How to hack your unconscious

How do you feel about your unconscious? Do you see it as a sort of black box full of fears and desires working to undermine you? If so, you are not alone: such notions still have a strong grip on the popular imagination a century after Sigmund Freud first advanced them. But modern neuroscience and psychology tell a different story. Far from being a malign adjunct to the conscious mind, the unconscious is responsible for all sorts of important stuff. It is smart and it is often running the show. Still, that doesn’t mean we should just leave it alone. “The vast majority of thoughts circling in our brains happen below the radar of conscious awareness,” says neuroscientist Michael Shadlen at Columbia University, New York. That’s too much to miss out on. Forget Freudian psychoanalysis, digging up dark thoughts, instead what about consciously tapping into your unconscious and using it to your advantage? It is early days, but already our growing understanding of the human mind means we can begin to hack our unconscious powers of inspiration, pain relief, emotional control, memory and more. Here’s how...