Andrew – what a wonderful and considered response… I like your defence of the unconscious mind ‘logically’ existing and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article, very good indeed.

I think most importantly, we need to consider what we tell our clients and what they are led to believe by our description of how the mind works and functions, in relation to themselves, their therapy and the field of hypnosis. So it is a valuable debate.

The other thing that’s particularly interesting is that the background processes in these computers used up most of the available computing capacity and ran as fast as the computer physically allowed. The foreground processes were originally found to take significantly less processing power overall, because they were dependent on the real time responses of the human beings involved. However, as programming skills increased these foreground processes became more and more flexible and complicated and, as a results, slower and more resource hungry. Again this sounds familiar when we think about the apparent relative speed of conscious and unconscious actions.

I’ve been reading an interesting article in New Scientist about a recent study that explains why the good cowboy often shot the bad cowboy first in a gunfight because rather than despite the good cowboy letting the bad one draw first. The study proved that the goody’s reaction time to seeing the baddie start to move his hand was faster than the baddy’s action time to draw and shoot. Maybe this is because the baddy’s making a slower conscious action and the goody’s executing – an appropriate term, perhaps – a much faster unconscious reaction. If that’s correct, then this research seems to support the argument for differences between the conscious and unconscious. You can read the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18463-draw-the-neuroscience-behind-hollywood-shootouts.html.

So does any of this support the notion of us having distinct conscious and unconscious minds? I think that depends on whether you are talking about multiple minds or multiple brains. The original computers had just one central processors and the foreground activities were free to compute while the background processes were waiting for data to be transferred to and from the, in computing terms, considerably slower tapes, disks, printers, etc. A single central processor effectively ran multiple foreground and background programmes. So it’s not too difficult to think of a single physical brain running both conscious and unconscious “minds”.

Continuing the computing analogy, when computers started to have multiple central processors, the foreground and background programmes could generally use whichever processor was available when they needed it. However, certain basic functions had to be run on specific processors to allow the system to function effectively. In those early days, the individual disks, tapes and printers could only be connected to a single processor, much like our individual ears, eyes and limbs are connected to the left or right sides of our brain. In addition, individual processors could be dedicated to handling particular programmes or clients. Again, not unlike the way certain functions of the mind like language are generally handled by one side of the physical brain. In neither case does it mean that the other side of the brain or the other processor couldn’t do the job just that it was set up that way. In the human brain we have the concept of plasticity to allow reconfiguration of processes between left to right hemispheres in the event of damage. Similarly, multi processor configurations were able to switch dedicated processes to other processors if one failed.

Phew, I hope that wasn’t too technical and I know that it’s going a bit far to compare the early multi-processor computers to the human brain. However, it does provide an analogy for how a multi-processor physical human brain can functionally deliver radically different conscious and unconscious minds.

For us hypnotists, I feel that what matters most is that we understand the different ways that the brain runs programmes – what we call conscious and unconscious minds or processes. Practically, it’s also useful to know, for the specific client in front of us, which physical hemisphere of their brain executes the processes we traditionally associate with the Right and Left Brain functions.

For hypnotherapy to need a base model to function is as necessary as the more celebrated and often less effectual “medical model”. It is, en soi, solely the base from which to stage the play – further analysis may be meaningless.

In the end, as the saying goes, it’s results that count, and hypnosis has barely begun to scratch the surface of its potential to do what science has long held impossible. Long may that continue, and long may the base of our model be as simple as “all reality is subjective – let’s treat you on that basis”.

Fine piece of epistemology Mr Eason – a sojourn in ancient Greece in your tours of the multiverse?