Month: September 2017

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subconscious or unconscious

Subconscious or Unconscious difference

    Subconscious or Unconscious. is there a difference?

    Recently I have been revising some pages I have not looked at for a while. I noticed that sometimes I use the word 'subconscious' and sometimes I use 'unconscious'. I realized that I do not actually know when to use subconscious or unconscious. On looking into it, I discovered that no one else does either.

    Consciousness is an emergent property

    There are no shortages of definitions or prescriptions, but there appears to be as many different meanings for these words as there are people writing about them. Almost all of the meaning assigned is based on metaphor, or arguing by analogy. There appears to be virtually no scientific agreement on either term. The basic problem is that "consciousness" itself does not have a clear definition. If you dissect a brain you will not find "consciousness". Consciousness is an emergent property.

    This is the same as your voice. You make the voice with your breath and the muscles of your throat. But you cannot investigate the voice itself. It is an emergent property. Your voice is not part of your body. In the same way, consciousness is not part of your brain. Therefore, trying to be exact about subconscious or unconscious is not possible. If you don't know what "consciousness" is, then you cannot really know what its opposite is.

    According to Wikipedia, when used in general conversation the words subconscious or unconscious are interchangeable. You can use either of them to refer to the causes of behavior you are not aware of doing. For most purposes this is good enough.

    Subconscious or unconscious

    The term unconscious was introduced by Freud. He regarded the unconscious as a part of the mind in which primitive drives, demands, feelings and memories exist. The unconscious is different from the conscious because no amount of introspection, no amount of thinking, will allow you to access the contents of the unconscious. He believed that the contents of the unconscious could be hinted at through dreams, hypnosis or free association.

    In psychology, the term subconscious is used to refer to whatever part of your consciousness you are not currently paying attention to. Psychologists today do not really accept Freud's view of the non-conscious part of the mind. Even the term "mind" is contentious and difficult to define. Modern psychology tends to avoid addressing or studying the "subconscious".

    So the best technical definition would be at the unconscious is totally unknowable, while the subconscious is simply that part of the brain's normal function that you are not aware of at the moment, but which you can become aware of if you direct your attention to it.

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    Negative Suggestions

    Negative Suggestions in Hypnosis

      Negative Suggestions are not not good

      I was talking to a student recently who was going through her hypnosis training. She was very concerned about not saying 'not'. I told her to relax and just speak normally to clients. There is a huge amount of nonsense talked about not using negative suggestions in hypnosis.

      I don't think it matters if you use negative suggestions or not. Some trainers tell their students that if they tell the client to 'stop smoking' all the mind does is to hear the word 'smoking' and not the word 'stop' and it puts the idea of smoking into the client's mind.

      Do not think of an elephant

      The evidence for this is always the NLP example: 'Do not think of an elephant'. The point is that of course the image of an elephant comes to mind. NLP teaches that the mind does not notice the word 'Not' and only acts on the thing that comes after the 'not'. The theory is that a negative suggestion emphasizes the thing mentioned.

      But if that was true, then the word 'not' would apply to 'think' rather than 'elephant'. If the 'not' was operating as NLP theory says, you would stop thinking. Of course that doesn't happen. The sentence 'Do not think of an elephant' gets parsed as a whole unit.

      Even as it being said, the language processing part of your brain is trying to make sense of the whole unit of speech.  In fact while the stream of words is being heard, processing is continuously redefining the sense of the sentence. Think of the times when you have only realized what somebody said long after they had said it.

      The sentence is evaluated as a unit. That is why you get confused by long rambling sentences. After the sentence has been evaluated, the core idea of the sentence is what remains. The actually words are largely ignored. The 'elephant' comes to mind because your mind is waiting to hear what comes next about that elephant. The image of the elephant stays in your mind because your mind is waiting to hear if you are going to feed it or shoot it.

      Do not think of an elephant is oversimplified

      The NLP view on negative suggestions is very simplistic. It does not reflect how the mind actually processes words. A moment's thought will show that if that was true, all hypnotherapists would be out of business. Because all you would have to say is something like 'Don't lose weight' and the client would give up overeating, or say 'Do not eat healthy' and the obesity epidemic would be over. Or how about 'Don't stop smoking' to have all the world give up smoking instantly?

      The whole negative suggestions theory about 'Never say Not' is overdone in my opinion.

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