#thinkingfastandslow — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: August 26, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Neuroscience reveals how the unconscious mind drives human behavior
URL: https://www.psypost.org/neuroscience-reveals-how-the-unconscious-mind-drives-human-behavior/
Have you ever heard the phrase “you only use 10% of your brain”? In reality, there is no way of measuring the percentage terms of consciousness – partly because the brain has no static baseline.
However, there is a general consensus among neuroscientists now that most of the brain’s processes are unconscious. That doesn’t mean you’re not using most of your brain though – it means there’s much more happening than you’re probably aware of.
Modern cognitive neuroscience has brought us right back to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic view of the unconscious mind. This is partly because the once-thought untestable theories are gaining scientific ground.
Freud, in 1895, proposed that the unconscious mind hides sexual and aggressive wishes, in his book with his colleague Josef Breuer Studies in Hysteria. They wrote that mental health symptoms like anxiety, phobias and compulsions emerge from unresolved unconscious thoughts.
Freud’s model (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) – maps onto our current understanding of memory. Nobel laureate, neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Eric Kandell says we have declarative and non-declarative memory processes. Declarative memory recall is conscious, like trying to remember the sequence of numbers on your credit card. Non-declarative memories involve unconscious, automatic recall.
And Freud’s structural model of the mind again arguably fits in with our understanding of cognition.
Freud proposed id made up the primitive part of your psyche and that the superego stands for our moral consciousness. Last, your ego mediates between your id and super ego. His idea of the id could be equivalent to unconscious neural processes – although there are convincing arguments that pleasure processing in the id is conscious too. Ego could also be represented by metacognition (awareness of your own thought processes) which is linked to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead.
The superego could be reflected in the brain’s limbic system, which regulates your emotions and behaviour, and tells you whether something feels good or not.
However, behaviourism became dominant in the 1920s, with psychologists like J.B. Watson, in his “behaviourist manifesto” championing the view that only measurable behaviour should be considered in science.
The unconscious brain is back
From the 1980s it became clearer that people’s decision making and behaviour could be influenced without their awareness.
Later, it was also clear with neuroscience experiments and brain scanners, as my team and I showed in two meta-analyses, that both unconscious memory and conscious memory play a role in brain processes. For example, neuroscientists can show study participants hidden flashes of “subliminal” happy or horrified faces and the person will have no conscious recollection of the faces. But their amygdala (the arousal region of the brain) will show increased activation, which can influence people’s decision making.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow built on some of Freud’s ideas of primary and secondary processes. He proposed we have two modes of thinking where system 1 is a fast process that is impulsive and largely unconscious, whereas system 2 is a slow process that takes effort. The secondary process is reserved for when you need to pay attention to something new, dangerous or uncertain.
What neuroscience can tell us about the unconscious mind
Essential functions, like heart rate, body temperature, hunger and thirst regulation are unconsciously rooted. Similarly, coping strategies to diminish painful feelings, learned in early childhood, are not necessarily conscious. Infantile amnesia occurs until about three years old but remain in our unconscious brains for life. However, some aspects of unconscious processes could be brought into conscious awareness via talking therapy.
Other theories about how the conscious and unconscious brain areas interact, come from two prominent ideas. The Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and the Intergrated Information Theory (IIT).
GWT proposes that the mind is like a theatre stage, where the unconscious agents are busy behind the scenes making sure that the “conscious spotlight” on stage is in the right place.
IIT suggests that there are gradients of consciousness. The degree and complexity of integration between brain regions determines how “much” consciousness (“phi”) an organism has. So for example, a human with a complex network of brain regions has more “phi” than, say, a sea slug with far fewer connections. However, the problem with this theory, is how to validate the “amount” of consciousness different species have.
The founder of neuropsychoanalysis Mark Solms – along with neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Karl Friston – in 2010 pioneered a new theory integrating the idea that unconscious activity is the major force influencing our conscious decision making. In my view, it’s the best model we currently have.
This theory – called the Free Energy Principle (FEP) suggests the brain’s
main role is to predict what will keep you alive and feeling good, within the predictable bounds we have evolved to survive in. Most of the time we do this unconsciously, with an internal model of the world, as well as pages of memories from our evolutionary rulebook.But when something uncertain or surprising happens, it is like free energy in the brain that is not bound to a prediction. This causes our brains to be ultra-conscious for a brief period of time to create a new prediction that binds our thoughts, costing the brain a lot of energy. As Kahneman stated, we do sometimes need our conscious brain to help make more difficult decisions for us, when there are many unknowns.
More recently, consciousness research has started to move away from humans altogether. Solms has argued it is possible to give AI consciousness. If he turns out to be right, then according to his own work, the unconscious processes of AI entities will be shaped by their interactions with us.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/neuroscience-reveals-how-the-unconscious-mind-drives-human-behavior/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #UnconsciousMind #Neuroscience #ThinkingFastAndSlow #Freud #DualProcess #ConsciousVsUnconscious #GlobalWorkspaceTheory #IntegratedInformationTheory #FreeEnergyPrinciple #BrainResearch
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"Because defeat is so difficult to accept, the losing side in wars often fights long past the point at which victory of the other side is certain, and only a matter of time."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.363
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"This is where businesses that are losing ground to a superior technology waste their remaining assets in futile attempts to catch up."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.363
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"Many unfortunate human situations unfold ... where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss.
Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters.
The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make a sensible decision that it is time to cut one's losses."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.363
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"... an angry face 'pops out' of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. ... No comparable rapid mechanism for recognizing good news has been detected."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.343
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.302
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Why Critical Thinking Is Disappearing – The Rise of Collective Stupidity
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rIO4IDMnBDU&si=O_mMnJ-WX5fWpO_a
#criticalthinking #ideas #philosophyofmind #philosophy #reading #education #thinkers #plato #thinkingfastandslow #kant #rousseau #cixous #debeauvoir -
#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.231
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they competely ignore regression to the mean."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.217
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#Kahnemann #Tversky #ThinkingFastAndSlow
"The principle of independent judgements (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them."
D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.98
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#ThinkingFastAndSlow #Kahnemann #Tversky
"Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible."D.Kahnemann, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Penguin Books 2012/2024, p.50
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A year in books:
Daniel Kahneman, ons feilbare denken; Thinking fast and slow
#ayearinbooks #reading #danielkahneman #onsfeilbaredenken #thinkingfastandslow
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A Tribute to Daniel Kahneman: Three Things I Learned from Danny
"I was reflecting on Danny's passing yesterday and thinking about what I learned from the opportunity to interact closely with him. Obviously, his research has influenced many, many people. But here are three personal observations you may appreciate." -- #PeterMcGraw
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Daniel Kahnemann died, aged 90…. I especially liked his book „Thinking fast and slow“ #Kahneman #thinkingfastandslow
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Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of "Thinking Fast and Slow," died today at age 90. Here's a tribute to him from NPR. "Danny was a giant in the field," said Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton. "Many areas in the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene."
#RIP #InMemoriam #ThinkingFastAndSlow #Psychology #Economics
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@coffeegeek An instant message gets an instant answer, but usually no more than a short sentence, at best.
You're never going to get more than a 'yes', 'no', 'I don't know', or 'have you asked Jeeves?', it's a constraint of the medium.
Thoughtfulness is discouraged, response on IM is a system 1 activity.
#WorkingAsDesigned #ThinkingFastAndSlow -
在读《Thinking, Fast and Slow》 :star_solid: :star_solid: :star_solid: :star_empty: :star_empty:
https://neodb.social/book/7HQXJ3S2Nfk1r7g4r3fpI1
不愧是诺贝尔经济学奖获得者，写文章跟掉钱眼里了一样，每一章都在问你一些类似选 90% 概率拿 1000 刀还是 100% 概率拿 900 刀之类的问题。我跟着做了几道，几乎每次都跟 great majority 选的不一样，几遍之后就没耐心读题了，因为我真的对钱没有那么大的兴趣！虽然作者有解释为什么用 simple gamble model 但读起来还是无聊透顶。
书开头几节印象还可以，我还做了点笔记的，越到后面越无聊，重复啰嗦而且很自大。讲话的角度经常让我感到完全不是一个世界的人，比如“开公司失败的概率总是远远超过人们预计，如果知道了失败率之后你还会选择开公司吗。”呃呃呃所以你们做事的唯一目的就是成功吗？还有讲到 hostile to algorithm 之类的，拜托，那是因为不信任 machinery 吗？那是因为 algorithm 也是人写的啊！我怎么能确信写 algorithm 的人有考虑到我认为重要的因素/有随着现代价值更新呢？
#ThinkingFastAndSlow #读书 -
@hiljaisuus Ihmiset ovat siinä mielessä ihan tavallisia eläimiä että teemme aina sitä mikä on helppoa ja mukavaa. Kyllä #DanielKahneman’in #thinkingfastandslow -kirjan perusajatus pitää.
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You don’t know how many posts & replies I write and then delete. 😂😅
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This weekend will be exciting! John E. Laird (https://laird.engin.umich.edu/), Yoshua Bengio (https://yoshuabengio.org/) and @garymarcus are speaking at #AAAI #FSS 2022 on Thinking Fast and Slow - https://sites.google.com/view/aaai-fss22/program.
Laird and Bengio represent the cognitive-symbolic and statistical-sub-symbolic views respectively. Both have architectures that implement some form of 'fast and slow'. @garymarcus ofcourse is the chief cynic :)
#AI #ML #ThinkingFastAndSlow #CognitiveArchitecture #NeuroSymbolic
