What Is Time to the Unconscious Mind? - Julia Mossbridge, M.A., Ph.D.

For most of us, our everyday conscious minds feel the stream of conscious experience flowing linearly through what we call the past, present and future. But how do non-conscious mental processes interact with events that take place in time? By definition, we aren’t privy to our non-conscious minds, so to get at this question, we have to use some tricks. I will first briefly describe current neuroscientific and psychological ideas about how everyday conscious awareness creates a sense of order and temporal flow. Then we will delve into the methods used to examine how non-conscious processes interact with events, and how the results of such experiments can inform our understanding about the nature of reality and time. Specifically, I will describe the methods and implications of experiments examining non-conscious “time bending” (i.e., differences between our everyday conscious version of time and the versions accessed by non-conscious processes), including presentiment/precognition experiments and their implications. Finally, I will discuss a new model describing how the so-called past, present, and future collapse under the influence non-conscious processing. Taken from another point of view, this model also addresses how the past, present, and future are manufactured for use by everyday conscious processes.

Julia Mossbridge is a Staff Scientist and the Director of the Innovation Lab at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the Science Director at Focus@Will Labs, and a Visiting Scholar in Psychology at Northwestern University. She seeks to understand how time is perceived by the conscious and subconscious minds. She is honored to be the 2014 winner of the Charles Honorton Integrative Contributions award.