We have immediately to admit that ‘I’ – my conscious self – could never have taken in, never mind usefully processed, all this detail, this plethora of information which is yet managed so routinely by my unconscious. There is simply no way the conscious could direct all that detailed circuitry which, after all, it knows practically nothing about. We are driven to accept that ‘I’ would be utterly unable to function without ‘my’ fabulous unconscious digesting, analysing and representing reality for me. It follows logically, I am sorry to say, that whatever ‘I’’ consciously experience at any moment must already have been experienced by my unconscious. Not only that, of course, but it follows from this that whatever my conscious is experiencing is simply an invention of my unconscious. It is an entirely virtual ‘reality”.

Logic suggests that there must be a time lag between what goes on in the unconscious and the echo of part of it in the conscious. Has anyone tried to measure this gap and, if so, how long is it? Has the time between the first stirrings towards thought or decision within the unconscious and the awareness of thought or decision within the conscious been quantified?

I shall describe only one experiment which I hope will amuse you (and see Dennett & Kinsbourne in Block et al). It involves Hector Projector (this irreverent terminology being absolutely mine, I hasten to add). The experiment is controversial and, if real at all, is just a whacky update of the kind of work carried out by researchers like Benjamin Libet (see Nørretranders 1998 for less controversial work). Hector sits facing a screen onto which a slide is being projected from a carousel projector. The carousel is full of slides yet to be projected. On the right arm of his chair is what Hector is told is the control button for the slide projector. Unknown to Hector, however, this button is a dummy – it is not actually connected to the projector, or anything else. It does nothing. Hector’s scalp, meanwhile, is fitted with monitors which are capable of detecting very slight changes in brain activity. With devilish cunning the monitors over the hand motor area of the left brain (that area which directs movement of the right hand) are connected up in such a way that whenever they detect rising activity in that motor area they will activate the carousel and project the next slide. Hector is not told this interesting fact, of course. He is just invited to switch to the next slide whenever he likes, by pressing the button provided. To his astonishment and confusion Hector finds that just as he is about to press the button the slide changes anyway. However he tries, the projector appears always to think for him, and slightly ahead of him. Whenever he decides to press the button and see another slide the machine seems, almost half a second earlier, to have decided exactly the same for itself and is already changing the slide. The projector seems to be (indeed is) reading his mind and anticipating his conscious desires. The machine is, of course, being activated by his unconscious decisions to press for another slide. His real decisions, his unconscious decisions, are being artificially made manifest. It is obvious that these are well ahead of his apparent decisions, his conscious decisions. The notion of conscious control seems suddenly much less robust, indeed it is clearly mythical. It is all very disconcerting, for a modern man like Hector.

What does this mean? There is indeed a delay between events in the unconscious and their appreciation in the conscious. The gap is close on half a second. The delay between the real, or unconscious, decision to change that slide and the mythical, or conscious, decision to do so, turns out to be between 300 and 500 msecs, from 0.3 to 0.5 seconds (Nørretranders 1998). Our unconscious is ahead of our conscious by this small half second. And thus it will always be.

In other words, as we have just seen logically and experimentally, everything in our conscious mind has already been managed in our unconscious. Whatever is in the conscious can only, ever, be whatever the unconscious has assembled from data, and by means, only it understands. ‘Reality’, or my conscious experiencing of it, is inevitably (and literally) an afterthought. It is history. It happened a little under half a second ago. The representation of reality for us by our unconscious is all we can ever (consciously) actually have. There is nothing else. We do not, and cannot, consciously experience reality directly. We never will. What we consciously experience is always a reconstruction. It could be nonsense and is indeed sometimes simply wrong (for example when viewing illusions like the fabulous Ames room and some of our misperceptions and misattributions).