(Newswire.net — October 29, 2014) — Former President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations as well as a founder of the Organizational Program at The William Alanson White Institute, Ken Eisold, Ph.D., wrote in an article on consciousness in the Psychology Today that we are largely sleepwalking through out lives.
“We usually don’t need to be conscious of what we want. We already ‘know’ what it is, and once we have started to be aware of having a choice, we have already made it,” wrote Eisold.
To give an example, Eisold quoted a Princeton professor Michael S. A. Graziano, who, using the example of seeing the color white, said that contrary to our subjective beliefs, we make most of our decisions automatically and unconsciously. Therefore, when we are seeing a white color, we see what doesn’t actually exist. The white is only a combination of the entire spectrum of colors.
According to a Professor Graziano , awareness is actually “a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color. In this theory, awareness is not an illusion. It’s a caricature.”
Eisold said in an article that unawareness was a great advantage to our ancestors struggling for survival, as they reacted instinctively to hunt an animal they can eat or to escape from the surrounding danger.
This instinct-driven behavior is great advantage today in modern society, for example to traders scanning the markets for commodities or currencies or derivatives. Opportunities for profit appear in a flash, and traders must react.
An ‘autopilot’-mode, however, is not sufficient for making complex and difficult decisions. Our ancestors needed to become conscious to organize and manage their communities. So we, are able to make a decision unconsciously, however, we need to think about managing our wealth, when to buy and sell, how to plan, when to be suspicious, etc.
This is where the things get more complicated. “We have to think together so we can act together,” said Eisold, emphasizing that by ourselves, we are sleepwalking. “Faced with making communal choices we need to weigh the alternatives, to debate and reflect, exploring the long-range consequences, and think about the impact on our communities,” Eisold said.
In short, that means, in order to make a right decision, we have to inhibit our impulses for immediate action and act as a part of something greater, which is tricky, said Eisold.
Neuro-science has made huge contributions to our understanding of how the mind works, said Eisold, yet it does not have much to say, about us as social animals or group members. “We can’t really do much just by ourselves,” concluded Eisold.