Have you ever heard the phrase “you only use 10% of your brain”? In reality, there is no way of measuring the percentage terms of consciousness – partly because the brain has no static baseline.

However, there is a general consensus among neuroscientists now that most of the brain’s processes are unconscious. That doesn’t mean you’re not using most of your brain though – it means there’s much more happening than you’re probably aware of.

Modern cognitive neuroscience has brought us right back to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic view of the unconscious mind. This is partly because the once-thought untestable theories are gaining scientific ground.

Freud, in 1895, proposed that the unconscious mind hides sexual and aggressive wishes, in his book with his colleague Josef Breuer Studies in Hysteria. They wrote that mental health symptoms like anxiety, phobias and compulsions emerge from unresolved unconscious thoughts.

Freud’s model (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) – maps onto our current understanding of memory. Nobel laureate, neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Eric Kandell says we have declarative and non-declarative memory processes. Declarative memory recall is conscious, like trying to remember the sequence of numbers on your credit card. Non-declarative memories involve unconscious, automatic recall.

And Freud’s structural model of the mind again arguably fits in with our understanding of cognition.

Freud proposed id made up the primitive part of your psyche and........

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