ScienceDaily: New theory suggests that decisions are made unconsciously, then about half a second later become conscious

“"We knew that conscious processes were simply too slow to be actively involved in music, sports, and other activities where split-second reflexes are required. But if consciousness is not involved in such processes, then a better explanation of what consciousness does was needed," said Budson, who also is Chief of Cognitive & Behavioral Neurology, Associate Chief of Staff for Education, and Director of the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System.

According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them. So, we can say to ourselves, we're just going to have one spoonful of ice cream and, the next thing we know, the container is empty -- because our conscious mind is not controlling our actions. "Even our thoughts are not generally under our conscious control. This lack of control is why we may have difficulty stopping a stream of thoughts running through our head as we're trying to go to sleep, and also why mindfulness is hard," adds Budson.

Budson and his coauthors consider a number of neurologic, psychiatric, and developmental disorders to be disorders of consciousness including Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, delirium, migraine, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, certain types of autism and more.”

Some Insights From This Article

• Quite an interesting study, apparently decisions are made unconsciously before they are made aware of our conscience. This can have a lot of implications in philosophy and other realms of sciences but for now it’s something we can understand to use to our advantage.

• Perhaps this is why it may be difficult to really try to “consciously” make a change, our unconscious mind may have a lot more hold over our choices than we really thought.

• The matter of making a change is then to convince our unconscious mind? How do we do that? There’s really no clear answer but there may be belief that our conscience and our unconscious may not be a one way relationship and that perhaps our conscious actions and experiences can affect our unconscious.

What do you make of this interesting finding?

Full article is here!

#Conscience #Unconscious #Decisions