The brain is the organ deputed to the production of culture, is the home of intelligence, of will, of fantasy and memory; the human mind consists of a set of brain activities: such activities produce the thoughts, receive and process the external stimuli, recall the memories; when we think we all “feel” in our mind our thoughts, as if there was an inner voice, but it is important to note that this does not always happen; there are numerous experimental tests that show us that only a part of our thoughts is heard and the same is true for the reception of stimuli. In other words there are some thoughts that we know that we think and others we do not, some things we know that we have seen or heard and some that we do not know; all our thoughts that are perceived are told conscience, while the unaware thoughts are called expression of the “unconscious”; please note that the mind is one, but only a part of it is perceived by us; unconscious and consciousness are thus separated only to our perception, but generally have a common work to carry out with harmony and consistency, since they are parts of the same mind, which is also the result of biological evolution that, as we have seen, has grown by creating organs and bodies increasingly complex, but always based on the symbiosis and on the specialization and always equipped with well determined and selected features.
We all, when we draw any figure, guide our hands full with conscience of it; if we talk instead with a friend during a walk, we do not think what our legs do: they seem to move alone and the same goes for all automatic movements, many of which often we don’t even know to make; anyway, legs can’t walk alone, these movements are controlled by the brain, but not in an aware way.
It is important to note that the concept of automatic movement is very different from the innate or instinctive movement: we can let ourselves be absorbed by the speech with a friend even when we drive a car or a bicycle and surely they are not instinctive movements provided by nature: they are automatic, but learned, not innate; this reveals that the hidden part of our mind is able to learn, both directly and through culture. To use an analogy with informatics, the unconscious is able to perform functions in parallel while we are focused on an activity which in that time is considered a priority, but this functions will not only be managed by a service software that does not require updating as those instinctive, but also by increasingly complex software and in addition overlap with continuous updates.
ROYAL BOX
SIGMUND FREUD