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Chayce Hayman

ENG 101E-14

Dr. Cassel

14 November 2018

Subconscious

The subconscious is a part of the brain that can influence people and make decisions

without awareness of it happening. We don’t even realize it is there, but it is. It can make

decisions for us without even realizing it was the subconscious mind and not the conscious

mind. Most people are uninformed about the subconscious, but it is actually quite complex and

active in affecting us in our everyday lives.

The reason I chose my topic to research and write about is from a discussion I had with

some friends of mine. So recently I had been pretty curious about the subconscious and what it

does. I was having a discussion with two friends of mine one day, and we were talking about

the subconscious. We were discussing what we thought about it and our thoughts on how it

works. I said I wasn’t really sure what I thought about it because I haven’t ever thought about it

before. So after our discussion I became curious about the subconscious and how it actually

affects us as people. I thought about it for a little while but I was still unsure of how to works

and what it really is. So eventually I just moved on past it. Then about a week later I was

informed of this research project. I was told the topic needed to be researchable and it needed

to affect me. So I knew right away I was going to do my project over the subconscious and how

it affects us as people.
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I felt confused and uninformed about the topic and wanted to learn more about it.

Learning more about it excites me because I get the information about it that I am looking for.

Before my research I thought the subconscious was an area deep inside one’s mind with

thoughts that the person has but don’t know they’re are having. I knew that it had something

to do with the mind and not a lot of people are informed about it. I believed that it is a

powerful part of the brain that we just can’t or haven’t yet accessed. I was mostly right about

what I thought about the subconscious but I didn’t know any of the details about it or how it

even worked until I did this research project.

The subconscious affects us more than most people realize. It can affect our everyday

lives. It makes decisions without us even knowing. Like if you’re trying to decide what to do in a

situation, it is likely that the subconscious has already made the decision. It can alter someone’s

judgement of another person based on little things. For example psychologists at Yale did a

study where they altered someone’s judgement of a stranger based on if they handed them a

cup of hot coffee or a cup of iced coffee. There are studies like this are pouring out of

psychological research. It can influence our decisions without us knowing by being triggered by

the senses. Studies show that people tidy up more when there is faint smell of cleaning liquid

in the air, people become more competitive if there is a briefcase in sight, and become more

cooperative if they catch a glimpse of words like “dependable” and “support”. These are

demonstrations of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can activate goals and motives

people already have (Benedict).

The subconscious can act as a memory bank. It can hold memories we don’t even know

we remember. Willis R. Whitney in his article “How the Subconscious Works” says he was trying
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to think of a name of a person in his own company. He wrote down three names before getting

the right one on the fourth. He wondered how he got there. Then he remembered about 60

years back when he learned his three R’s in a little red school house, that the names he thought

of were the names of the four farmers that bounded the little red schoolhouse. He hadn’t

consciously thought of them since way back then until now but they were stored away in his

subconscious to be used when he would need them. So it can bring up old memories, we don’t

even know we have, to help us come up with something we are trying to think of (Whitney).

The subconscious can affect us through subconscious cues and subliminal messages.

People can consciously suppress memories when asked to. One experiment used visual cues to

tell volunteers to remember or forget words while trying to remember a variety of word pairs

and if told to forget, they were less likely to remember it later on. Raphael Gaillard and his

colleagues have shown that this works subliminally as well. The team trained a group of 44

volunteers to remember or forget in response to clear visual cues. The volunteers recalled the

second word in a pair 83% of the time when given the remember cue but only 77% of the time

when given the forget cue. Next the team ran the same experiment but flashed the forget and

remember cues on a screen for periods of time that were too short for anyone to consciously

notice them. The researchers found that the subconscious cues to forget lowered the average

recall rate to 75% and the subconscious cues to remember lowered the average recall rate to

81%. So the subconscious can not only remember things for us but tell our conscious mind to

forget something (Surugue, Subconscious Cues Can Make Us Forget Things).

The subconscious is more powerful than many believe. It is thought of as the brain’s autopilot,

which it is basically, but it also plays a crucial role in learning and memory. It is also better at
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making tough decisions than rational analysis is. In the 1980s the late neuroscientist, Benjamin

Libet discovered a spark of brain activity 300 milliseconds before a conscious subject chose to

twitch a finger. In 2008 John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational

Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, discovered brain activity up to 10 seconds before a conscious

decision to move. This is incredibly interesting because it is showing the real activity of the

subconscious and the relationship it has with the conscious mind. In the sense that the

subconscious acts before the conscious mind does. This proves that the subconscious can affect our

conscious mind and influence our thoughts, decisions, and actions.

Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at INSERM, France did

an experiment where he flashed a word on a screen in front of a volunteer followed, almost

immediately after, by a picture which made a conscious perception of the word. As time between

the two increased the word slowly came into consciousness accompanied by characteristic activity

on a brain scan. This usually happened when the interval reached around 50 milliseconds, but

when emotional words such as "love" or "fear" were used, it happened a few milliseconds earlier,

like the subconscious made a tough decision on the words importance and attention worthiness.

Experiments like these have changed people’s views about the relationship between the conscious

and subconscious thought.

Since the subconscious is so powerful and interesting, the people at Facebook decided

to do a secret experiment with peoples’ subconscious. For a week in 2012, a trio of scientists were

allowed to tinker with nearly 700,000 user’s newsfeeds. They measured whether a mostly positive

or mostly negative newsfeed would influence the users own posts. The data suggested that

emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion causing people to have the
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same emotions without their awareness. People were not happy about the secret experiment

performed on them. Facebook did not add to the newsfeeds but reduced negative headlines from

one sample of users and reducing positive headlines from another sample of users. This could

mean that Facebook could have a powerful emotion and behavior shaping aspect due to it being

viewed by some 130 million Americans who sign on to Facebook each day. It is crazy to think about

the power of the subconscious and the influence it has on you, where you are emotionally

influenced without knowing it because someone messed with your newsfeed.

Figure 1 Shows an iceberg in comparison to the mind showing the conscious and subconscious areas (atuneu.com).
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In figure 1 you can see in the comparison of the iceberg to the mind showing how much

the subconscious actually does and how much larger it is than the conscious mind. The

subconscious mind is almost like a makeup of ourselves. It stores a lot of the things that make

us who we are. Such as, for a few examples, our beliefs, memories, and reactions.

It is uncertain as of right now where exactly the subconscious is located at in the brain.

Many scientists have been trying to locate it and each idea that I read about was different. So

as of now we do not know where it is at. But we surely do know that it is there.
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Works Cited

Bruinius, Harry. “Facebook’s Secret Experiment on Users Had a Touch of ‘Inception.’” Christian Science

Monitor, 30 June 2014, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost,

ezproxy.wittenberg.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a

9h&AN=96873874&site=ehost-live.

Carey, Benedict. “Who’s Minding the Mind?”. The New York Times 31 July 2007

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31subl.html Accessed 29 October

2018.

Douglas, Kate. “8 How Powerful Is the Subconscious? (Cover Story).” New Scientist, vol. 206, no. 2754, Apr.

2010, p. 32. EBSCOhost,

ezproxy.wittenberg.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&

AN=49099142&site=ehost-live.

Google image- https://www.quora.com/Why-is-our-subconscious-mind-so-powerful

Surugue, Lea. “Subconscious Cues Can Make Us Forget Things.” New Scientist, vol. 239,

no. 3197, Sept. 2018, p. 15. EBSCOhost,

ezproxy.wittenberg.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tr

ue&db=a9h&AN=131973150&site=ehost-live.

Whitney, Willis R. “How Does Your Subconscious Work?” Saturday Evening Post, vol.

218, no. 15, Oct. 1945, p. 6. EBSCOhost,

ezproxy.wittenberg.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct

=true&db=a9h&AN=20067401&site=ehost-live.
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