The Integrative Nature of the Mind

The purpose of learning about the different facets of the mind is to help you identify useful information within your mental experiences about your needs and core beliefs so that you can change them or cope more effectively. The more diverse the modalities you use, the easier it will be for your brain to change. It is helpful to understand your inner world because one domain of experience can sometimes become dominant, causing us to see the world primarily through that domain or through a small number of domains. Becoming familiar with these different domains can also help you identify and address the challenges that arise within each one. The following are some key domains of the mind, as physiologically delineated by the brain.

Consciousness

There are various levels of consciousness that operate differently because of our evolutionary history. These layers of consciousness are reflexive, emotional, cognitive, and metacognitive. This parallels the evolution of the brain, beginning with reptiles (reflexive), mammals (emotional), primates (cognitive), and humans (metacognitive). The difference between humans and other species lies partly in how the brain is used. For example, one difference between macaque monkeys and humans is that humans use more areas of the brain while completing the same tasks.

Most of our awareness actually occurs below the cognitive and metacognitive levels of consciousness. This includes the body’s awareness of its internal and external environments through reflexive and emotional consciousness. Understanding the different layers of consciousness that developed throughout evolution is important because it can help us recognize why we automatically think, feel, and experience impulses to behave in particular ways. These levels of consciousness were adaptive throughout much of our evolutionary history and, consequently, remain with us today.

The earliest-evolved layers of consciousness form the foundation of our higher levels of consciousness—the cognitive and metacognitive layers—and have a profound influence on them. Given all these different forms of awareness, it is no wonder that we may feel emotionally pulled in many different directions or that our initial impulses, feelings, and automatic thoughts are not necessarily prosocial.

This does not mean that acting on these impulses is acceptable, nor does it mean that we should be uninhibited. Inhibiting and redirecting our more basic impulses is important for living harmoniously with others. However, recognizing their origins can help us develop greater empathy toward ourselves and others when antisocial thoughts or feelings arise automatically. It can also help us manage and channel these impulses into more prosocial, constructive, and adaptive ways of being.

Understanding the layers of consciousness can also help us better meet the needs associated with the different brain regions involved in each type of consciousness. The core needs connected to these different layers include safety, satisfaction, connection, and meaning or purpose, which will be discussed in the “Resilience” section.

Fast and Slow Sensory Processing Systems

For our purposes, there are two primary ways in which the brain processes experiences and sensory information. The fast processing system is associated with the reflexive and emotional levels of consciousness, while the slow processing system is associated with the cognitive and metacognitive levels.

As previously mentioned, the fast processing route operates outside conscious awareness at speeds of approximately 50 to 90 milliseconds. The second processing system is slower and conscious, processing sensory information at approximately 250 to 500 milliseconds.

When we initially perceive something, relatively little contextual information is available. As a result, we tend to notice potential negativity first and make broad associations so that we can quickly become aware of possible dangers and avoid them. This works well in life-or-death situations. However, it can become maladaptive when the stressors we face are not matters of life and death.

The same stress-response systems can be activated by physically dangerous situations and by social or emotional adversity. The difference is generally a matter of degree, depending on how strongly the stress response is activated. When a person experiences more than a moderate level of anxiety, their higher-order thinking capacities may become impaired.

These higher-order thinking capacities can add context and detail to the initial interpretations and expectations generated by unconscious processing. However, when we are stressed, the slow, conscious processing system does not work as effectively. Consequently, we may spiral into negative thinking and broad generalizations, which can also contribute to troubling behaviour.

The key takeaway is that the fast processing system generates generalized, negatively biased interpretations more quickly than we can consciously process them. These interpretations lack the context and perspective necessary for accurately assessing reality. They eventually contribute to conscious impressions, feelings, expectations, and interpretations that may be biased toward worst-case scenarios, lack perspective, and be influenced by implicit memories from the past.

The slow, conscious processing system can add context and perspective to these initial reactions. However, this system does not function as effectively during periods of heightened stress. Stress regulation is therefore an important skill because it allows you to operate on all cylinders.

Memory

When we think about memory, we often assume that it consists primarily of explicit memories that we can consciously recall. However, memory takes different forms. The two primary types are:

1. Implicit memory

2. Explicit memory

Implicit memory is characterized by a lack of conscious awareness during the act of recollection. By contrast, explicit memory requires the conscious recollection of a previous experience.

Implicit memories are more closely connected with somatic and sensory experiences, including bodily sensations and motor impulses, as well as procedural processes, behaviour, and emotional processing systems in the brain and body. These memories are called “implicit” because they are involuntary and visceral and can operate outside conscious awareness.

Consider a child who has not yet developed language. The child experiences the world predominantly through nonverbal processes involving the body, the senses, movement, and emotion. This is the type of memory that must be targeted and changed to address inner turmoil.

Changing implicit memory requires more than simply talking about it. Making what was implicit explicit through conversation, and discussing the problem abstractly, can be helpful for exploration. However, this is only one piece of the puzzle. A more dynamic and embodied approach is needed so that the implicit memory systems responsible for the underlying difficulties can be affected and changed.

Implicit memory forms automatically outside conscious awareness and can be difficult to interpret consciously because it was not originally formed directly through language. Implicit memory is stored in three regions of the brain. The amygdala stores emotional memory, the striatum stores habitual memory, and the cerebellum stores procedural memory.

Explicit memory consists of:

1. Working memory, or immediate memory

2. Short-term memory, lasting from seconds to days

3. Long-term memory

Working memory and short-term memory are localized in the prefrontal cortex. Long-term memory is distributed across many brain regions, although the hippocampus and surrounding regions are especially significant to explicit memory.

The hippocampus is necessary for converting short-term explicit memories into long-term memories. However, it is not required for the conversion of implicit memories. The consolidation of explicit memories from the hippocampus to their respective memory regions can take anywhere from days to years.

Traditional talk therapy tends to focus on verbal forms of memory while leaving experiential forms largely on the sidelines. However, explicit memory is also highly significant because making the implicit explicit brings previously dissociated memories under greater cortical control. This allows for the processing, inhibition, and organization of impulses, reflexes, and emotions.

Nevertheless, talk therapy must also incorporate action and adaptive simulations of lived experience to influence experiential memory systems, including somatic, sensory, motor, and emotional systems. Experiential memory systems are the first to arise during development and account for much of the information processing that occurs outside conscious awareness.

To some extent, the different memory systems appear to influence one another reciprocally. This does not mean that a person can form an embodied sensory-motor or somatic memory through conceptual and abstract thinking alone. However, conceptual thinking can produce greater awareness of that domain and may have limited, interrelated effects within the capacities of each domain.

For example, cognitions can trigger emotions; emotions can elicit cognitions; impulses can elicit emotions; and emotions and impulses can lead to behaviour.

The limitations of this reciprocal influence relate to the types of memories that can be formed through the presence or absence of embodied experience and action. Trauma can form without direct embodied experience because fear increases neuroplasticity and contributes to automatic, generalized interpretations.

By contrast, when trying to form a positive and contextualized interpretation consciously, embodied awareness, simulations of the relevant context, and other techniques discussed in the “Self-Directed Neuroplasticity” section are needed.

Thoughts

Thoughts can be consciously directed—or at least perceived as consciously directed—or they can arise automatically. They can occur above the surface within semantic consciousness or below the surface within the nonconscious mind.

We are accustomed to using language and often become absorbed in the world of words because language is necessary for communicating with others. However, there is also a personal inner world from which many people become disconnected. This is the world of emotion, imagery, metaphor, impressions, sensations, and impulses.

This is not only the world of dreams; it is also a source of vitality, meaning, and relational connection. Ironically, the conscious semantic or language-based state that allows us to connect with others can also distance us from them emotionally.

The greater the balance we develop in experiencing and accessing both domains—the semantic domain and the affective, metaphorical, sensory, and motor domain—the more whole we may feel and the more connected and interdependent we may perceive ourselves to be in relation to others and the world.

Thoughts can take several forms. To begin, thoughts may consist of conscious words, images, or sensory and spatial perceptions. Automatic thoughts involve less-conscious perceptions that occur below conscious awareness but can still affect emotions and physiology.

Automatic thoughts can also enter conscious awareness, but this does not mean that they were consciously elicited. Thoughts are generally integrated to some degree with emotions, sensations, and other domains of experience. Whether a person becomes conscious of these domains depends on their level of stress, where their attentional resources are being allocated, and a range of other factors.

There are also consciously directed thoughts that people use to observe, assess, and analyze situations. However, these processes can occur at both automatic and consciously directed levels.

Consciously directed thought is a real phenomenon and can be demonstrated through a simple thought experiment. The next time you forget something, try as hard as you can to remember it. This approach often does not work. Then give yourself a mild distraction and focus on a trivial matter. The information you were trying to remember will often return.

If conscious thought did not exist, there would be nothing to block the automatic thought from arising. Free will is a separate matter. What this example demonstrates is that there are different levels of consciousness.

Emotion

To understand emotion, we must first differentiate between the motivational tendencies of emotion and the social and communicative functions of facial and bodily emotional expressions. These domains can have different functions depending on the emotion.

This does not mean that facial expressions of emotion arise only in relational contexts. These expressions were selected because of their adaptive value throughout the evolutionary history of our species, not merely within the life of a single individual.

The motivational tendencies associated with emotion have adaptive value because they prepare our behaviour to regulate the organism. Facial and bodily expressions of emotion have adaptive value because they communicate our needs to others and provide information about how others might relate to us within a social context.

Facial and bodily expressions of emotion can be inhibited, although the degree to which this occurs depends on the context. Microexpressions can also indicate emotion and demonstrate the fast processing system at work in eliciting emotional expression.

Both the motivational tendencies and the facial and bodily expressions of emotion are triggered by a combination of fast, unconscious, and automatic sensory perceptions of the environment. These perceptions are also filtered through implicit memories formed through personal lived experiences.

We do not need to be conscious of an emotion for it to influence our thoughts, behaviour, and physiology.

The automatic perceptions that produce evolutionarily adaptive motivational tendencies are based on biological values encoded in the brain throughout evolution. All mammals share these biological values, which are represented by brain circuits associated with seeking life-sustaining resources, anger, fear, lust, nurturance, sadness, and play or joy. Each of these systems has had adaptive value throughout mammalian evolution.

What we consciously “feel” may not necessarily correspond directly to the emotions represented within these circuits because feelings are often a combination of emotions, sensations, and cognitions.

For example, someone might say, “I feel obligated,” “I feel hopeful,” or “I feel like you hate me.” This does not mean that we cannot consciously experience core emotions. However, people use the term “feel” to describe many kinds of mental experiences, not only emotions.

Our mental experiences have a predominant feeling quality because our perceptions are grounded in sensory-spatial, motor, and somatic lived experience. The word “feel” is used so broadly partly because much of our experience of the world occurs nonconsciously through the senses, body, and movement. These experiences may then be translated into conscious awareness afterward, depending on the cognitive resources, cognitive biases, and defence mechanisms that allow, distort, or prevent emotional experience.

Because unconscious, dynamic, and action-oriented experiences are the primary source of our lived experience, our conscious mental experiences reflect these experiential processes.

There are primary, secondary, and instrumental emotions. A primary emotion is the direct emotional response to a stimulus. Secondary emotions may form to protect the organism from the fear of experiencing the situational reality associated with the primary emotion or to help meet the need underlying the primary emotion.

An emotion that functions as a primary emotion in one situation may also function as a secondary emotion in relation to another primary emotion. This can occur when the initial emotional response would be maladaptive within the present context.

One may wonder how a natural phenomenon such as primary emotion can become maladaptive. The emotion elicited in a particular context may have already been sensitized or formed as an adaptive reflex in response to previous situations. Over time, this response may have become habitual or sensitized to features resembling the original context.

Although emotion can be adaptive when implicit perceptions interpret reality accurately, implicit memories can influence the emotion that is elicited and make it maladaptive.

For example, a person might experience anger as a secondary emotion because they are experiencing sadness as a primary emotion. Because the sadness feels too vulnerable, the person shifts into anger. This anger may arise from an implicit expectation—based on bias, implicit memory, or current evidence—that their underlying need will not be met.

Instrumental emotions occur when a person consciously or semiconsciously uses emotional expression or behaviour to elicit a particular response from another person.

There are three practical reasons for learning about emotion.

First, understanding emotion can help you identify and differentiate primary emotions from secondary and instrumental emotions. You can then use or shift the primary emotion toward a response that is more adaptive and constructive for your long-term well-being and goals.

Second, learning about emotion can help you identify implicit memories. Experientially understanding your emotions is a precursor to understanding implicit memories because emotion and implicit memory are inextricably connected.

Third, learning about emotion can help you better identify emotions in yourself and others. This can support more adaptive relational patterns by cultivating greater empathy and more constructive interactions.

Implicit memories are traces of perceptions from situations that emotion has marked as significant. Emotions are motivational or communicative tendencies that are ideally adaptive for navigating our interactions with people, places, and things in the world.

The problem is that implicit memories remain with us and can distort our perception of what is happening in the present. Our attention tends to be negatively biased and to generalize features from past experiences.

This process can elicit emotion and recreate the sensory, motor, and emotional experience of a memory in the present, as though the past were happening now. As a result, our perception of present reality may become distorted.

Metaphorical Superimposition of the Mind

Symbols are a powerful phenomenon because they help us connect with meaning and derive fulfilment from daily experience and life as a whole. Even when something does not make logical sense, it can still be functional and beneficial if it provides a sense of meaning and fulfilment.

The mind is a metaphor- and analogy-generating system. It is highly associative at both explicit and implicit levels, which is why symbols can influence our levels of stress, enjoyment, and satisfaction.

There is certainly an external reality. However, the mind automatically perceives that reality through a lens composed of networks of associations. At a nonconscious level, these associations connect objects, people, and places within the psyche.

These associations do not arise only between similar stimuli. They can also be symbolic, meaning that something can stand for something else that does not share similar surface features but does share similarities in the essence of its action or function.

Function and action form the basis of implicit experience, implicit processing, and implicit memory. Symbolic stimuli are, in essence, metaphors.

The brain interprets reality metaphorically first because metaphor provides a faster form of processing than discrete logical analysis. Metaphor is grounded in experiential action.

The foundations beneath our cognitive and conceptual understanding consist of sensory-spatial, motor, and emotional experiences formed through interaction with the world before advanced cognitive development. These experiences then provide a foundation for our ability to simulate and manipulate variables mentally rather than having to manipulate them directly in external reality.

It is important to remember that symbolic meaning has no validity in the scientific determination of the physical world. Symbolic meaning relates to function and action in terms of what is emotionally significant and fulfilling, whereas science pertains to function and action in terms of what is materially or physically beneficial.

There is some overlap because greater emotional fulfilment can support better health, and better health can contribute to emotional fulfilment. However, we must not conflate symbolic meaning with scientific accuracy. Each has an important place and must be used according to its specialized function.

What exists in external reality is not necessarily what we interpret. What we perceive, and what draws our attention, is influenced by implicit values and expectations and may differ from external reality.

The mind learns and understands best—particularly when learning quickly and automatically—through sensory-spatial representations because these representations are action-oriented and therefore relevant to survival.

Why does this process occur metaphorically? The tendency to generalize allows for faster identification and learning because features resembling a previous threat are automatically highlighted as salient and elicit an internal simulation of the original stimulus.

The metaphorical superimposition of meaning upon reality provides a bridge to the unconscious parts of ourselves. These parts of us inform the values and meanings that we experience.

We understand much of our experience through metaphor because complex language can become reality-based and disconnected from implicit metaphorical meaning. The further we venture into a purely science-minded world without attending to the emotional and metaphorical world that allows us to understand our unconscious emotional and implicit experiences, the greater the distance and lack of meaning we may experience within ourselves and within life.

This emotional and metaphorical world is a source of fulfilment and a foundation of emotional processing.