Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious 85
lee1 writes "Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (by masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences."
I knew that (Score:5, Funny)
Like when my wife insists that we had an entire conversation about taking out the trash while I was playing a video game.
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Replying to first post with an unrelated reply is obvious Karma whoring
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He was replying to the first comment in order to get his "oh it's a dupe" comment above everyone elses to I assume get more karma. I was protesting the way he posted, not the content of his post.
Re:I knew that (Score:4, Funny)
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The problem is that the first few initial threads get washed by a tidal wave of generic posts meant to grab attention, rendering the whole post and reply paradigm meaningless. It's annoying to the original poster as well as to anyone who is actually interested in the topic he/she brought up.
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Using the "off-topic" moderation to describe being irrelevant to the thread a comment is posted in as opposed to the original article should discourage this behavior. Unfortunately it would require changing the way a lot of people view that moderation option.
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No, have you read the slashdot faqs? What he did was recommended. Now, an offtopic post like yours (and my reply) is proof one isn't a karma whore.
And what if one is a "karma whore"? You don't get karma unless you can post interesting, insightful, or funny comments, and those are exactly the comments I want to see. "Karma whore" is an undeserved pejorative usually hurled by someone who is neither insightful nor informative and lacks a sense of humor.
"This guy is a karma whore" adds nothing to the conversati
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Can you explain to me why you think that posting a random reply to the first comment shouldn't be discouraged? As I explained in a later comment, it's annoying to the initial poster and to anyone who is actually interested in the subject he/she brought up. If he posted a new thread rather than replying to the first comment, I'd have no problem with it.
But instead, he posted as a reply to the first comment, in order to, I'm guessing, get his "dupe" comment viewed before all the other "dupe" comments already
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Re:I knew that (Score:4, Funny)
Like when my wife insists that we had an entire conversation about taking out the trash while I was playing a video game. :-)
You did, you know: like all other conversations with her, it consisted of her talking and you tacitly agreeing.
Just ask your average propaganda minister (Score:2)
They know how it works.
OK (Score:5, Funny)
My students can't even do this consciously. :)
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Re:OK (Score:5, Insightful)
And in other news, researchers found that subjects could tap a foot in sync with music while doing another task and not consciously paying attention to the music... or, well, subjects could do pretty much anything "unconsciously" if it was something they have done thousands of times and does not require novel thought.
Seriously, is this really that surprising? For most literate people, word recognition seems "automatic." We don't consciously have to sound out the letters of each word, nor even consciously parse the syntax of a sentence. Same with really basic arithmetic (well, at least for people who still actually are drilled on basic arithmetic in schools).
If a person can tap a foot to a beat and even respond to changes in tempo etc. automatically without even thinking about the music (a much more complex task, I think), is it really a stretch that our brains just "know" that 2+2=4? That is, without us consciously having to go, "umm... let's see, if I visualize two fingers on one hand, and two fingers on the other, and put them together, well, then, it's 1, 2, 3... uh... 4! Yeah, 4!"
It feels almost like an automatic response, seemingly requiring no conscious intervention... just like people reading this post now just "know" what the words say, without actively consciously parsing the letters into words and sentences. It wouldn't surprise me if a mathematician could even integrate "unconsciously" or chemist could see the product of a basic chemical reaction "unconsciously," since these are trained repeated behaviors. Now, if someone could do a task that required novel thought involving a stimulus never seen before, that would actually be interesting and perhaps surprising.
If anything, this experiment is only novel for trying to isolate such responses in an abnormal way. We don't normally try to do arithmetic in "the background" of consciousness in the same way we might tap our feet to music or... I don't know... manage to get popcorn into our mouths while watching a movie without thinking about the trajectory of our hands (a task again that I think is arguably more complex than simply "knowing" or maybe just "remembering" that 2+2=4).
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Interesting study but needs replication (Score:5, Interesting)
And even if this is the case, I'm not sure what, if any, useful information we can extra from the study, other than "this is cool."
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This simply seems like an extension of the cocktail party effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect) or Priming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)) it's not entirely new, it does show that inattentive processing can be a little more sophisticated than previously thought, but it is not a game-changer.
Re:Interesting study but needs replication (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no evidence of anyone having an eidetic or "near-eidetic" memory. [wikipedia.org]
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That's not eidetic. I'm a musician myself, and I've memorized over a thousand songs, and I can in fact "play them back" in my head, for the most part. My memory is good, but it works the same way as everyone else's.
Want proof? Listen to a completely random sequence of notes for five minutes, then try to play the entire thing back in your head in order. You can't do it, because you failed to chunk it as you listened, and the input was many times larger than your phonological loop could accommodate.
Furthe
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McGurk effect. My kingdom for an edit button.
(Yes, I used the preview button. No, I didn't notice :-)
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Nope, 'subconcious' is a Freudian concept that refers to deeper currents of conciousness, well beyond what can be known or observable and such phenomena as dreams are ascribed to this. Unconcious may alternatively be described as 'inattentive' i.e. something you do without being conciously aware you are doing it (e.g. something that is well practiced such as signing your name, may be largely 'unconcious' whereas sketching a fruit-bowl might draw far more concious resources if you are not proficient in that
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0330209/evidence-for-unconscious-math-language-processing-abilities
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"Subconscious" is not a Freudian concept. Freud always spoke of the unconscious ("das Unbewußte"). He explicitly opposed the notion of a "subconscious" ("Unterbewußtsein"):
translated by Brill as
dupity dupity dupe (Score:1, Informative)
This is a dupe: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0330209/evidence-for-unconscious-math-language-processing-abilities [slashdot.org]
dupity dupity dupe
dupe dupity dupity dupe dupe
dupe dupity dupity dupe dupe
dupity dupity dupe
A simple explanation (Score:1)
Imagine your brain as a multithreaded program. Each thought runs on its own CPU set. The thalamus acts as the debugger, and can step through one thread at a time. When you are "debugging" a thought, that is your conscious thought. Unsupervised thoughts tend to wander around randomly and seldom produce anything useful. These are your unconscious thoughts. Unconscious thoughts are no less capable than the conscious ones, and as the experiment indicates are perfectly capable of thinking through any problem. Th
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worst analogy ever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
also, it's more like an autonomous hardware subsystem, firing an interrupt
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Here, the criticism is more illogical than the theory itself. "Mind" IS a computer, because it computes. I am a traveller because I travel. What is the big deal there?
Some people do not like the qualitative connotations it creates, but they are simply illogical.
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So? Traveller is still a person/thing that travels. Computer is still a person/thing that computes. Uncharted notwithstanding.
Take the Chinese room objection to the theory. The person / room / books combination conducts the conversation. Qualitatively one may not be comfortable with the idea of a system conducting a conversation, but one either needs to define "conversation" to exclude non-persons from conducting it; or accept that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck.
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Until that is, you go to cook the duck
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Cooked quacking duck?
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not if it's been cooked it isn't :)
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So it is outside the scope of discussion when discussion involves quacking ducks.
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Since we are setting parameters, I think it would also be wise to specify that ducks eligible for this metaphor must be able to fly, since only a flying duck a can migrate, and therefore be considered a traveller!
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* or duck-like entity
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No, your reading comprehension is poor. Duck is not described as traveller. And even if it were, walking and swimming are also forms of traveling.
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Do let me know if you have something relevant to add on this subject.
dupe (Score:2, Redundant)
Peter Watts' "Blindsight" (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks pretty consistent with the kind of view of human conciousness, as forms the core of Peter Watts' "Blindsight". The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.
If the subject interests you I highly recommend reading the book. It's available free from author's homepage: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm [rifters.com]
Re:Peter Watts' "Blindsight" (Score:5, Interesting)
The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.
What then is the point of consciousness ?
Maybe your question has no meaning. Maybe "consciousness" is this thing that philosophers got obsessed with when dealing with potentially made-up issues like the "mind-body" distinction. Maybe the reality is that "awareness" and "consciousness" are much more flexible than we think.
I'm a pianist and I've done a lot of accompanying for choirs. I've also in the past been a choir director. At times, when working through a new piece, I've often been essentially sight-reading a piano part while giving cues and direction to the choir. And I don't claim to be the best person at this activity -- I know many directors who are more skilled than I am.
So, all at the same time, I am simultaneously:
In all of this, how much of what I am doing is "conscious"? How much is "unconscious" or "subconscious" or whatever? My attention is continuously shifting back and forth -- cue the choir, pay attention to that weird rhythm, have to slow down here, turn the page, etc., etc. I'm certainly not consciously "thinking" about sight-reading the music or playing the piano for the most part, since I'm primarily concerned about making sure the choir is learning something -- but those tasks seem quite a bit more complex than the ones mentioned in TFA.
I would defintely not saying I am consciously "multitasking," since my attention usually is skipping back and forth between things -- I can't really "think" actively about more than one of these activities at once.
Yet, it's all happening. My body is managing to do all of these things, including potentially decoding a new piece of music and instantiating a performance of it, while giving basic direction and evaluation to a choir... most of it at any giving moment happening without my direct "conscious" attention.
In such a situation, what is the "point" of consciousness? To me, the only meaning "consciousness" has there is "the thing I'm giving slightly heightened focus to at a given moment," usually the thing that is most novel and can't just be "put on autopilot."
I realize that to some people this may sound like I'm demeaning consciousness -- but I'm not. And all of us do stuff like this all the time, coordinating all sorts of body motions and behavior while managing to focus on some other task. Does that mean I don't have ("conscious") control over these "autopilot" tasks? Of course I do -- they just aren't at the center of focus.
What's really going on is a lot of degrees of awareness, some bubbling up to visual, auditory, and/or verbal consciousness, while others (like the coordination of my body in playing the keyboard) are mostly part of my body remembering and responding to musical patterns as it has done thousands of times before.
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Apple connection (Score:2)
Looks pretty consistent with the kind of view of human consciousness, as forms the core of Peter Watts' "Blindsight".
I just realized that the main charter in Blindsight is named "Siri", same as the Apple search app. Although, considering that his book came out in 2006, it would seem it pre-dates the Apple term.
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1: The first is to look in the center of your field of vision, and concentrate on something at the very edge of your vision. You can't really 'see it', but you can detect the very basic shape and colour.
2: Have randomly placed words on a page. Sometimes, you'll be able to think of a word that randomly pops to mind, then look a little to the left/right/up/down, and that's the word you unconsciously pic
One digit arithmetic (Score:3)
is just a test of memory, not reasoning.
One assumption less, please (Score:2)
In psycho-linguistics, it has always been understood that parsing is an sub-conscious, automatic process. Parsing sentences consciously is extremely slow, as every 2nd language learner knows, and we can do it at a speed of about 4 words per second without any problem. But the experiments as described in the extract do not warrant the conclusions. Effects of lexical priming have been known for a looooong time (since the 1930s, I think), and it remains to be seen if none of the results can be attributed to an
99% of what our brains do is "unconscious" (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of cognitive science I could ramble on about here, but the fact is that the conclusion stated in the summary is obvious to anyone who has studied brain function in detail.
Putting aside the debate over whether or not consciousness is an epiphenomenon, just about the only part of thought that we are consciously aware of is information that takes a trip through short-term memory. Everything else is in dedicated (innate or due to learning) circuitry that just computes what we've learned and either spoon-feeds our consciousness with the results or directly interacts with the sensory and motor systems. (In other words, we are only consciously aware of punctuations in multi-step processes.)
Consider when you first learn a new skill. At that time, it's entirely conscious, because we have to pay special attention to every step. Like when we're new to cooking and baking some new recipe, we consciously reason over each step in preparation. But when we've gotten really expert at something ("unconsciously competent"), most of it goes on automatic. We don't think so much about the steps; we just execute them, and our conscious mind can wander off on something else. By that point, many of us have forgotten what we went through when learning and generally have a challenge explaining how we're doing what we're doing.
Other examples: Playing an instrument -- really experienced players practice so much that the motor system is completely on automatic, while the conscious mind is (often to a very limited extent) focusing on the sheet music and timing reference (conductor or percussion). Reading radiology images -- an experienced doctor can show you a lesion they've observed, and after it's pointed out, you can sorta see it, but finding it in the first place is a well-honed skill that can be very difficult to explain; how do you tell that that one extremely vague splotch is a lesion while one nearby is normal?
The really interesting bit is this: Most people can explain more or less how they do something. But none of that is from direct access to how we ACTUALLY process the information. Rather, our explanation about how we THINK we do something is based on conscious theories we construct to explain behaviors we've observed in others and ourselves. In other words, our "skills" and our "'mental models' of our skills" are stored in entirely different parts of our memory.
It's also interesting to study teachers. Really good teachers (particularly on subjects more abstract than what you get in grade school, which are mostly rote learning from books) are people who have some combination of a good memory about how they learned something and a really good takent for self-observation when they perform a skill (i.e. a good conscious mental model of their otherwise unconscious skill).
The next level up is teachers who are good at teaching how to teach. :)
So, to address the article here: Our unconscious minds can read and do math, because the unconscious mind is what already does those things anyway. (Once you're past elementary school.)
There's that Ego again... (Score:1)
Re:There's that Ego again... (Score:4, Informative)
Why would the framework (the thing that contains all the rules) be something less than that which it produced?
Because properties emerge from complex systems. Just because it occurs at one level doesn't mean the building blocks that level is made of can do it too. A transistor can't add, groups of transistors can.
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can this be called SubInformation?? (Score:2)
maybe this is part of why some folks can look at a pattern and then KNOW that say A B C D F G H J is "missing" parts (and what those parts are).
The geek thing of What happens if we do THIS can also be included in this
(and YesHOLD MY BEER and watch this is NOT part of this)
We Don't Have a Subconscious (Score:2)
Oblig. hat tip to Douglas Adams (Score:2)
Sounds like an S.E.P. [wikipedia.org] field to me...
I can do this (Score:2)
I can do this. I remember as a kid having to write out the numbers 1-100 in a 10x10 grid so I just started doing it and got almost immediately distracted thinking about something else and the next thing I know it's done, sort of. For some reason, I managed to skip a few numbers here and there and had to rub it out and do it again, painstakingly trying not to get distracted.
Same with the maths question sheets they used to give us in primary school. Done with barely a conscious thought, but riddled with off-b
consciousness as a sensory phenomena (Score:1)
Come on this was obviously common knowledge (Score:2)
Come on, this is not new knowledge. We all, or at least a lot of people, are well aware that if you leave the radio on at night tuned to a talk station, the content of the talk gets worked into your dreams.
So what does that mean? Well, Unconscious? Check. Parsing sentences? Check. Integrating those the semantic content of those sentences into your dreams into the "plot" of your dream-or in other words "problem solving" - check.
On the last point- yes, it is problem solving. Getting the meaning out of a
Julian Jaynes (Score:1)