 Hi, this is Tracy Rokohama Espinosa, and this is a video on conscious and unconscious processes of learning. We know that the brain pays attention to things and does learn things in explicit, overt ways, but does the brain also learn in unconscious ways? That's what we're going to look at today. So big heads up just before we begin. There is no such thing as brand new learning while you sleep. So this means you can't like stick your, you know, Chinese book underneath your head and fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning speaking. It doesn't work like that. However, you can and you must consolidate long-term memories through the process of dreaming. And we've known this since 2004-2005 when we, when stickled and Walker and colleagues first discovered there was this unique combination of neurotransmitters during dream time that actually consolidated memory. So sleep will help you pay attention and focus while dreaming will help you consolidate memories. And these are two different distinct processes in the brain, right? When you go into deep and slow wave sleep, this is when your body becomes refreshed, right? But when you're in REM sleep just before you wake up, there's different electrical activity, but there's also different chemical activity. It's a chemical activity at that moment that actually consolidates the memories. So the big challenge we have is the definition of consciousness. We say, can people learn in unconscious states? Well, it depends on how you define consciousness. So is deep sleep just on this scale of things of unconsciousness or alert and wakeful states? If it's on a continuum in this way, it's easier to justify that there's learning in unconscious stages. So if we look at it at this kind of continuum, it also means that any learning that takes place outside of being completely attentive or paying attention to the information would count as unconscious learning. In that case, then we also include things like gut microbes that are part of unconscious systems of behavior. This very interesting article by Dean and colleague shows that gut microbes are part of the unconscious system influencing behaviors. So what happens in your gut, what you ingest, what's happening in your gut actually triggers different types of chemical releases, which does in turn change the way that we learn things. This is what we call the gut brain access. So at this level, we're not very conscious. We don't really think about what's going on in our stomach as being something or in our gut as being something that's influencing our thinking processes. So in that sense, unconscious processes would be included here. There are other people, however, who go so far as to say that, well, during certain stages of sleep, people can learn things like association between colors and motions, for example. This is kind of borderline research. It's very interesting. We don't have a lot of conclusive studies in this area, but it is worth taking into consideration. We do know, however, for example, if I ask you very explicitly, Oh, do you like dogs? And you say, Oh, I love dogs, but you actually have this unconscious fear of certain types of dogs. We know that that kind of learning is also happening under the radar. So you're not very conscious of the fear that you might be experiencing, but you still have learned a fear response to that particular stimulus. So other researchers have taken advantage of this typical unconscious fear learning and tried to test it. So for example, if subjects were shown an angry face as a target stimulus for less than 40 milliseconds, right? And then over that were shown expressionless faces, the subjects will report that they did not see the angry face. However, they will react to that new stimulus later as if it had been learned. So they learned, they saw it, they learned it, and then they reacted to it. Another way to think of unconscious learning is occurring has to do with the way we divide memory systems. You've all heard about short term and working and long term memory. Well, long term memory is what really counts for learning and long term memory is divided into these two areas of procedural memory and declarative memory. So what happens in procedural memory are things that you really can't explain, like for example, walking. You all know how to walk, but can you tell me how you walk? Right? So these are things that are part of a process, they're procedural things that happen in our brain, but we have a very hard time explaining them. Well, basically this is what Squire, who's really one of these gurus in the area of memory research points out to us that this is actually, since it is happening under the radar of things, it is an unconscious type of learning. So he equates procedural memory with unconscious learning. So other things that are often under the radar because they aren't really attached explicitly to the learning moment are things like the way we're motivated by certain things. So certain types of motivators enhance certain types of perception, what we're really honing in on or the way that we pay attention to certain types of things. And that, again, can also be said to be an unconscious kind of learning. We're learning things without clearly saying, yes, I am paying attention to this. Basically, because of the motivation you have for a secondary but connected idea, you actually pay attention to that more. There are other things that also, you know, fly below the radar of our consciousness. For example, the intonation used to give certain types of instructions can push people to learn things or pay attention to them faster. So other things that kind of fly below this radar of consciousness are things like verbal instructions. So verbal fear instructions are really quickly ingrained in our memory. So this means that the intonation of the voice, the prosody that's used, the way that people say things rather than exactly what they are saying, may also change and influence the way we learn things or the speed with which we learn things. So as all good learning scientists, we try to figure out where exactly is this occurring in the brain? What types of networks? What are the key hubs? And an obvious candidate would be the hippocampus, which is a key hub for all memory systems. So that would be pretty important, right? Is this really the bridge from the conscious and unconscious memories? But then others are really pointing to the cerebellum in the back of the brain, which is very interesting at theory because they're directly tying this to the way that emotional memories might be processed and that the cerebellum is a much bigger hub for those types of memory processings that do occur under the radar, much more than through the hippocampus, for example. Finally, the last idea is kind of related to the big so what question. Okay, so if we know that learning can occur at an unconscious level, well, what does this really mean for me? Does it make any difference? Well, one of the very interesting applications of this would be targeting the unconscious in therapy. So one of these ideas, based on this understanding of learning occurring through unconscious networks as well as conscious networks, is that therapists could target survival or defensive circuits that may be the cause of anxiety disorders. So not directly meeting this head on, but actually using unconscious learning to unlearn that anxiety or fear response and replace it with something else. And lastly, and very parenthetically, I want to share a metaphor that you might come across a lot in the literature that has to do with top down and bottom up processing. This was an idea that was made popular by Uda Frith back in 2007. She's a brilliant neuroscientist. She did some wonderful work and she explained the way that she and her husband Chris Frith looked at this idea of consciousness and unconsciousness and basically thought there was a clean and neat way to describe this based on certain circuitry in the brain. So the idea would be that a top down process is very much, you know, using frontal lobe circuits that repress the information that's coming up from these lower or base emotional centers of the brain. And the bottom up would be how you sometimes learn or react to information based on pure emotional reaction to stimuli. So their vision was more or less trying to explain mostly metaphorical terms because there really is no clean directionality. In fact, you'll find that both top down, bottom up are occurring almost simultaneously in the brain sometimes depending on the type of stimulus. So just be aware that this information occurs. The top down is sort of like taking the intellectual brain and repressing this lower level instincts. Whereas the bottom up is how base level emotions might rise up and take over decision making systems, for example, a higher thinking. This is all very much in metaphorical terms. So please don't take this as the circuitry of the brain. So in summary, we looked at this kind of range. Can you look at consciousness on a spectrum kind of an idea? We looked at the types of unconscious learning depending on how you define the term of unconscious. Is the consolidation of memories during dreaming an unconscious type of learning? Or is it sleep dependent plasticity? Or just because something falls under the radar of your external perception or your conscious perception? Does that mean that we can also label that as unconscious learning? That's basically the extent of the definitions that we have in the literature right now. And lastly, I just shared this metaphor about unconscious versus conscious processing and how we looked at that as top down or bottom up, though this is still very much in debate right now. Okay, with that information, I hope you come to class with lots of great questions. Thanks. With that, I hope you come to class with lots of great questions and looking forward to talking with you soon.