Unconscious and Conscious Thinking

Before I began learning about autism I didn’t know anything about the many functions the brain performs. Like most people I had some hazy idea that the mind was contained within the brain, but I had no idea how the structure of the brain controlled the way I thought. The mind I thought was controlled by me, isn’t in fact. I think a lot of people have trouble accepting this fact.

I read about the conscious and unconscious when I became interested in psychoanalysis as a teenager. I wanted to figure out how my mind worked so I could fix whatever it was that was wrong with me. I also began reading lots of self-help books and spiritual literature. It took me a long time to realise what my problem was; that I had an autistic spectrum disorder.

Although I’d read a lot about the conscious and the unconscious I never felt I had fully grasped what these terms referred to. I couldn’t picture them as real things. They didn’t seem real to me. They seemed very vague, nebulous terms to me.

The whole time I’ve been reading about autism and how the autistic brain works I’ve been looking for a definition of these terms and now I think I’ve got there. This may be obvious stuff to some, but for me it was a eureka moment, because I could finally attach these terms to parts of my brain.

My unconscious mind, I believe, contains my memory (naturally) and my feelings. I‘m still a little unsure of pairing my feelings with the unconscious, as I only have my experience as an autistic person to go on. I used to think that emotions began in the conscious mind, but my personal experience contradicts this.

If my emotions arose within the conscious mind I would be aware of them the moment they happen. But I’m not. The physical sensations of an emotion are obvious; blushing, increased heart rate, tears, etc… all of which tells me I’m having an emotional experience.

Subtle emotions though are more difficult to pick up on. Maybe it’s different for NT people. If I am having trouble telling when I have an emotion this is because it is still in my unconscious. It seems to me that the unconscious is determining which emotions are released and which aren’t which would suggest that this is where they are first felt.

The conscious mind though, is my awareness. It is a logical thinker and the knowledge it acquires is passed onto the unconscious to be stored. Our conscious mind must be able to contain a number of thoughts at the same time to be able to think. This is our working memory. It’s like a very think slice of memory, just enough to allow the thinking process to occur.

You could say the main role of the unconscious is to store, and the main role of the conscious is to think. These would be neat definitions, but not strictly true. The unconscious is also a thinker. When we can’t figure something out using our conscious mind we often wait for our unconscious to come up with something.

Lastly I would just like to say something else I noticed about memory. Our memory contains both events that have happened to us and knowledge we acquire. We acquire our memory of events without any conscious effort, but knowledge requires more effort before it becomes part of our memory. I think there are two different mechanisms at work here.

When we remember past events, these are usually things our unconscious has chosen to remember, when we are learning new knowledge these are things that our conscious mind has chosen to remember. Knowledge I think can be divided into facts and wisdom/lessons. Facts, if they don’t get used can be forgotten, or rather the link between the fact and our conscious mind gets lost. This happens to me a lot. Wisdom though, permanently alters our personality, and stays with us forever.