Skills that were once done with conscious effort
have become less conscious, or ‘automatised’, with
time. Reading is a good example. When you first
learned to read, every word was difficult and you
were probably conscious of each letter, but now
you read quickly and with no awareness of individ-
ual letters. Bernard Baars (1997a) suggests, as an
example of his method of contrastive analysis, that
you turn the book upside down and try reading it
like that, forcing yourself to go back to a slower and
more deliberate kind of reading. So, what does this
mean for how the brain changes in the more and
less conscious kinds of reading?
Baars correctly predicted that a brain scan would
show much more activity in a difficult and more
conscious task than in the routine or automated
one. A study using fMRI compared a controlled
search task with a highly practised and auto-
mated task and showed that controlled processing
involves a large network of domain-general brain
areas (including ACC, preSMA, DPMC, and others),
while in automatic processing the control network
drops out, leaving activation in only sensory areas
(Schneider, 2009).
Dual-process theory is a common model for con-
trasting ‘automatic processing’ with the slower and
more effortful ‘controlled processing’ (Kahneman,
2011). There is plenty of evidence for the distinction
(see Chapter 8), but the terms may lead us astray.
They suggest a kind of unintelligent under-mind
that plods along doing boring useful jobs for the
truly intelligent conscious mind or striving self. As
Wegner points out, the term ‘controlled’ implies ‘a
fatal theoretical error – the idea that there is a con-
troller’ (2005, p. 19). In his view the controller is an
illusion created by mental mechanisms including
controlled processes: the controller is an effect, not
a cause (p. 20). So, what is unconscious processing? Is it a useful concept, or is
the whole idea that we can separate conscious processes from unconscious pro-
cesses ultimately misguided? As Nancy Kanwisher puts it,
the fact that we can obligate subjects to produce a binary response
should not fool us into thinking that their internal state itself is binary
or that there is anything important or fixed about the particular
threshold the subject uses. Indeed, anyone who has been a subject in
a psychophysical experiment will be familiar with the uncomfortable
feeling of having to force an unclear and inchoate perceptual experience
into one of a small number of discrete response categories.
(2001, p. 103)PRoFILe 4.1
Christof Koch (b. 1956)
Known for his multi-
coloured clothes and
hair, Christof Koch
was born in Kansas,
but grew up in the
Netherlands, Germa-
ny, Canada, and Morocco. He originally studied physics
and worked at MIT before moving to the California Insti-
tute of Technology to run his own K-Lab. He is now also
Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Sci-
ence in Seattle, where he aims to create three-dimension-
al atlases of the mouse and human brains that contain
anatomical and genomic data, because ‘to understand
consciousness, we need to be able to image the activity
of millions of individual neurons at the same time’. Koch
collaborated with Nobel laureate Francis Crick from the
late 1980s until Crick’s death in 2004, writing numerous
papers and developing a ‘framework for consciousness’
that guided their search for the neural correlates of con-
sciousness. He first worried about consciousness when he
was 18 and in pain: it’s just action potentials and ions
sloshing about – why should they hurt? Asked how his
studies of consciousness have affected his life, Christof
said, ‘I’ve stopped eating the flesh of most animals’. He
finds ecstasy in running and climbing mountains and
once took a solitary mountain hike to convince himself
that there really is freedom of action.