Neurobiology of conscious and unconscious processes during waking and sleep

Waking mind functioning comprises conscious and unconscious processes, with the latter being experimentally demonstrated by parapraxes and recent findings showing the active suppression of unwanted memories. According to psychoanalytic theory, these repression phenomena involve a censorship process. Today, neurobiological results show that this process seems to occur during waking rather than during the dreaming sleep stage. Claude Gottesmann Département de Biologie, Faculté des sciences, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France The study of the differences in mental functioning between the sleep and waking stages, and the identification of neurobiological bases for each stage, has provided crucial knowledge regarding the support of consciousness and has partially opened doors onto the neurobiological basis of unconscious processes. Kandel (1999) distinguishes between three kinds of unconscious processes: (1) repressed or dynamic ones, that is, those described in psychoanalysis; (2) procedural unconscious ones, which are not repressed but rather remain out of awareness and which concern habits, perceptual and motor skills; and (3) preconscious-unconscious ones, which “refer to almost all mental activities, to most thoughts and all memories that enter consciousness.” This short paper will be mainly devoted to the neurobiological basis of the conscious and repressed unconscious processes. Waking Consciousness Waking is characterized by vigilance. This physiological property supports the ability to focus attention (psychological property) and to interpret environmental stimuli (perception categorization). Waking mentation is characterized by both explicit and implicit activities (Lotstra, 2007). Among the latter are all the unconscious and preconscious processes underlying behavior as considered by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis posits that through the action of several defense mechanisms, unwanted memories of events, wishes, and drives are actively prevented from invading the consciousness in order to exclude unpleasant feelings that could disturb adaptation to the environment. Today, such suppression (“repression”(Freud,1900)) of unwanted memories is demonstrated by think/no think paradigms (Anderson & Green, 2001; Anderson, Ochsner, Kuhl, Cooper, Robertson, Gabrielli 1 Mail: Cl. Gottesmann, 22, parc Lubonis, 06000 Nice, France E-mail : [email protected] Neurobiology of conscious and unconscious 93 et al., 2004; Depue, Banich, & Curran, 2006; Depue, Curran, & Banich, 2007), this phenomenon being reinforced by sleep (Rauchs, Feyers, Maquet, & Collette, 2008) and reduced in older people (Levy & Anderson, 2008) These results confirm old findings showing that unconscious thoughts can incidentally burst in during waking through parapraxes like forgetting, slips of the tongue, misreading, slips of the pen, bungled actions, and mislaying