All current neuroscientists, such as the Spanish professor of neuroscience in the USA, Joaquín M. Fuster, one of the world's leading authorities on the study of the cerebral cortex, say: "The vast majority of our decisions are unconscious. This means that we are not aware of the reasons for the vast majority of our behaviours... we are in a constant unconscious game" (Fuster is neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist).
Stanislas Dahaene, French neuroscientist in Consciousness in the Brain: "Sophisticated executive functions operate unconsciously (...) even high-level cortical areas encoding our acquired cultural knowledge, such as reading, arithmetic, can operate outside our consciousness (...) they can trigger a set of mental processes without consciousness".
The content of the unconscious. The brain does not see reality, it constructs it in a mixture of what comes from outside and what is stored inside.. We try to conserve, to stick to our ideas, to deny ourselves self-criticism, to go along with the wheels of our own particular mill, even if we have to falsify what we perceive. To perceive is to interpret.
From birth we accumulate ideas, experiences, memories, emotions, configurations of the world, of ourselves and of others. It has taken many years to build it up and we present strong defence mechanisms, resistances and subtle manoeuvres to preserve this enormous construct. This is where the fear of therapy comes from. We have to add what we have inherited from our origin as a species, from our ancestors, from the environment in our childhood and adolescent years. Then, education, training. All this has modelled a strength of brain connections, of neural loops for problem solving and navigating the world. All this is at the service of the preservation of our life, of our vital constants. Well, this is the origin of the different strategies for not changing, of the defence mechanisms: denial, repression of the need to project outside what we do not accept inside, sublimation, etc.
"We despise the complex".
We perceive for our conservative mind that imposes itself on our desire to know, because we fear and even despise the complex. We perceive from a basic level, from emotions common to all mammals, with the same chemistry: from feelings, from our body, from our vital state, from our education and training, within our "tribe", from our senses, generally underdeveloped due to the limited capacity for concentration to which we are led by a whirlwind of news and influences generated by the legion of sellers of proposals that surround us.
From personal and collective memory, and always from our very small personal world and that of the group in which we are included! And, what is worse, from headlines, currents, fashions, emotional plagues, ideologies, from the lack of awareness of life on our Planet Earth as a biological unit of which we are part and which we are attacking every day, from our limited mental resources, from the lack of sensitivity to perceive ourselves as sentient and barely thinking beings.
We do not perceive what we have not seen before, what we have not experienced, what we have not been trained to see, we would say that what we have not seen before we do not see now. We perceive, equally, from our vital training, from individual and collective memories, from our developed senses, trained or not. Without feelings we would not be viable, because they are perceptual, adaptive systems prior to consciousness and generally outside of it. There are people who, because of their personal history, do not perceive the good, the meritorious. Trained in criticism they do not feel the praiseworthy, the exemplary, they can attack it, they do not perceive it.
We need the connection of the posterior perceptual cortex, the executive frontal cortex, the posterior longitudinal fasciculus to build perception, guide action and perceptual constancy. If we eliminate for our real gain the 95% of the subcortical brain, our body and our half-trained senses, we may believe we are rational thinking beings, but we have a filter like the Thalamus that gives passage to what comes from outside through the senses, and from the body, if it is deemed relevant to distribute it through the cortexes and from there back to the rest of the brain. This means that the rational represents a tiny amount of the brain.
Sophisticated mechanisms of self-deception
If there is no previous experience, it may not be perceived because the thalamus will say it doesn't make sense, process it as noise and discard it. As clever as we are, it turns out that a structure prior to our species makes the selection of what has value or not, its value is survival, which unfortunately is not the common denominator of our decisions, because other structures intervene, the amygdala, which is blunt and decides on the spot without nuances. Don't you recognise it? This primitive cortex keeps all animals on guard against dangers and us too, but it can overreach itself seeing enemies everywhere, and if we have enough ideology and power, we will cause millions of deaths, or on the contrary, we will smoke, we will be sedentary, gluttonous and we will not have programming to detect the dangers of such behaviour, as happens in all addicts where the amygdala loses volume and they kill themselves slowly.
We are very primitive animals with sophisticated mechanisms of self-deception and justification, called defence mechanisms, which our culture has increased with its narrow-minded denial of the unconscious, i.e. the secret work of these and other structures outside of consciousness. We always try to see what confirms what we already know, in order to remain in our judgements, evaluations, criteria, ideologies, proof-proof of scientific evidence. Generally from our "tribe" our cultural or social environmentWe do not see what is happening outside our people, our nation, our Europe. They, the politicians and we do not see the future that demands union, a common project, a constant path of working together. They and we live from day to day. We do not have the brains for much more.
To perceive is to classify and colour objects or ideas in the world with affects and to relate them. We have a set of nuclei, loops, neural associations and molecular mechanisms stratified within the brain from the species that have preceded us that gave rise to the structures from which we perceive, phylogenetic memory, activating or slowing down our decisions and perceptions. Rather than knowing, we tend to recognise, and this is a biological fact that we deny. That is why we learn little from our obfuscations.
95% of what we perceive is outside of consciousness, due to the work of structures such as the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala and the whole body and other components of the limbic system, where the necessary processes of living such as love, hate, reward, pleasure, pain, emotional memories, food, sex, flight, defence, aggression reside.
A politician perceives that everything is political, a chemist that everything is chemistry, a physicist, a forestry engineer will perceive things beyond our understanding. Therefore, our ability to perceive is very limited and tied to our constructs. With these limitations we decide and perceive the origin of our difficulties as humans. Tied to our personal memory, to that of our species and to our social or scientific culture, to the bad or good education we have received. Always driven by our emotional system, which if aroused, we will leave logic, rationality and maybe even what favours us, entrenching ourselves in our conceptions, our beliefs, with my own, our own, my militancy: "I will vote for this party until I die".
It is therefore necessary to understand and be consistent with the limitations of our brain. This would be a good contribution from neuroscience. And thus begin to cooperate, to ask for help and help; knowing that we are rabid animals contained by repression, stopping the dogs that bark demagogies, simplicities, messianisms and social reforms without any basis, from what we already know from science. They should explain these progressive projects, because as far as we know, progress as humanity has been brought about by laws, culture, science, the work of millions of anonymous beings, and somewhat by politics, since the Greeks, trying to achieve democracy. In a world in crisis like today's, it is a scam to offer progressivism that is the mother of all health cordons.Instead of union and vision of the future and very long-term policies, before we are crushed, like a mojama sandwich, by the great powers and the emerging countries, while we entertain ourselves in dividing up the seats and putting patches in place for this legislature. Although we have known this tremendous limitation of the collective mind and its emerging powers and representatives since antiquity. Already the rhetorician Georgias confided to Socrates his experience that every time he arrived in a city with his brother to be entrusted with his health, they always chose him, a sophist, and not his consanguineous doctor.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis