February 7, 1984

Prosecutors at the trial of City Councilman Luis A. Olmedo played a videotape yesterday that they said showed Mr. Olmedo conspiring to get kickbacks from detectives posing as construction executives. The secret tape was played at the trial of Mr. Olmedo, Democrat of Brooklyn, and two others in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. They are charged with conspiracy and attempted extortion.

''It is a living hell. We have rockets coming down on us one a minute.

Owning a home has always been considered the American dream, and largely because of this, tax benefits have been generous. This year, while those benefits have been left unchanged by Congress and the Internal Revenue Service, several Federal court decisions have established important precedents that could affect millions of taxpayers. Specifically, the courts have provided both victories and defeats for individuals who want to write off a room in their home as a business expense. Vacation homeowners, meanwhile, were handed another favorable ruling on the amount of rental expenses they can write off. For many years, the Federal Government has helped subsidize the cost of home ownership by means of deductions for mortgage interest and real estate taxes as well as preferential tax treatment when a primary residence is sold.

AMERICAN college professors have always been free to retire to their studies, write textbooks and other scholarly works and pocket the revenues they generate. But when Sharon Dugdale writes course materials for math classes in elementary schools, she does so on the multimillion-dollar computer system of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Does this mean that the university should share in the profits? Under a new policy, still to be formally approved by the faculty, the answer is yes and no. Dr. Dugdale, a full- time researcher in the university's Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory, will keep the first $10,000 of profits, but after that she will share the income with the university on a sliding scale. Above $100,000, the university gets three-quarters of the revenue.

SUDDENLY, psychology is excited again about the unconscious. For decades mainstream research psychologists suppressed the notion that crucial mental activity could take place unconsciously. Indeed, through the 1950's, these experimental psychologists largely ignored any such entity as ''the mind,'' focusing instead on observable behavior. Even in the 1960's when the resurgence of cognitive psychology legitimized the study of how the mind registers information, the unconscious was still slighted outside psychoanalytic circles. But now, in what one researcher calls ''a silent revolution,'' experimental psychologists are taking the unconscious seriously in the wake of new and compelling evidence that the unconscious is the site of a far larger portion of mental life than even Freud envisioned. The main studies show that the unconscious mind may understand and respond to meaning, form emotional responses and guide most actions, largely independent of conscious awareness. And the research evidence extends beyond the laboratory to such real-life situations as an operating room: Researchers have verified, for example, that what patients hear while under anesthesia can affect their subsequent behavior and, ultimately, their health. The findings imply that, despite the subjective experience of being in conscious control of feelings and thoughts, decisions and actions, people are piloted far more than they know by the unconscious mind.