• Question: Hello, my question is... could the urge to kill people come from an individual unlocking their unconscious thoughts? So this would mean that everyone does have sinister impulses they don't have access to them?

    Asked by anon-284017 on 5 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Ooh this is a dark one! I’m not in this area of Psychology so I can’t provide a super in depth discussion, but I can throw my ideas in to the topic! We all have dark thoughts that just pop in to our heads for no reason, one example is the feeling people get to jump off high things, a phenomenon called “Call of the Void” or “High place phenomenon”. This specific phenomenon is thought to come from a miscommunication in the brain, our brain wants to say no but for some reason it says yet. Fortunately we are able to stop ourselves, because we know better – using something called ‘Inhibition’ which is our mind’s ability to stop or ignore something. If I show you a bunch of stationary with pens, pencils, crayons, etc. and tell you to grab everything but the pencils then your brain will inhibit pencils, it tells you that once you identify something as a pencil then you can ignore it.
      So we might find that we get these random, intrusive thoughts to kill and fail to inhibit them – one reason for this is our emotional processing area of the brain (a part called the Amygdala) can override the area that controls inhibition. You might recognize this process as ‘fight or flight’, an almost automatic function our body can use to react to situations automatically.
      In terms of unconscious thoughts, i’m not sure anything exists that can ‘unlock’ them. Our brain has background activity called the ‘default mode network’ which is just general activity that doesn’t really mean much, the brain is just keeping things warmed up in case we need to use it, so as far as I know we don’t really hold an unconscious thoughts like wanting to kill someone, that kind of thought would come in as an intrusive thought that we failed to inhibit, or it could be a response to something that we feel strongly about (like if we’re angry or scared).

      Perhaps somebody who is well versed in forensic or social psychology might know something better though!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 5 Mar 2021: last edited 6 Mar 2021 1:38 pm

      Hi Anastacia Thompson,
      In relation to the unconscious, it is not really that sophisticated! psychology has going a long way from the days of Freud and unconscious complex desires and urges. So in that case I would say probably no to your answer.
      I think your great question also raises questions about a shared mentality – do we all have the same thoughts and feelings? In some ways we do (our brains are very similar) and some ways we don’t. Things like aggression are very much prevalent in all of us, but going on from this to committing murder is very, very rare.
      So what does differentiate ourselves from each other? Is it nature, or nurture? If some of us can commit crimes does that mean we all have the power to but something is stopping us? And what would this be? – getting quite philosophical here but your question really makes for some interesting ideas and implications about us as humans and free will.

    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 8 Mar 2021: last edited 8 Mar 2021 8:41 am

      Hi Anastacia! Alex and Lara have already given fantastic answers; more than I can probably provide, because it’s not really within my area. But I just want to add: That person can benefit from diffusing their energy (or unconscious thoughts) to sports – Take martial arts or boxing perhaps? These can teach discipline and self-control, and can relieve aggression.

      We all have that annoying person in our lives. When people are rude to you, they reveal who they are, not who you are. So don’t take it personally.

      Bury those people with a smile – success and happiness, as they say, are the best revenge.

      Fight for your dreams! 😊

    • Photo: Lisa Orchard

      Lisa Orchard answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      Wow – interesting question! This is not my area of expertise so I’m not sure how well I can answer, compared to the great responses you have had already. Zimbardo once wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect that tries to understand why a “good person” would do an “evil” thing (I’ve used quotation marks as I disagree with his labels). He suggests that different factors (such as adopting a group role or having a diffusion of responsibility) can lead to something called deindividuation; that is people lose their self awareness, and therefore we can all have the tendency to do things we wouldn’t normally do. His studies have received high criticism (you may have heard of his Stanford Prison experiment) but I thought it may be useful to add in relation to your question.

    • Photo: David McGonigle

      David McGonigle answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      Hi Anastacia! So, there are already some nice answers from the other psychologists covering much neuroscience and psychological research into your question. I’ll be honest: I’m no criminal or forensic psychologist, so I can’t add much to the answers to the first half of your question. However, the second half really made me think, in an ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ kind of way! Can ‘we’ have an impulse if ‘we’ don’t actually have access to it? I suppose it all comes down to what or who you think ‘we’ are when it comes to the brain and psychology…

      My own opinion, one that I think most of us share (scientists or not!), is that we have access to a ‘core’ of identity that we consider ‘us’. This ‘sense of self’ is kind of that little voice in our head that consists of our train of thoughts, our memories, our plans, our emotions – ‘us’, essentially!

      While your brain produces this ‘essential you’, it’s also constantly working on loads of processes that we would call ‘unconscious’ because, in general, they go on in the background of our brain’s workings, and so we don’t have access to them. Why? I certainly don’t know for sure, but some scientists have theorised that we’d be completely mentally overcome if we had to consciously think of every little process that our brain handles. For example, consider something as simple as picking up a glass of water. The brain has to control over ten individual muscles in the arm and fingers, adjust your grip according to information from the receptors in your hand, etc! But ‘you’ don’t have any sense of this all going on. Instead, your conscious experience is usually ‘i’m going to pick up and drink that glass of water’, and guess what: it all happens swimmingly!

      So there is lots of information processing going on ‘under the hood’, as it were, in your brain! Some of this can be rather simple, like my example of all the muscles control above. Still, there are also, as you suggest, more complex collections of brain activity that ‘bubble away’ under the surface of that core of ‘you’ that I mention above.

      But these tend to stay there or are actively ‘inhibited’, as Alex says, not because they are ‘sinister’, but just often because there are not the best or ‘optimal’ way to go about doing something. We all ‘could’ pick up an axe and ‘could’ use it equally to chop wood or..chop someone’s head off (please don’t try this at home. Please!). Until ‘we’ do either action consciously, they can exist as a whole series of muscle movements pre-programmed and ready to go in our brains (google ‘utilisation disorder’ for when this goes wrong…). But the movement programs aren’t sinister – they are really, in a way, without any moral or ethical ‘weight’ until we consciously act on them. So – finally! – there’s no sinister ‘other you’ with their own impulses, just waiting to pop out. Phew!

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