1881, approximately 20 years before Freud published his landmark work,

the Interpretation of Dreams, an American William James published a landmark paper that began the psychological revolution.

Rational cognitive conscious thought is not at the epicenter of human behavior.

In fact, our conscious thought activates behavior is just one small little

part of a mind that is actually operated by essentially subconscious and unconscious

impulses that are entirely either beyond our control or to the degree we control them we can override them, but we don't actually create them, we don't actually

author or are the volitional cause of so much of our behavior. In William James's amazing paper for the time,

he notes that when you're walking through the woods and you hear a sound, a shuffling that sounds like it might be a bear,

before you become aware there might be a bear, I better run.

In fact, you already go unconsciously into the fight flight or freeze.

That much faster than thought are the impulses to survive which already put you in the I better get the hell out of here your

legs your blood goes down to the legs you go into the posture if somebody is going to run and you have the surge of adrenaline.

And that precedes the awareness that, oh, maybe there's a bear there.

The same when you're walking and you see a form that a stick looks like a snake and you jump.

That startle reflex again is pre-conscious. You don't wait to act until you think. You don't govern much of the survival behaviors

who thought. They're actually act. of the survival behaviors through thought,

they're actually activated by preconsious impulses.

And in fact, thought comes very, very late

in human behavioral processes.

In fact, literally a century later in Benjamin LeBette's work

that validated William James's proposition,

he found that human conscious thought

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