Peter Hagoort, professor in Cognitive Psychology at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen.
What we commonly call ‘intuition’ or ‘creativity’ is actually a form of unconscious thinking. Surprisingly, we are only conscious of our superficial thoughts, and not of our deeper thoughts. This would seem to contradict our ‘common sense’.
We have no conscious access to most of the signals in our brain. For instance, what we perceive of the visual world is reconstructed by our brain from the contribution of a whole series of different neuronal contributions. The same holds for language. However, the fact that humans have language allows us to be conscious of part of our thoughts. This is because we can only become aware of our thoughts through the phonological structure of our language. That is why animals won’t be able to think consciously.
This lecture is part of a series of lectures on ‘consciousness’.