Behavioural Science Blog

This is a reply posted at LinkedIn by Tom Woottoon to the original article: Unconscious perceptual processes.

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I spoke to 150 mostly doctors and therapists last week and continue to be amazed at how my radical ideas are so well received. Depresssion, Bipolar, and Schizophrenia can be turned into an advantage with professional guidance and disciplined effort. Using the unconscious mind is a major tool that can help.

I did a Google search on Unconscious Perception and even though I have a 142 IQ, I have no idea what it means :-) I’ll post some of the info I found at the end of this message and maybe someone can explain it.

Our core principles are that we need acceptance, introspection, mind skills, a valid plan with measurable milestones, professional help, and our own effort to turn our condition into an advantage.

Among other things, acceptance includes accepting the possibility that your condition can be turned into an advantage instead of trying to make it go away. I can go into greater detail, but that is not the focus of the topic.

Introspection means to look within and gain understanding. It is central to therapy, but can also be a practice outside of the therapeutic sessions. Mood charting fits within the realm of introspection as do many other practices. We teach a simple process where the subconscious mind helps us notice things that we are usually unconscious of.

We help people create a list of 5 – 7 questions with a simple yes or no answer for three different topics – how are your thoughts; how are your behaviors; and are you living according to what you believe in. The person doing the introspection sets a regular time to read and answer the questions every day. As they are just yes or no questions, it only takes a couple of minutes.

What happens is the subconscious mind begins to monitor those topics so that you can answer the questions. You start out totally unconscious of the triggers and reactions, but the subconscious mind keeps track in order to know whether to answer yes or no. Eventually, the subconscious mind breaks through and allows you to see not only the event, but further and further into the thoughts and actions that lead to the event.

At first we have no idea why we react to things the way we do as we are unconscious of the triggers as we have not learned how to perceive them.

There is a video of this topic at:
http://www.bipolaradvantage.com/AdvantageProgram/Outreach/Videos/Introspection.php

Another video that covers perception is at:
http://www.bipolaradvantage.com/AdvantageProgram/Results/Insight.php

Now as to the definition of Unconscious Perception:

“Previous research has demonstrated that hemispheric asymmetries for conscious visual perception do not lead to asymmetries for unconscious visual perception. These studies utilized emotionally neutral items as stimuli. The current research utilized both emotionally negative and neutral stimuli to assess hemispheric differences for conscious and unconscious visual perception. Conscious perception was measured using a subjective measure of awareness reported by participants on each trial. Unconscious perception was measured by an ”exclusion task,” a form of word-stem-completion task. Consistent with predictions, negative stimuli were consciously perceived most often when presented to the right hemisphere. Negative stimuli presented to the right hemisphere showed no evidence of unconscious perception, suggesting that the hemispheric asymmetry for the conscious perception of negative information occurs at the expense of unconscious perception.”

What does that mean?

http://eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ730515&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ730515