I Think—and Also, I Am

When I was a kid, I used to go fishing with my Dad. He’d come into my room long before dawn, and he’d say: “Jeff, time to get up.” And even though I was fast asleep, I’d always sit up immediately and say: “Okay.” What always seemed strange was that I heard his voice and responded to it, even though I hadn’t been awake. Clearly, some part of my brain was monitoring everything around me, even though I wasn’t conscious.

One of Freud’s lasting contributions to our understanding of the human mind was the concept of the unconscious. His theories were fueled, in part, by that strangest of human experiences: dreaming. Nowadays, neuroscience is just as likely to view dreams as random side-effects of some nightly neurologic housekeeping function, but that doesn’t change how eerie and bizarre they can be. One of the oddest things about dreams is their consistent ability to surprise us. As they unfold in our minds, we have no idea how they’re going to turn out. Think about how weird that is. Our minds are creating something that’s completely surprising to our conscious minds.

We know now that much of our brain’s neural activity is separate from consciousness. This is true, not only of our primitive, autonomic function, but of much of the processing and storage of our thoughts and memories. It’s as if our consciousness is no more than the monitor that displays the end product of a vast, complex computer that’s doing all the work.

Because we experience the world through our conscious minds, we tend to think that our conscious thoughts are the totality of who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have an enormous capacity to surprise and deceive ourselves. Our conscious thoughts are merely the output--the user interface on the screen. To understand the truth of why we do what we do, we have to look deeper.