Brain Science Podcast discussion

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman has just been released in the United States. So it is not appearing yet in the Goodreads data base.

I hope to interview the author later this month for the July 1st episode of the Brain Science Podcast.

It has been a couple years since we talked about the role of the unconscious, so this should be a good update. The discussion will be less technical than the most recent episode.

I have not read this book, but as soon as you mention the unconscious, Freud comes to mind. The influence of the unconscious is quite compelling to me, but it is more than a little disconcerting that we have historically been unable to prove or disprove theories such as Freud's because of our inability to study that which we are unaware of. At this point, I have a couple of questions:

1) How do theorists today tend to address this problem; and
2) The unconscious is usually connected to psychodynamic theory. Are there other groups today who are involving themselves in this area?

I know that with advances of brain imaging technology we are now in a position in which studying unconscious processes is possible. I hope to hear a little on how this technology is advancing our knowledge of the unconscious.

To put it simply, Incognito has nothing to do with Freud.

Neuroscientists like Eagleman rarely use the term THE Unconscious. Their focus is on unconcious processes, which refers to any process that occurs outside of "conscious" awareness. A clear-cut example is visual processing.

Using this definition most of what our brain does is "unconscious." While Freud made a valuable contribution by calling attention to the existence of unconscious processes, few scientists today are interested in his theories. Many consider psychodamic theory to be pseudoscience.

Of course there are exceptions, Norman Doidge who I interviewed way back in BSP 26 is a practicing psychiatrist who believes that modern neuroscience is vindication Freud. While I am not sure if this is a common attitude among psychiatrists it is certainly rare among neuroscientists.

One reason for this is that neuroscience is revealing that not only is the brain doing most of its work outside our awareness, most of what it does is totally inaccessible. While it may seem obvious that we can not change how our brain processes visual information by introspection, it is harder to accept that this applies to things like decision making. In fact, our brain is very good at deceiving our "conscious" mind. That is one reason why introspection may not be as valuable as many people believe.

Another problem with the various varieties of depth psychology is that they do not take into account how malleable memory really is. Given how unreliable our memories actually are, it seems very dangerous to base therapy on trying to recover them from the "unconscious."