Hello everyone, I hope that you a great week.
Today’s blog post is on the cognitive psychology topic of Conscious.
What is Conscious?
Conscious is our moment by moment awareness of ourselves, environment and thoughts.
A method of studying conscious is introspection. Whilst, it has its limits is can still be informative.
Introspection is a process where we look inside ourselves to discover our thoughts feelings and beliefs.
Whilst, introspection can be useful as a source of evidence and it’s useful in a range of settings. It can be limited for a few reasons.
For example:
· The introspector doesn’t tell you what they actually think.
· You might want to tell the truth, but you simply don’t have the needed vocabulary.
Another problem is when introspector finds the right word, but the other person interprets it differently.
The Cognitive Unconscious:
In addition, introspection is limited because it cannot tell us everything as the unconscious influence us in ways that we don’t know about. Meaning that these unconscious influences can’t be detected through introspection.
We use the term cognitive inference to describe certain aspect of human perception. For example, when you turn a corner and ‘know’ what’s going to be there because your unconscious has inferred it.
Whereas, the cognitive unconscious is the term given to the mental support processes that exist outside our awareness. This process makes our perception, thinking and memory possible.
However, it must be noted that the cognitive unconscious is the term for these support processes and not the unconscious mind as described by Freud. This is because Morden scholars strongly belief /know that the unconscious isn’t an adversary of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind doesn’t have its own desires or identity, like Freud suggested.
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Have a great week!