Psychologists reveal how emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge
‘How reading in a second language protects your heart’
Psychologists at Bangor University believe that they have glimpsed for the first time, a process that takes place deep within our unconscious brain, where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience (May 9, 2012 • 32(19):6485– 6489 • 6485), they identify a reaction to negative language inputs which shuts down unconscious processing.
For the last quarter of a century, psychologists have been aware of, and fascinated by the fact that our brain can process high-level information such as meaning outside consciousness. What the psychologists at Bangor University have discovered is the reverse- that our brain can unconsciously ‘decide’ to withhold information by preventing access to certain forms of knowledge.
The psychologists extrapolate this from their most recent findings working with bilingual people. Building on their previous discovery that bilinguals subconsciously access their first language when reading in their second language; the psychologists at the School of Psychology and Centre for Research on Bilingualism have now made the surprising discovery that our brain shuts down that same unconscious access to the native language when faced with a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience, and unfortunate.
They believe that this provides the first proven insight to a hither-to unproven process in which our unconscious mind blocks information from our conscious mind or higher mental processes.
This finding breaks new ground in our understanding of the interaction between emotion and thought in the brain. Previous work on emotion and cognition has already shown that emotion affects basic brain functions such as attention, memory, vision and motor control, but never at such a high processing level as language and understanding….
- Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge (sott.net)
- Psychologists reveal how emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge (medicalxpress.com)
- Bilingual Study Reveals How Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge (medicalnewstoday.com)
- Emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge, in our native language (sciencedaily.com)
- Brain Represses Bad Words for Bilingual Readers (sott.net)
- Our Unconscious and Social “Reality” (psychologytoday.com)
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