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Just a week ago, Wil, Emily, Paul and I sat down and began to discuss the implications of consciousness.  This was my thought about the conversation:

A psychologist once noted that these education practices might've resulted from the split between the cognitive unconscious and the conscious.  At one point, it is hypothesized that there was no bi-partite brain configuration, only a unified system of the conscious and unconscious.  However, when our conscious somehow separated from the unconscious and formed the story teller function--the function where we confabulate our reality, as reality is really a figment of our minds--we gathered the ability to 'think' in different ways.  This also created a problem that hadn't been present before: we could think and we could thus conform, and were less likely to reflect upon ideas and often held our ideas back for fear of not being accepted by other individuals' story tellers.  For instance, in a one-god religious culture, an entire group of people is apt to agree that there is, indeed, only one-god.  This leads to more cohesion of the group and thus more conformity.  This cohesion and conformity make it far less likely that the story of their existence can change, and they are less likely to reflect upon their past and add new details.  In a multi-god religious culture, many people may believe diverse things about the diverse religious figures--this does not lead to the strength of cohesion and conformity that the one-god religions feel, and it is thus more probable that they be able to confabulate, add and reflect upon their culture's stories without feeling estranged from the group dynamic.

What, indeed, does our conscious hold us back from?  It obviously inhibits ideas because of social stigma, as we all experience in daily life, and as our discussion today about web creation brought up.  It was noted that many do not wish to create something on the web because they fear the critique from the public -- a social stigma of producing their ideas to a forum.  I think this opens up an opportunity: perhaps teachers can encourage public displays of ideas in order to increase confidence and lower the inhibition of the conscious over the unconscious, thus supporting the discussion of new ideas and overcoming social stigma.