In one of my replies to a question from Mary this morning, I mentioned that most of what goes on in our brains, including the brain processing of what we perceive with our senses, such as sight, hearing, and smell, is never conscious, and that much that is conscious passes through and is never remembered. As support, I referred to a well known series of experiments reported in 1998. At the time, the lead researcher, Daniel Simons, was at Harvard University. What he and his colleague, Daniel Levin, found was that our awareness of what is going on around us, even directly in front of our eyes, is generally very poor.
A brief version of their results, which you might find interesting, was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 1998. What Simons and Levin found is that we often do not have any conscious memory of what we see. When they arranged for people to be interviewed by strangers, and switched interviewers behind a passing door, more than 50% of people had so little awareness of who was asking them questions that they did not notice the change.
Because this was such a surprising result, the experiment became well know, and other researchers repeated it with variations. I found out about it because it is used by some contemporary philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained, as support for the idea that human consciousness is a fragmented product of largely independent brain operations. Their research also appears in work by Steven Pinker supporting a cognitive psychology theory of how the brain works to create our minds and the rest of what makes us us.
You might like to add a comment on your own ideas about it and the implications it has in other areas.
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References
Dennett, D. (1993). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.
Simons, D. J. & Levin, D. T. (1998) Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5 (4). 644 - 649. Available at http://peters-classes-at-aua.googlegroups.com/web/human_perception_sl_1998.pdf?hl=en
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