Unconscious Mental Life

Unconscious mental life consists of mental states - percepts, memories, and the like which influence conscious experience, thought, and action outside of phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. Automatic processes, for example, appear to operate unconsciously in this sense. In addition, dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, as in various forms of amnesia, indicate that subjects can be influenced by memories that they cannot consciously remember. The explicit-implicit distinction has been extended to various other psychological domains, including perception ('subliminal' perception, inattentional blindness, and attentional blindness), learning, and thinking. In principle, it can also be extended beyond cognition to motivation and emotion. In each case, subjects show the influence of mental states of which they are not consciously aware

Hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness

The status of hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness (ASC) has long been controversial. The classic phenomena of hypnosis, such as sensory anaesthesias, analgesia, amnesia, and posthypnotic suggestion, provide prima facie evidence of altered consciousness, but some theorists contend that these are the products of normal mental processes, such as suggestion and expectation. In this article, hypnosis is viewed against a general framework for describing ASCs in terms of four converging operations: induction procedure, subjective experience, behavioural correlates, and physiological correlates. Although ʼneutral’ hypnosis, in the absence of specific suggestions, has few distinctive characteristics, many of the classic phenomena of hypnosis involve dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, or perception, such that percepts, memories, and thoughts influence ongoing experience, thought, and action outside conscious awareness and control