In this video I describe different levels of consciousness that we have based on our level of access to different types of information. These include conscious, preconscious, subconscious/unconscious, and nonconscious levels of awareness.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we looked at different types of consciousness, so we compared different organisms and we saw that they can have different levels of awareness of their environment or of themselves. So we can classify those as different types of consciousness.
At the very top end of that spectrum we had sort of the full rich human experience of consciousness which we considered to be the highest level of consciousness that we’re aware of or perhaps that we even could be aware of. So within that there’s different levels of access to information. It’s not the case that we have the same high level of access to all information about the environment or about ourselves, there’s different levels. That’s what we’re going to look at in this video.
The first level of consciousness would be information that we are conscious of. This is stuff that we are aware of, we can think about, we can sort of actively engage with this information. A closely related level of awareness would be the preconscious level. So the preconscious refers to things that could be conscious if we choose to think about them. They’re things that can be brought to mind, right? We’re not currently thinking about them, they’re not conscious at the moment but they could be.
For instance, if I were to ask you about a vacation that you took a year ago, you weren’t thinking about it before I asked, it wasn’t in your conscious mind before that, but as soon as I asked you can bring it to mind very easily. So we consider that to be a preconscious type of information.
Now there’s some information that you can’t readily bring to mind, that you’re not aware of at the time that you’re doing something, but it still influences your behavior. This is what we call the subconscious. So the subconscious is something that you’re not aware of but it does influence your behavior. So you might be able to look back and say “okay, I wasn’t aware of this at the time but it was actually influencing my thought or it was influencing my behavior”. So that might be something that we would consider to be subconscious.
Now there’s a bit of confusion here because this term is used interchangeably with another term and this term is unconscious so you’ll often see these you these terms used interchangeably saying something is subconscious, we’re saying something is unconscious and they’re meant to mean the same thing; meaning something that you’re not aware of but that influences your behavior. We’ll see some examples of this in a future video when we talk about priming and we talk about the mere-exposure effect. So we can have stimuli that influence us even though we’re not aware of them and we can say those are subconscious or we can say they’re unconscious.
But further confusion arises because the term unconscious can also be used to talk about some Freudian ideas. So we also have the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious refers to repressed wishes, desires, and fears that are kept out of conscious awareness because they would cause anxiety. Most of the time when people talk about the unconscious, unless they’re specifically talking about Freud or talking about psychodynamic theory in general, then they’re probably referring to the subconscious.
They’re not really referring to this Freudian unconscious and the Freudian unconscious is generally discredited today in terms of the type of unconscious influences that people mostly think about now. That said, I’m not trying to denigrate Freud too much. I think people do this they lay a lot of criticism on Freud as, you know, his ideas being ridiculous or, you know, that I’ve even heard other teachers say that perhaps we shouldn’t learn about Freud at all. I mean why do we even have to teach students about all these ideas that are wrong?
Well I think that’s not the most credible way of viewing Freud’s contribution to psychology. I mean his ideas really were revolutionary and completely changed how we think about the mind. I mean before Freud this idea that there could be things you’re not aware of that influence you, people didn’t think that way and Freud helped to make that the type of idea that now we take for granted. We just assume “oh, of course things can influence you without you being aware of them”. I mean that’s a pretty big idea and we should give Freud credit where he deserves it. The details, of course there’s some disagreement and you know there’s aspects of Freud’s theory that are no longer considered to be valid but that said, we shouldn’t completely dismiss Freud as an important figure in psychology.
Ok, so the last level aware of awareness that we’ll look at is the nonconscious. Ok, so what’s the difference between saying that something is unconscious versus something is nonconscious? Well when we say it’s nonconscious a good way to remember this, remember the N in nonconscious and think of it as “Never aware” or think of it as having “No access”. The nonconscious level refers to things that you cannot be aware of whereas the unconscious we can look back and see the influence on behavior and, you know, even the Freudian unconscious believed that you could uncover it, you could figure out what was going on in there.
Whereas the nonconscious it’s like you can’t figure it out. You don’t have access to that information so when it comes to something like controlling your heart rate, you know, or your digestion or your liver function, I mean you just simply can’t do that. You can’t be aware of what’s happening in your liver at any time no matter how hard you try to think about it. The same would be true even for your body movements, right? You might say “oh, of course I’m aware of my body movements” but you’re not really aware.
I mean you know how to move but you don’t really understand what’s happening and you you can’t really have access to, you know, specifically which neurons are firing or exactly how you’re contracting different muscles. I mean you just know I want to put my hand over here and you just do it but in terms of actually how that happens, what you’re actually doing in your body to make that happen, you have no idea. And you really can’t have any idea. It’s nonconscious, you don’t have access to that type of information.
Alright, so these are the different levels of access that we have, the different types of information that we can categorize as conscious, preconscious, subconscious, or nonconscious.
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