Biological approaches to psychoanalytic theory could, in principle, explore all three types of unconscious processes. One way of doing so—which I will explain in the next chapter—is to compare images of activity generated by unconscious and conscious perceptual states and to identify the regions of the brain recruited by each. Most aspects of our cognitive processes are based on unconscious inferences, on processes that occur without our awareness. We see the world effortlessly and as a unified whole—the foreground of a landscape and the horizon beyond it—because visual perception, the binding
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