if you compare recombined and intact, you're looking at associative memory. 185 00:22:07,710 --> 00:22:12,600 If you compare recombined to new, you're looking at item memory for these objects. 186 00:22:13,920 --> 00:22:15,870 I've got a picture of what these are. 187 00:22:16,170 --> 00:22:25,560 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, 188 00:22:25,590 --> 00:22:31,110 because we wanted to see whether the evidence that damaging the medial temporal lobes in pairs, 189 00:22:31,110 --> 00:22:36,680 these kinds of memory was consistent with what we'd see in brain imaging. 190 00:22:36,690 --> 00:22:44,820 What we'd expect to see is that the same brain regions change activity where damage impairs performance in patients. 191 00:22:45,690 --> 00:22:53,310 So that's the train, elephant, cabbage and pineapple, etc., etc. 192 00:22:53,490 --> 00:22:57,059 So you're seeing now that's what people actually saw. They didn't see words. 193 00:22:57,060 --> 00:23:05,670 They saw the optic pictures. And what we got was that associative priming occurred. 194 00:23:06,630 --> 00:23:15,630 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. 195 00:23:15,900 --> 00:23:20,250 So there's evidence, behavioural evidence, that's the point. 196 00:23:20,250 --> 00:23:24,150 Behavioural evidence for both associative and item priming. 197 00:23:25,110 --> 00:23:31,710 Now when we look at the brain and we particularly look at the hippocampus because that's the big issue, particularly with us. 198 00:23:31,760 --> 00:23:43,850 Associations. What we see is that the hippocampus with associative priming make this judgement faster, reduces in activity. 199 00:23:43,850 --> 00:23:53,240 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. 200 00:23:54,050 --> 00:24:00,350 They were matched in in difficulty. We actually did a complex counterbalancing procedure, but that's the key point. 201 00:24:01,370 --> 00:24:04,639 If you look at recognition, that's air. 202 00:24:04,640 --> 00:24:16,520 So this here just a p, the shorthand is the associative priming and you get a reduction in hippocampal activity, 203 00:24:16,520 --> 00:24:20,569 but with recognition you get an increase. So the effects go in opposite ways. 204 00:24:20,570 --> 00:24:27,290 The hippocampus isn't working apparently in quite the same way, but it's the same region of the hippocampus. 205 00:24:27,290 --> 00:24:34,130 They perfectly overlap, so it's very likely it's the same neurones which when you prime seem to decrease in activity, 206 00:24:34,340 --> 00:24:38,810 but when for associations you have a recognition they increase in activity. 207 00:24:40,070 --> 00:24:48,470 If you look at the neocortical structures, which I showed you a picture of the Perry Rhino and the parrot hippocampal cortices, 208 00:24:48,920 --> 00:24:54,050 they don't change activity at all either for associative priming or associative recognition. 209 00:24:54,560 --> 00:24:59,930 And I'll only briefly mention this, but as I said, we looked at object picture, 210 00:25:00,580 --> 00:25:08,149 individual item priming, and with that, neither for recognition nor for item priming. 211 00:25:08,150 --> 00:25:12,170 The single item was not the association. There was no change in hippocampal activity. 212 00:25:12,410 --> 00:25:15,690 But interestingly, that was a change I can't show. 213 00:25:15,690 --> 00:25:25,010 It's our point that in the paradigm and power of hippocampal cortices, there's a reduction in activity. 214 00:25:25,340 --> 00:25:30,380 So that's referred to by psychologists. There's a double dissociation between the two. 215 00:25:31,160 --> 00:25:37,400 Associative priming reduces activity in the hippocampus, not the now cortical structures. 216 00:25:38,120 --> 00:25:47,240 Item priming for the individual pictures doesn't affect the hippocampus, but does affect produces activity in the cortex. 217 00:25:48,410 --> 00:25:51,440 So how do we interpret this associative priming? 218 00:25:51,440 --> 00:25:57,590 Obviously deactivates the same hippocampal region that associative recognition activates, 219 00:25:58,010 --> 00:26:09,830 and this suggests that this region of the hippocampus is involved in storing and associative representation of this object. 220 00:26:12,170 --> 00:26:25,040 But the unconscious memory may retrieve this representation in a different way from what happens with conscious memory, that is to say, recognition. 221 00:26:26,390 --> 00:26:32,060 And the reason that said is that the activity of the neurones goes in opposite directions. 222 00:26:32,060 --> 00:26:40,580 With priming, it seems to reduce and with recognition it seems to increase unconscious memory, it reduces punctures, it increase it. 223 00:26:40,880 --> 00:26:42,230 We don't actually know why. 224 00:26:42,230 --> 00:26:52,340 And it's controversial, but it's possible that the retrieval processes are different for unconscious stimulus memory and conscious stimulus memory. 225 00:26:53,810 --> 00:27:05,690 Okay, now the final example comes from the group of Catarina Hanke working in Switzerland with quite a large group of associates, 226 00:27:06,320 --> 00:27:11,870 and they've been looking at memory, false stimuli, which is completely unconscious. 227 00:27:11,870 --> 00:27:14,900 You're never aware, having seen this data, how do they do this? 228 00:27:15,530 --> 00:27:19,460 They present usually words, but sometimes they share in faces or objects. 229 00:27:19,760 --> 00:27:24,020 You present them very briefly for about 17 milliseconds. 230 00:27:24,020 --> 00:27:29,160 You can do it multiple times, but you precede the presentation of the target. 231 00:27:29,210 --> 00:27:32,240 Similarly with what's called a visual mask. 232 00:27:32,240 --> 00:27:40,520 It's a passive mask which is shown immediately before you present the target and immediately afterwards the result is, 233 00:27:40,520 --> 00:27:43,010 and this is demonstrated in their experiments, 234 00:27:43,370 --> 00:27:48,920 you're not aware that there's a stimulus in the middle of the target stimulus, which would be these work parts. 235 00:27:49,670 --> 00:27:53,190 You're not aware of seeing them at all. You can't identify them consciously. 236 00:27:53,210 --> 00:27:58,820 You're completely unconscious. That's a study later test. 237 00:27:59,690 --> 00:28:10,250 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. 238 00:28:10,550 --> 00:28:14,360 So although you see those items, they are not the same items. 239 00:28:14,660 --> 00:28:25,580 However, what happens is, although you are never aware of the items, you show a change judgement for the related associations. 240 00:28:25,610 --> 00:28:31,610 Now I'm going to illustrate that with one of their experiments in which they did both. 241 00:28:31,690 --> 00:28:34,540 Functional and structural as well as brain imaging. 242 00:28:34,900 --> 00:28:43,450 But also they looked at patients with damage to the hippocampal system, the hippocampus and structures that it relates to very closely. 243 00:28:44,050 --> 00:28:47,620 And this is important because it combines both the approaches that I've described. 244 00:28:48,580 --> 00:28:55,390 Brain lesions in a particular site should impair a particular kind of memory if they're involved with it. 245 00:28:56,020 --> 00:29:01,510 But also when you show that particular kind of memory, the brain region should change activity. 246 00:29:01,570 --> 00:29:04,840 And that's what they've shown in this experiment I'm going to describe. 247 00:29:05,350 --> 00:29:12,490 So it's slightly complicated to describe. So I'm probably overrunning as again, I'll be as creative as I can have this. 248 00:29:13,100 --> 00:29:21,400 Okay, so study what they did was show pairs of items, words which came from different categories. 249 00:29:21,520 --> 00:29:30,880 So there were string instruments here you see them citrus fruits, you see them and vehicles and a lot of other categories as well. 250 00:29:31,450 --> 00:29:33,880 They never had more than a few stimuli in each category. 251 00:29:34,060 --> 00:29:41,860 Now if you take the first example of instruments, violin and the first example of citrus fruits. 252 00:29:41,860 --> 00:29:47,259 LEMON, That's that would be typical of what they did. 253 00:29:47,260 --> 00:29:52,930 Then you might take the first example of vehicles and with the first example of a new category, which I haven't shown. 254 00:29:53,200 --> 00:29:58,090 So that's how they presented their study test. 255 00:29:58,180 --> 00:30:01,600 They didn't show violin and lemon again. 256 00:30:01,840 --> 00:30:08,620 What did they show? They showed actually, it's the second item from each of those categories. 257 00:30:08,620 --> 00:30:14,530 They showed cello and Mandarin, an instrument, a string instrument and a citrus fruit. 258 00:30:15,640 --> 00:30:25,690 They also showed harp. Now that's being presented on trunk, but that wasn't a category that had been presented. 259 00:30:25,690 --> 00:30:31,030 So Harp should have gone with a citrus fruit, but it's actually being now paired with a vehicle. 260 00:30:31,810 --> 00:30:45,940 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. 261 00:30:45,940 --> 00:30:55,179 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. 262 00:30:55,180 --> 00:31:02,710 So in order to get judgements which are roughly half the time they are related and roughly half the time they're not, 263 00:31:03,370 --> 00:31:10,630 subjects are encouraged to be very lenient in their criteria so that they make about equal numbers of judgements. 264 00:31:11,080 --> 00:31:18,100 And what happens is with related paths you're more likely to say they are semantically related. 265 00:31:18,100 --> 00:31:22,479 So cello and Mandarin, you'll be more likely to say you're semantic related. 266 00:31:22,480 --> 00:31:26,860 You're never aware of having seen violin and lemon at all. 267 00:31:28,330 --> 00:31:32,920 If they're unrelated, there's no effect on your semantic preferences whatsoever. 268 00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:38,970 They showed that, but only after the stimuli had been shown unconsciously, quite a lot of times. 269 00:31:40,240 --> 00:31:46,629 Okay, I want to mention this because this is item priming. 270 00:31:46,630 --> 00:31:51,970 Let's just concentrate on the associated with associative priming. 271 00:31:54,190 --> 00:32:00,249 What they found was they had control subjects that just healthy people and they found that they showed promise, 272 00:32:00,250 --> 00:32:05,260 but only if they were shown the stimuli paired together quite a few times, never being aware of them. 273 00:32:06,010 --> 00:32:14,020 They didn't find this in a group of 11 amnesic who had damage various degrees of severity to the hippocampal system, 274 00:32:14,110 --> 00:32:16,540 not just the hippocampus, but the structures next to. 275 00:32:17,260 --> 00:32:26,530 And they didn't show any associative priming at all, apart from three patients who had very mild hippocampal damage. 276 00:32:27,010 --> 00:32:33,280 Now, these three patients were very impaired at conscious associative memory. 277 00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:39,130 They couldn't recall or recognise associations between words that had been shown recently. 278 00:32:39,160 --> 00:32:45,130 They were very impaired of that, but they performed normally this unconscious memory task. 279 00:32:46,030 --> 00:32:50,860 Now, in addition to that, the healthy subjects showed activity, 280 00:32:50,920 --> 00:32:58,299 increased activity in the hippocampus and temporal cortex and also in a temporal cortex. 281 00:32:58,300 --> 00:33:01,750 It was a temporal cortex, semantic processing region. 282 00:33:02,290 --> 00:33:10,270 The three and Ne6, who were intact on associative priming, showed weaker activity in these regions. 283 00:33:10,390 --> 00:33:14,200 So they were showing some activity. It wasn't normal, it was reduced. 284 00:33:15,790 --> 00:33:23,020 This suggests associative priming and recognition. Both involve the hippocampus and probably in the same way. 285 00:33:24,340 --> 00:33:31,500 So this is a new suggestion now, the interpretation of sense. 286 00:33:31,550 --> 00:33:46,860 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. 287 00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:58,330 Is it shown in this study? Yeah. It's one thing I never unconsciously kind how to control this thing. 288 00:33:58,330 --> 00:34:07,000 It just doesn't behave. The point being, you don't need much hippocampus to perform the unconscious tasks. 289 00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:11,469 Normally you need a lot of hippocampus to be intact, to perform the conscious memory tasks. 290 00:34:11,470 --> 00:34:19,960 Normally, when you do the unconscious memory task, there's much less hippocampal activity than there is when you do the conscious memory task. 291 00:34:19,970 --> 00:34:24,280 So what that suggest is they can use the same region of the brain. 292 00:34:24,310 --> 00:34:27,850 This is contrary to all the stuff I told you earlier about the standard view, 293 00:34:29,230 --> 00:34:36,430 and what that suggests is that they're just a very weak form of the same sort of thing as conscious memory. 294 00:34:36,430 --> 00:34:42,550 The same regions of the brain are involved, but you need less of those brain regions to get normal working, 295 00:34:42,850 --> 00:34:47,230 and that suggests it's a continuum rather than completely different things. 296 00:34:47,650 --> 00:34:53,290 And that is very different from what a lot of people believe about these forms of memory. 297 00:34:53,920 --> 00:35:02,590 Okay. Quick conclusion that the evidence about priming is not yet universally agreed. 298 00:35:02,590 --> 00:35:10,419 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. 299 00:35:10,420 --> 00:35:17,840 That isn't universal agreement yet about the neural basis of conscious and unconscious memory and how they relate to each other. 300 00:35:18,340 --> 00:35:24,580 Secondly, this form of unconscious memory priming may be similar to conscious memory, 301 00:35:25,030 --> 00:35:30,040 but in some sense, as I've just said, it's weaker, so it might be like a continuum. 302 00:35:31,670 --> 00:35:39,580 However, I'm unconscious. Memory of all kinds may be heterogeneous and even within priming. 303 00:35:40,270 --> 00:35:48,879 The sort that I described earlier super-luminova. But threshold when you're aware of signalling may be carried out in a different way. 304 00:35:48,880 --> 00:35:55,750 So maybe it isn't just weak memory, but it is actually rather different from conscious memory. 305 00:35:55,960 --> 00:36:05,950 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. 306 00:36:05,950 --> 00:36:12,160 We are never aware of the processing that is carried out by most parts of the brain. 307 00:36:12,340 --> 00:36:21,430 Most of the time, however, this processing quite possibly works differently from conscious processing. 308 00:36:23,020 --> 00:36:27,520 Nevertheless, it must input into conscious memory. 309 00:36:27,520 --> 00:36:35,169 It influences it the whole time. So we could see conscious memory and consciousness in general. 310 00:36:35,170 --> 00:36:37,120 Perhaps like the tip of an iceberg. 311 00:36:37,690 --> 00:36:46,390 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. 312 00:36:46,600 --> 00:36:52,720 Thanks very much. Thank you very much for the invitation. 313 00:36:59,760 --> 00:37:05,190 I'm going to be doing something very different because I'm an intellectual historian and a literary scholar. 314 00:37:07,140 --> 00:37:13,920 And part of what inspired this talk was thinking about this book that someone mentioned earlier. 315 00:37:13,920 --> 00:37:16,719 This was the face of a conference that we did in 2007, 316 00:37:16,720 --> 00:37:26,080 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. 317 00:37:26,670 --> 00:37:33,510 So in a way, Andrew's talk demonstrated when you you're talking about things beneath the surface and above the surface. 318 00:37:33,510 --> 00:37:39,090 Our language we're talking about the unconscious is state remarkably similar across a number of centuries. 319 00:37:41,460 --> 00:37:46,320 I wanted to reflect on this book to begin with, which I co-edited with my sleep, Lucia, 320 00:37:47,550 --> 00:37:55,230 because some of the methodological issues that the book confronted are ones that I might handle differently now. 321 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:06,540 I had the opportunity to do so. My main claim in this short paper will be that the unconscious, whatever that is, 322 00:38:07,260 --> 00:38:14,730 is something that presents a particular problem for the standard type of conceptual history that we offered in this book. 323 00:38:14,760 --> 00:38:21,300 So this was a fairly traditional history of concepts in Germany called this philosophy shifter. 324 00:38:21,750 --> 00:38:31,950 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. 325 00:38:33,150 --> 00:38:36,060 And this is the approach that we took in this particular book. 326 00:38:36,570 --> 00:38:48,840 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, 327 00:38:49,050 --> 00:38:51,480 or to a certain class of objects. 328 00:38:52,950 --> 00:39:02,640 And the reason for that is that the enlightenment's general criteria for a functioning concept are those that we have inherited from Descartes, 329 00:39:03,240 --> 00:39:06,120 and they are clarity and distinctness. 330 00:39:06,750 --> 00:39:16,180 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. 331 00:39:16,200 --> 00:39:24,120 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. 332 00:39:24,630 --> 00:39:29,700 Similarly, when I use a concept like causality, even though that is an abstract concept, 333 00:39:29,700 --> 00:39:33,510 which is which does not coincide with any particular empirical object, 334 00:39:35,370 --> 00:39:43,769 when I use that concept, we are also fairly familiar with the notion that there are certain events which lead to certain other events. 335 00:39:43,770 --> 00:39:53,670 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. 336 00:39:57,410 --> 00:40:07,430 Now the history of Concepts examines how such concepts change over time by taking into account alterations in the things to which they refer. 337 00:40:08,390 --> 00:40:17,360 And my claim today is that the unconscious does not and cannot really conform to this mode of doing the history of concepts. 338 00:40:18,200 --> 00:40:29,690 Why is that the case? Well, if the worse criteria for concern for conceptual status have traditionally been those of clarity and distinctness, 339 00:40:30,410 --> 00:40:33,320 then the unconscious is a special case precisely because, 340 00:40:33,650 --> 00:40:42,360 at least since blindness, it has been described as referring to those mental contents that fail to achieve clarity and distinctness. 341 00:40:43,970 --> 00:40:47,510 In other words, the unconscious has never really been a concept. 342 00:40:48,050 --> 00:40:54,560 It is much more a philosophical, whole or problem which various thinkers have tried to fill or explain. 343 00:40:56,300 --> 00:41:08,810 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. 344 00:41:08,810 --> 00:41:16,730 Because often the way that the unconscious has been spoken about has been in a metaphorical way, like I'm speaking here. 345 00:41:17,390 --> 00:41:26,240 This is what the philosopher Hans Blumenfeld, about whom I've subsequently written a book called Metaphor oLogy. 346 00:41:26,810 --> 00:41:31,160 And Metaphor oLogy was a way of doing intellectual history, 347 00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:36,049 which did not always that the concepts that looked at metaphors and how they form concepts. 348 00:41:36,050 --> 00:41:45,980 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, 349 00:41:46,670 --> 00:41:53,690 there is more pretty conceptual or primordial work going on, namely the work of metaphor. 350 00:41:54,530 --> 00:41:59,060 And it's that possibility that I want to talk about today. My paper will be in two parts. 351 00:41:59,720 --> 00:42:07,190 First of all, I'm going to talk about the unconscious as a philosophical problem that the West inherited from Descartes. 352 00:42:07,850 --> 00:42:12,710 And on this whistle stop tour, it's going to be a very quick tour throughout a number of centuries. 353 00:42:13,070 --> 00:42:19,580 I have three main thinkers. They are like this Fisher, who is the father of psycho physics and Freud. 354 00:42:21,500 --> 00:42:26,510 In the second part of my paper, I'm going to talk about mineralogy as a way of doing intellectual history, 355 00:42:27,290 --> 00:42:31,459 and I'm going to look at one of the best known metaphorical descriptions of the 356 00:42:31,460 --> 00:42:36,140 unconscious in the German tradition offered by Kahn's in his anthropology. 357 00:42:36,410 --> 00:42:40,160 From a pragmatic point of view, extending beyond account. 358 00:42:40,700 --> 00:42:44,870 I will also address Hunt's to index project of a metaphor ology. 359 00:42:51,700 --> 00:42:59,830 In his proposition Cogito sum Descartes associates four modes of thinking with consciousness, 360 00:43:00,940 --> 00:43:08,170 since the subject's awareness of itself as a thinking substance underpins its ontological existence. 361 00:43:08,650 --> 00:43:16,420 It is literally impossible for Descartes to conceive of modes of thought of which one would not be aware of unconscious thoughts. 362 00:43:18,010 --> 00:43:22,810 These were the problems inherited by the German tradition after Descartes. 363 00:43:23,530 --> 00:43:27,310 Namely, what happens within the subject when it is not conscious? 364 00:43:28,120 --> 00:43:36,020 And what is the relationship between thinking, substance, culture, tongues and extended substance extends up. 365 00:43:38,020 --> 00:43:49,270 The solution proposed by lightness was to was to replace dualism with monism within its moralistic system. 366 00:43:49,870 --> 00:43:59,530 The individual soul or monad is an individual thing which mirrors the entire universe from its own perspective, 367 00:43:59,980 --> 00:44:04,750 and which is characterised by an internal motion, a partition or striving. 368 00:44:05,860 --> 00:44:09,940 The individual strivings of each monad are regulated by what? 369 00:44:10,240 --> 00:44:14,470 By what life is caused, create established harmony, established by God. 370 00:44:15,190 --> 00:44:19,960 So these are your monads. And loaded is always active, even even when asleep. 371 00:44:20,500 --> 00:44:26,230 And the relations between monads are always underpinned by this notion of pre-established harmony, 372 00:44:28,960 --> 00:44:33,700 because the individual soul or monad is always connected to the universe. 373 00:44:34,180 --> 00:44:37,840 It is always subject to perceptions, even when asleep. 374 00:44:37,900 --> 00:44:47,280 So we are always thinking, how is it possible for a monad to have perceptions without being aware of them? 375 00:44:48,610 --> 00:44:53,680 LYDEN His answer to this particular question provided the dominant framework for theories 376 00:44:53,950 --> 00:44:59,410 of the unconscious in German idealism and in general psychology of the 19th century, 377 00:44:59,740 --> 00:45:06,730 all the way up to Freud. It is in many ways the inaugural moment of German psychology. 378 00:45:07,000 --> 00:45:10,330 And that point number one, do you have your hands out for you? 379 00:45:12,250 --> 00:45:17,740 Everybody has a hand up. Okay. Do we have any at the front of the room? 380 00:45:18,250 --> 00:45:29,320 All right. Okay. Actually, I'm not [INAUDIBLE] doing. So this is the first place where the hand of. 381 00:45:33,760 --> 00:45:41,469 And you'll see that for living in unconscious perceptions are particular perceptions or small perceptions 382 00:45:41,470 --> 00:45:48,100 with perceptions that are not strong enough to penetrate above the threshold of conscious awareness. 383 00:45:49,060 --> 00:45:56,480 Conscious thoughts are referred to as our perception because they fulfil these criteria from Descartes. 384 00:45:56,950 --> 00:46:01,240 They are clear and they are distinct. So here's an example. 385 00:46:01,360 --> 00:46:05,950 This is a Queen Mary example. 386 00:46:06,220 --> 00:46:09,430 I'm in my office on the modelling road I'm writing. 387 00:46:09,940 --> 00:46:17,860 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. 388 00:46:18,400 --> 00:46:22,060 But if I decide to focus upon the traffic on the road, then I hear that traffic. 389 00:46:22,750 --> 00:46:27,760 So the question of the intensity of a particular perception is often the question of focus. 390 00:46:28,660 --> 00:46:38,709 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. 391 00:46:38,710 --> 00:46:43,030 This is very different from Freud's particular understanding of the unconscious. 392 00:46:43,030 --> 00:46:52,240 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. 393 00:46:53,740 --> 00:46:56,050 Now, to cut a very long story short, 394 00:46:56,920 --> 00:47:08,860 this basic threshold model of consciousness was extremely influential within the German tradition and dominated the 19th century. 395 00:47:09,550 --> 00:47:20,680 And here the key text is a text by two started off elemental to psychophysical elements of psycho physics, 396 00:47:21,490 --> 00:47:28,480 and he was an experimental psychologist and pin up point number two. 397 00:47:29,200 --> 00:47:37,809 He was very much concerned with presenting as a scientifically measurable and viable understanding of the unconscious. 398 00:47:37,810 --> 00:47:41,140 So no longer could you talk about monads and pre-established harmony. 399 00:47:41,500 --> 00:47:49,540 All this metaphysical speculation have to go and instead tell that point number two psycho physics would be 400 00:47:50,050 --> 00:47:56,110 an exact theory about the functional connections or the connections of dependency between body and soul, 401 00:47:56,980 --> 00:48:03,070 or in more general terms, between the corporeal and the mental, the physical and the psychical worlds. 402 00:48:04,240 --> 00:48:09,940 So a natural scientific psychology would need to demonstrate that all mental 403 00:48:09,940 --> 00:48:14,620 states could be understood in terms of the physical states that underlie them. 404 00:48:15,370 --> 00:48:18,610 And these physical impulses should be empirically measurable. 405 00:48:19,900 --> 00:48:26,770 The unconscious would therefore need to be part of a natural scientific research program in so far as those 406 00:48:26,770 --> 00:48:35,770 physical or nerve impulses that do not achieve sufficient intensity would fall below the measurable threshold. 407 00:48:36,250 --> 00:48:39,610 So you can see here A, B is the threshold. 408 00:48:40,450 --> 00:48:47,050 These are the parts or these are the impulses that emerge above the threshold. 409 00:48:47,710 --> 00:48:51,880 And this material here amounts only to a kind of negative reading. 410 00:48:51,880 --> 00:48:55,570 You're not this is not a positive result, as it were. 411 00:48:55,780 --> 00:49:02,890 It's only these peaks here that achieve the level of consciousness or of going above the threshold. 412 00:49:06,370 --> 00:49:12,700 Now, this diagram or this way of thinking about the unconscious came to dominate all the ways of thinking about it. 413 00:49:13,930 --> 00:49:20,200 This is Freud's photo topic, or the second topographic model for late Freud's second model of the unconscious. 414 00:49:20,860 --> 00:49:24,400 You can see here that he retains the threshold. It's here. 415 00:49:25,360 --> 00:49:30,370 Here we have the escalated, as he calls it. We have the unconscious here. 416 00:49:31,270 --> 00:49:34,660 This material here is being fed, linked or repressed. 417 00:49:35,560 --> 00:49:37,870 Here we have the pretty conscious. The conscious. 418 00:49:38,440 --> 00:49:46,870 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. 419 00:49:48,850 --> 00:49:50,320 And in the early Freud, 420 00:49:51,190 --> 00:49:59,590 there is much confidence that those elements of the psychical system that lie beneath this this threshold could be made knowable, 421 00:49:59,800 --> 00:50:08,200 hand out point number three. This is the very famous project for Scientific Psychology of 1895, which sounds very much like fictional. 422 00:50:09,070 --> 00:50:13,420 He says that this project will, quote, furnish us with a psychology. 423 00:50:14,110 --> 00:50:17,140 Finish us with this psychology, which will be a natural science. 424 00:50:17,770 --> 00:50:24,900 Its aim is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of. 425 00:50:25,280 --> 00:50:32,640 Of all material particles. All very ambitious, as in the case of Fishman. 426 00:50:33,490 --> 00:50:38,350 It is assumed that even if the particles of which Freud speaks are not directly visible, 427 00:50:38,950 --> 00:50:45,550 they nonetheless exist so that the unconscious expressed in the form of a substantive, 428 00:50:46,240 --> 00:50:58,030 refers to a real place, a location in the mind that can be mapped, hand out point in the form 420 years later. 429 00:50:58,630 --> 00:51:01,910 Freud has become much less confident about this, right? 430 00:51:02,920 --> 00:51:06,340 He says in this particular essay on instincts, 431 00:51:06,670 --> 00:51:20,110 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. 432 00:51:20,360 --> 00:51:26,499 Right. So the whole through the kind of retreating away from this notion that we could specify material 433 00:51:26,500 --> 00:51:33,280 particles or chemical impulses or mechanical processes that would be associated with the unconscious. 434 00:51:36,170 --> 00:51:38,959 So in other words, this map of the line is still being used, 435 00:51:38,960 --> 00:51:47,300 but it is now conceded that there are areas on this map which are unknown and which may remain unknowable, 436 00:51:48,200 --> 00:51:54,390 or to quote that great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, they might be known unknowns. 437 00:51:54,460 --> 00:51:58,070 Right. So we know that they're there, but we don't know much about them. 438 00:51:58,360 --> 00:52:02,510 Right. So let me summarise what I have established so far. 439 00:52:03,590 --> 00:52:08,660 I began by saying that the function of a concept according to the Cartesian criteria 440 00:52:09,680 --> 00:52:14,210 would be that of referring to objects or phenomena that are clear and distinct. 441 00:52:15,140 --> 00:52:20,030 A conceptual history of the unconscious would therefore need to be based upon the assumption 442 00:52:20,030 --> 00:52:26,720 that the term the unconscious refers to something objectively existent in the real world. 443 00:52:27,740 --> 00:52:33,920 Yet so far, our investigations have shown that this is very far from being the case. 444 00:52:34,910 --> 00:52:40,520 Likeness. Unconscious perceptions are simply those that remain below the threshold of consciousness. 445 00:52:41,570 --> 00:52:50,360 Similarly in fish, they are impulses that are insufficiently powerful to penetrate above the threshold of 446 00:52:50,360 --> 00:52:56,060 awareness and which therefore fall below that particular threshold of measure ability. 447 00:52:57,170 --> 00:53:05,240 And in Freud, the unconscious is a known unknown, the existence of which can only be inferred rather than directly demonstrated. 448 00:53:05,930 --> 00:53:15,830 So if the concept of the unconscious cannot refer to any stable class of objects or to any directly observable range of phenomena, 449 00:53:16,520 --> 00:53:21,890 then maybe a conceptual history of the unconscious will only be partially successful 450 00:53:22,250 --> 00:53:26,300 in helping us to understand how this term is functioning in our tradition. 451 00:53:27,830 --> 00:53:31,790 Alright, now I'm going to talk about metaphors now. 452 00:53:36,600 --> 00:53:46,380 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. 453 00:53:49,460 --> 00:53:55,610 Hunter Blue. My dad wrote a book in 1960 called Paradigms for a Metaphor oLogy. 454 00:53:56,840 --> 00:54:00,950 He was the one that was involved with a group that worked on the history of concepts. 455 00:54:01,700 --> 00:54:06,770 And he proposed that if you focus only on the conceptual level, 456 00:54:07,040 --> 00:54:13,910 then what you leave out is the pretty conceptual work that gets done before a conceptual system even exists. 457 00:54:14,210 --> 00:54:23,720 Right. So he's interested in a more primordial, if you like, German philosophers of the mid 20th century, loved primordial things. 458 00:54:25,040 --> 00:54:31,580 He was concerned with a more primordial approach to the to the idea of how to research conceptual history. 459 00:54:34,130 --> 00:54:41,330 His main claim is that metaphors precede concepts and in fact, make conceptual systems possible. 460 00:54:42,470 --> 00:54:49,400 So in Bloomberg's view, the more primordial approach to intellectual history would be to see what the 461 00:54:49,400 --> 00:54:55,040 background metaphors are that make philosophical concepts possible in the first place. 462 00:54:56,030 --> 00:55:03,710 And metaphor ology is an anthropological theory based upon the idea that humans require 463 00:55:04,160 --> 00:55:11,150 a basic level of orientation in order to establish a conceptual system at all. 464 00:55:12,110 --> 00:55:17,059 And this is done by way of what Bloomberg refers to as absolute metaphors. 465 00:55:17,060 --> 00:55:22,459 This is hand out point number five absolute metaphors. 466 00:55:22,460 --> 00:55:31,730 Answer the supposedly naive in principle, unanswerable questions whose relevance lies simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside. 467 00:55:32,390 --> 00:55:39,560 Since we do not pose them ourselves, but find them already posed in the ground of our existence, 468 00:55:41,360 --> 00:55:48,740 no examples and absolute metaphors would be ones like the world as a machine or a clock. 469 00:55:48,890 --> 00:55:57,740 So mechanistic philosophers like Descartes and Newton often use this particular idea to describe how the world fits together as an overall thing. 470 00:55:58,190 --> 00:56:02,170 And Bloomberg's point is that you can never experience the whole world, right? 471 00:56:02,190 --> 00:56:03,770 It's impossible to do that. 472 00:56:04,070 --> 00:56:11,360 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. 473 00:56:11,990 --> 00:56:18,290 So in order to have an overall orientation, you need an overall world picture. 474 00:56:19,640 --> 00:56:27,590 Now, the problem is that absolute metaphors cannot be cashed out conceptually because they do not refer to any specific empirical thing. 475 00:56:28,100 --> 00:56:37,160 Rather, they make possible a very general sense of orientation and metaphors for the unconscious also abound, 476 00:56:37,820 --> 00:56:43,940 and they also tend to be very topographic, as in this very well-known example from Karnes. 477 00:56:44,210 --> 00:56:48,350 And when reading this passage, I like to show this. This is a map of the United States. 478 00:56:48,680 --> 00:56:55,280 It's not particularly relevant to what Kansas saying, but you'll see what I mean when I am reading this quote. 479 00:56:56,030 --> 00:57:04,070 This is coming from the anthropology, the field of sensuous intuitions and sensations of which we are not conscious, 480 00:57:04,850 --> 00:57:07,850 even though we can undoubtedly conclude that we have them. 481 00:57:08,390 --> 00:57:15,410 That is obscure representations is a makes clear representations, on the other hand, 482 00:57:15,830 --> 00:57:21,709 contain only infinitely few points of this field which lie open to consciousness so that, 483 00:57:21,710 --> 00:57:27,500 as it were, only a few places on the vast map of our minds are illuminated. 484 00:57:27,780 --> 00:57:31,850 Right. So everything that is black here is unconscious. There's few points. 485 00:57:32,600 --> 00:57:37,610 I would probably say fewer than those are those which we are aware of. 486 00:57:38,600 --> 00:57:44,300 And here we see that card is actually using the language of Descartes and lightness, 487 00:57:44,780 --> 00:57:56,360 obscure or in in in the German don't call dark representations are simply not clear enough to be regarded as conscious representations. 488 00:57:56,990 --> 00:58:00,140 And this is one of the examples that he uses. 489 00:58:01,280 --> 00:58:10,580 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, 490 00:58:10,910 --> 00:58:15,830 but I'm not close enough to them to distinguish different parts of their body, so I can't make that judgement. 491 00:58:16,430 --> 00:58:24,820 Then that full count is an unconscious representation because there's no clarity and distinctness to that particular mode of perception. 492 00:58:24,830 --> 00:58:32,960 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. 493 00:58:33,050 --> 00:58:41,350 Right. So you can see again, that count is using this Descartes system, which is has nothing to do with Freud. 494 00:58:41,360 --> 00:58:47,770 The unconscious is not does not have anything to do with repression or guilt or. 495 00:58:47,820 --> 00:58:54,540 Or any of those things. It's purely deciding how clear and distinct a certain mode of perception is. 496 00:58:58,070 --> 00:58:59,540 The more general problem, though, 497 00:58:59,540 --> 00:59:08,059 faced by Karl Rove and the reason why he regarded the map of the mind as overwhelmingly shrouded in darkness is that for current, 498 00:59:08,060 --> 00:59:15,680 our awareness of ourselves is also at bottom obscure counts, famous pink or the thinker. 499 00:59:15,950 --> 00:59:22,729 The ground of our subjectivity, the place where everything works and is put together with something that he 500 00:59:22,730 --> 00:59:27,410 thought is only available to us at the level of intuition and not conceptual. 501 00:59:27,770 --> 00:59:34,040 Okay. So again, can't is struggling to understand what is going on within human subjectivity. 502 00:59:35,930 --> 00:59:43,130 Okay, what's the point? Why is it important to think of the unconscious as a metaphor instead of a concept? 503 00:59:46,820 --> 00:59:51,740 Well, it has implications, not so much for what Andrew's doing, 504 00:59:52,580 --> 00:59:58,670 but certainly for the types of epistemological claims that were made about the unconscious bias, 505 00:59:58,670 --> 01:00:10,790 psychoanalysis, the traditional criteria for concepts, those of clarity and stiffness function according to a corresponding theory of truth. 506 01:00:11,510 --> 01:00:19,310 For a concept to work. According to this theory, it must correspond in some way to the objects to which it refers. 507 01:00:20,210 --> 01:00:26,330 Now, this cannot be the case with respect to the unconscious, because the unconscious is not an object. 508 01:00:27,440 --> 01:00:37,970 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. 509 01:00:38,750 --> 01:00:44,090 So just think about that. Is it possible for a concept to create an object to which it prefers? 510 01:00:45,650 --> 01:00:50,660 This is the way that doing that puts it in a book entitled The Theory of Non Conceptual. 511 01:00:50,780 --> 01:00:58,370 This is point number seven on your handout concepts to not only refer to objects. 512 01:00:58,640 --> 01:01:04,070 Rather they also constitute objects. So it is with the concept of the unconscious. 513 01:01:05,060 --> 01:01:06,110 Strictly speaking, 514 01:01:06,620 --> 01:01:16,400 the concept of the unconscious is a procedural rule which specifies how one should react when confronted by a particular form of consciousness. 515 01:01:17,330 --> 01:01:27,530 The unconscious is an auxiliary concept, a health of life in Germany, a helping concept used for specific technical operations. 516 01:01:28,250 --> 01:01:38,120 It indicates the totality of consciousness which no memory or or expectation and no form of self consciousness can verify. 517 01:01:39,890 --> 01:01:47,330 So for blooming back the unconscious borders upon myth and this is in no way pejorative when he says this, 518 01:01:48,470 --> 01:01:56,000 it borders upon myth upon the act of naming those particular aspects of our experience that we cannot control, 519 01:01:56,870 --> 01:02:06,350 but which we imagine influence our lives. Presented with particular contents of consciousness, like dreams, for example, 520 01:02:07,070 --> 01:02:11,390 we surmise that they are attributable to the operations of the unconscious. 521 01:02:12,410 --> 01:02:17,960 To have an unconscious is thus to have a particular view of one's own subjectivity. 522 01:02:18,650 --> 01:02:24,170 To have a narrative about oneself which cannot be positively verified or refuted. 523 01:02:25,280 --> 01:02:32,930 Now, seen in this light, the question about whether one has an unconscious or not is not really a useful question, 524 01:02:33,350 --> 01:02:37,160 because it could not be answered, but maybe it can be answered in the way that Andrew is shown today. 525 01:02:37,280 --> 01:02:40,000 Certainly at Freud's time, it it couldn't be. 526 01:02:41,690 --> 01:02:49,730 The question must rather be, is it helpful for me to think that I have an unconscious or put more generally? 527 01:02:50,420 --> 01:02:59,570 Does psychoanalysis work? This is, by the way, why Martin and I called a book Thinking the Unconscious. 528 01:03:00,290 --> 01:03:10,520 Its main precursor was this study by Ellenberger, the discovery of the unconscious, published in 1970 and the very title of this book, 529 01:03:10,760 --> 01:03:20,540 The Discovery of the Unconscious presuppose that the unconscious is a thing in the world which you can discover by Munson's view. 530 01:03:20,540 --> 01:03:27,050 And my view was much more that this type of realism about the unconscious is a little bit naive 531 01:03:27,410 --> 01:03:32,959 because we have to see the extent to which ideas about the unconscious actually created the object, 532 01:03:32,960 --> 01:03:38,390 the unconscious mind, and certainly the way that that Andrew has talked about the unconscious today. 533 01:03:38,840 --> 01:03:40,790 This is a very British way of talking about it. 534 01:03:41,030 --> 01:03:49,010 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. 535 01:03:49,340 --> 01:03:53,780 British thinkers tended more to say there are unconscious phenomena without 536 01:03:53,780 --> 01:03:59,960 necessarily attributing them to a place or a region or a particular topography. 537 01:04:00,770 --> 01:04:04,550 So this was the reason why we called our book Thinking the Unconscious, 538 01:04:04,990 --> 01:04:13,069 but because we chose to leave open the question as to as to whether the unconscious as a thing exists and therefore, 539 01:04:13,070 --> 01:04:16,820 whether it can be discovered as a thing at all. Thank you very much.