Sublime

Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of

What is going on here? Shafir and Tversky argued that when we make choices, we are not ‘expressing’ a pre-existing preference at all; indeed, they would argue that there are no such preferences. What we are doing instead is improvising – making up our preferences as we go along.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

Dan Wegner, one of the most perverse and creative social psychologists, has dragged the imp into the lab and made it confess to being an aspect of automatic processing.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel

Less ambitious, more accessible, Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will20 doesn’t deal with the nature of consciousness so much as with the nature of will, which Wegner thumbnails as “our mind’s way of estimating what it thinks it did.” And of course, Oliver Sacks21 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even