Consciousness Is a Narrative Created by Your Unconscious Mind | Dean Buonomano | Big Think

Dean Buonomano: Okay, but let me, I’ll try to add a bit more on consciousness.

So consciousness is one of the deepest mysteries that we have never attempted to resolve. And part of the problem with studying consciousness is that it’s very difficult to measure. But we do have some insights; and for one, in the context of how the brain tells time, there’s evidence that consciousness is not really what it seems to be.

So what I mean by that is we feel our subjective experiences unfolding in the world around us in sort of this linear narrative in which A follows B, follows C, and follows D in which we experience the world. I should say that again. In which B follows A, and in which C follows B, and D follows C in which things are happening in a linear progression.

But in reality, it seems that our subjective experiences, our conscious narrative, might not be that linear. So there’s a number of experiences or experiments that suggest that the brain processes information in sort of a discontinuous and discrete manner. So it’s not that I’m conscious of everything happening in a nice linear progression.

It seems to be, in some cases, that what happens after interferes or modulates our conscious experience of those things that came before. So it seems that, in some cases, things that happen after an event can alter our consciousness of what happened before.

There’s something called the cutaneous rabbit illusion in which, if you feel a couple of taps on your arm, maybe one, two, three, four, people will feel that as sort of a continuous progression. But in reality, that can’t be a continuous progression because it’s the taps that came later that determined where you felt that the previous taps were occurring.

And if you think of something like speech, you’re probably not aware of my speech in a syllable-by-syllable, word-by-word manner. It seems to be that we become conscious of events around us sort of in chunks in which your unconscious mind reaches a point of analysis by taking and sampling everything that’s happening around it before a subjective experience is delivered into your conscious mind.

So I think there’s some suggestions that the unconscious brain is continuously taking in, sampling events through its sensory organs, waiting to appropriate points in the narrative to deliver something—a nice narrative of the world around us—into our conscious mind.

In the case of speech, for example, we don’t have an experience of every syllable by syllable, every word by word. But sometimes we have this chunking that happens. So, for example, if I say, “the mouse pad was beside the computer,” in that case, the mouse could have another meaning.

The mouse could mean a rodent, or it could be the mouse pad of a computer. But you only knew the meaning of the word “mouse” with the word in this case that came after the word “mouse.” So, “the mouse pad.” I could have said, “the mouse was hungry.”

So the meaning of the word “mouse” can only be understood based on what comes after that. So it seems that when people understand that, they might have to wait until the appropriate time to create a conscious perception or a conscious interpretation of what we’re listening to.

So I think there’s mounting evidence that consciousness is not a linear flow of what’s happening around us but sort of a creation, a narrative, a convenient narrative of what’s happening around us created for our viewing pleasure by the unconscious brain.