Kristin Magaldi – We’ve always believed that conscious thought is the seat of all higher forms of human thinking; from art, to science, to language, our ability to process the world around us and reflect on deeper meanings has always seemed to be in the forefront of our minds. But what if all of our more abstract ruminations did not come from conscious thought at all? What if it was actually the dictating most of the things we do?

In the new paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University Ezequiel Morsella posits just that in what he calls the “Passive Frame Theory.” Morsella suggests that the conscious does not do nearly as much as we thought. In fact, conscious thought is just a small fraction of what is happening in the brain. Instead, it is the unconscious that is doing everything for us, and we are completely unaware of it.

To clarify, we are not talking about unconscious in the Freudian sense here; all of your thoughts and actions are not stemming from a strange attraction to your mother and a need to kill your father. Instead, according to Morsella, the unconscious is a type of processing plant that takes all decisions and thoughts that need to be made during the course of your day, and turns out an answer well-suited to the situation. Once it’s time to act on that decision, the unconscious hands the information over to the conscious mind, which believes it had it figured out all along.

Basically, your unconscious is like the ghostwriter who actually wrote the novel a celebrity published. Yes, the celebrity is getting all of the credit, but none of anything that was written was his idea. Continue reading →