Stories and human society are inseparable. Before human history, our ancestors created myths as the oldest form of narratives. Due to the advances of digital media, stories are nowadays communicated in various ways. Yet the structure and the key elements of modern stories still remain the same. This chapter starts with a discussion about the relationship between stories and human society. It is...

Since the time of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), people have been fascinated by the possibility of a powerful and influential ‘unconscious’ that controls much of our behaviour. Though Freud conceives of this unconscious largely in terms of emotional urges and powers to suppress these urges, a more cognitive interpretation in terms of mental processes is highly feasible [1, 2]. Most of us will proba...

The author discusses memory from the point of view of the neurosciences and molecular biology, proposing an integration with the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. The discovery of the implicit memory has extended the concept of the unconscious and supports the hypothesis that this is where the emotional and affective--sometimes traumatic--presymbolic and preverbal experiences of the pri...

The most common method for assessing similarities and differences between conscious and unconscious processing is to compare the effects of unconscious (perceptually weak) stimuli, with conscious (perceptually strong) stimuli. Awareness of these stimuli is then assessed by objective performance on prime identification tasks. While this approach has proven extremely fruitful in furthering our un...

According to unconscious thought theory (UTT), unconscious thought is more adept at complex decision-making than is conscious thought. Related research has mainly focused on the complexity of decision-making tasks as determined by the amount of information provided. However, the complexity of the rules generating this information also influences decision making. Therefore, we examined whether u...