A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days.  More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing:  he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious. 

In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:

• Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.
• Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features.
• Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context.
• Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole.
• Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion.
• Making inferences relevant to what is being said.
• Constructing mental images where relevant.
• Filling in gaps in the discourse.
• Noticing and interpreting a speaker’s body language.

In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience.  It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”

Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra: 

“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point.  That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …