Conscious effort 🧿
"Not to brag. But I don't even need alcohol to make bad decisions."
—Meme
> godspeed | freud
To many, it may feel like our decisions are coming from the voices in our heads or our inner monologues.
But the voices in our heads are contained in our conscious, aware minds, not our unconscious minds.
- "Implicit cognition," as psychologists have often called it, is our better, modern understanding of what famed 19th century psychologist Sigmund Freud called "the unconscious mind."
Its counterpart is the explicit or “conscious mind.”
Freud also called them the primary and secondary processes.
Psychologists and scholars since Freud have coined numerous new names for what remain broadly similar abstractions.
- The unconscious mind has also been called intuitive, implicit, automatic, involuntary, uncontrolled, and hot-processed mind.
- The conscious mind, meanwhile, has also been called analytical, explicit, controlled, voluntary, deliberate, and cold-processed.
Instead of firing hot and instantaneously, our cold, conscious processing needs our cognitive effort to be carried out.
Experts in the field of addiction point to implicit cognition as a noisy, powerful engine that can drive us to make bad decisions. It helped lead me to drinking again and again long after I knew I wanted to quit.
In a 2006 collection of studies, researchers defined implicit cognition as:
>> "Those thought processes that fall beyond one's conscious awareness but nevertheless influence a wide variety of everyday behaviors in automatized ways, including addictive behaviors."
Many of Freud's theories have not survived the passage of time. But they are "historically important for introducing the idea of unconscious thinking," the researchers wrote.
Our minds process an estimated 35,000 decisions per day. Consciously contemplating them all is impossible. Such a task would cause us to burst into flames.
At the very least, subjecting our conscious, aware minds to tens of thousands of daily decisions would paralyze us with indecision.
- next time How our minds rescue us from regret.
- listening Minor Threat "Seeing Red"
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