Is Mental Life Conscious?

How Much of Mental Life Is Conscious?

There are various ways of addressing the question of how much of mental life is conscious, each of which leads to slightly different answers. What they all reveal, however, is that consciousness is a very limited part of the mind. For example, if the extent of consciousness is equated with the amount of information that we can “hold in mind” at any one point in time, then readers might be surprised to learn that consciousness is restricted to only seven units of information.

It is no accident that most telephone numbers are roughly seven digits long. Digit span (the capacity to repeat a string of random digits) is a standard clinical test of as aspect of working-memory capacity. (“Working-memory: is synonymous with the ability to consciously “hold things in mind:). If a patient cannot retain roughly seven digits, his or her audiverbal working memory (audioverbal consciousness) information (or “location” information) in mind in a similar way, but this aspect of consciousness is even more restricted: most people can hold only some four units of visuo-spatial information in mind at a time. (This capacity is usually tested by tapping a series of blocks scattered before the patient and asking him or her to hold the sequence of taps in mind.) Considering how many thousands of pieces of information we are processing all the time, this way of measuring the capacity of consciousness reveals that it is very limited indeed. The vast bulk of the information we constantly need to process must be processed in the unconscious part of the mind.

Another way of estimating the “size” of consciousness is to measure the extent of its influence on our behavior. What proportion of our actions is consciously determined? In a review of the scientific evidence pertaining to this question (and related masters). Bargh and Chartrand (1999) concluded that 95% of our actions are unconsciously determined. This way of measuring consciousness therefore suggests that it accounts for only 5% of behavior.

So, regardless of how they measure it, mainstream cognitive scientists today agree with Freud on this point: consciousness is attached to only a very small part of our mental life. Where then, is this consciousness generated in the brain? And how does it become attached to mental processes? And why?

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

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