I agreed to discuss the book "Incognito" by Eagleman in the fall. A person can accumulate plenty of knowledge without quite realizing it. I have a blog (Fear, Fun and Filoz) that runs from a few days in 2008 to today that includes 3874 posts. I have a website (Kirbyvariety) of about 212 web pages. I often look at the blog and the site to see what I have been doing, what I have thought, read and written. When I started to think about what I could say that might be entertaining, informative and helpful about our conscious and our unconscious minds, I looked in the blog and the web site pages. I was surprised at how much I have and how much of my thinking and writing seems to be related to our minds.
Humans concentrate on their own conscious mind and on the language of others. It can improve the picture if we think of "language" as including both our memories of what others have said and done, and our perceptions of them as people. That is, we know others not just by what they openly say, but by comparing one appearance or comment with what we can remember of earlier statements and actions.
Teachers easily focus on explicit parts of others since there isn't time to go much deeper with students, but teachers and anyone who interacts with other people realizes that what we see and what we are told is only part of what is going on.
In some ways, the story of the unconscious human mind is a very old one. We have known and discussed for centuries a mother's worry and imagination about her soldier son, or a lover's preoccupation with imagining the beloved far away. In other ways, Mesmer and Freud and more recent thinkers and professionals have in the last couple of centuries tried to be scientific and evidence-based in studying our unconscious minds. Daniel Kahneman is the author of the book "Thinking: Fast and Slow". It tends to equate rapid reflexive thinking with what our wiring and instincts lead us to, and slower, more complete questioning and comparison with our cognitive conscious mind work.
It certainly helps to include the force of emotions when we are thinking about ourselves. If I very much treasure my car, I may think about it and its care differently than if I am indifferent. We also have the slide from explicit desire to habit. I can train myself all the way to habit so that I reach for a cigarette or my car keys without consciously paying attention to what I am doing. When I drive a car, I pay attention to my speed and to other vehicles while conversing with a friend.
