LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, demonstrated that under the conscious cortex exists "a neuronal pathway" that lets current events trigger
unconscious memories of emotionally potent past events, causing seemingly irrational conscious responses, such as "Men with beards make me uneasy.
The researchers found that people put to sleep but not operated on retained no
unconscious memories.
LeDoux believes that we may never rid ourselves of the implicit,
unconscious memories that underlie anxiety disorders.
This activates
unconscious memories of the first six months of childhood when the infant makes a "good breast/bad breast" distinction and then "splinters" the image of the latter in such a way that, through processes of projection and reintrojection, "each part of the splintered object acquires a unique identity".
a power that does not reside 'outside' an organism but rather acts from 'within'; that is, upon the store of
unconscious memories to which every organism perhaps has access.
Other researchers went on to probe the
unconscious memories of amnesics with different implicit tasks.
