The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness (Steve Ayan, Scientific American, Dec 19 2018)
“People like to think of the unconscious as a place where we can shove uncomfortable thoughts and impulses because we want to believe that conscious thought directs our actions; if it did not, we would seemingly have no control over our lives.
This image could hardly be less accurate, however.
Recent research indicates that conscious and the unconscious processes do not usually operate in opposition. They are not competitors wrestling for hegemony over our psyche.
They are not even separate spheres, as Freud’s later classification into the ego, id and superego would suggest.
Rather there is only one mind in which conscious and unconscious strands are interwoven.
In fact, even our most reasonable thoughts and actions mainly result from automatic, unconscious processes.
A revolutionary, and now widely accepted, countermodel to Freud’s scheme goes by the term “predictive mind.”
The theory comes in different flavors, but overall it holds that automatic processes play a central role in the mind, allowing us to predict events quickly and accurately as they arise.
Learning, experience and consciousness constantly improve our implicit, or unconscious, predictions, and we take note of events only when the predictions fail.
That is, we become conscious of circumstances when they merit our attention.
This automaticity enables us to function smoothly in the world, and becoming conscious when predictions fail enables us to avoid the pitfalls of automatic processing and adjust to changes in our environment.
In a simplified example, unconscious processes predict the trajectory of a ball tossed to us and adjusts our limb motions accordingly.
Conscious processing would become engaged, however, if the ball took a sudden right-angle turn. (…)
In the final analysis, Solms and Friston assert, predictive errors equal surprise equals consciousness; when things do not work as expected, we get consciousness—a state the brain tries to limit. (…)
When I put a picture of my loved ones on my desk to fuel my motivation for work or when I take the stairs instead of the elevator,
I am steering my unconscious mind, recognizing that its desires for leisure and rest do not serve my best interests at the moment.
And the fact that I am able to do this shows that the conscious and the unconscious are partners rather than opponents.”