Unconscious cognition is the processing of perception, memory, learning, thought, and language without being aware of it.
[1] The role of the unconscious mind on decision making is a topic greatly debated by neuroscientists, linguists, philosophers, and psychologists around the world.
The attitude of the scientific community towards the unconscious mind has undergone a drastic change from being viewed as a lazy reservoir of memories and non-task oriented behavior to being regarded as an active and essential component in the processes of decision making.
One familiar example of the operation of the unconscious in problem solving is a well-known phenomenon of having a "Eureka!"
Sigmund Freud is perhaps the most well-known psychologist and his theories laid the foundation for the serious scientific investigation of the unconscious brain.
Freud believed that the Unconscious' influence on thoughts can be accessed by training one's mind through meditation, or by random association, dream analysis and paying attention to Freudian slips.
He believed that the personal unconscious held memories and experiences specific to every individual and the collective unconscious held memories, predispositions and experiences of a species which are passed on from generation to generation and are shared among all the individuals of a species.
This theory could explain the cases of altered personality, like Phineas Gage, due to trauma or traumatic brain injury.
These messages flutter on the edge of perception and are almost impossible to notice unless and until one's conscious brain is called to pay attention to these minute details.
[6] An analysis of their responses showed that the participants were more likely to associate words which were not shown previously as a part of the group if they followed the preset grammatical rules.
An implicit attitude manifests itself as an action or judgment that is under the control of automatically activated evaluation, without the performer's awareness of that causation.
According to "radical plasticity" thesis, thinking and reasoning are the products of the unconscious mind's ability to decipher and process countless possibilities and predict the consequences of taking a certain course of action.
In contrast, the conscious mind is only able to process the outcomes of no more than a couple of courses of action during decision making.