In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR MIND
If there’s anything that should be 100% comprehensible to you in exquisite detail it’s the workings of your mind. I mean you and only you inhabit it 24/7/52. It’s a lifelong relationship, one-on-one; at the very least till death us do part. But if you understand even the workings of just your own mind, put yourself down for a Nobel Prize, you’ve earned it.
While different people have slightly different brain chemistries and neural network connections thus explaining different personalities, interests, worldviews and abilities, etc. you have just one normal brain chemistry (unless you deliberately alter it) and one neural network connection to come to terms with. So, we’ll (actually will have to) concentrate on the one, since you’re a typical representation of the generic whole.
You do a lot of mental stuff each day. From the moment you wake up your conscious mind goes into hyper-drive (your subconscious was still churning away while you were sleeping). Those daily mental gyrations tend to be interrelated but involve things like decisions and planning, from the chessboard to the dinner table; memory and recall; sensory processing (taste, smell, sight, sound, touch); and learning, even if it’s the evening news, the local gossip across the fence, or what’s on sale this week at the supermarket.
I need to state from the outset that the mind does have a very limited ability to deal with more than just a couple of things at one time. In fact it’s best to deal with issues arising in a linear fashion. You cannot concentrate on driving while at the same time concentrating on a cell-phone conversation as aptly demonstrated on the “MythBusters” TV show. I’m sure you can identify with trying to juggle three, four, five or more things at once, all demanding your full attention with things just sort of going to hell in a hand-basket, sometimes with serious or potentially serious consequences.
YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
Have you ever had a complex thought leap suddenly, almost or even unbidden, into your conscious (the self-aware or self-conscious) mind? Why? Was it your conscious mind that brought it to the fore, or your subconscious (otherwise more technically known as the unconscious) mind? Chances are, it was your subconscious (unconscious) mind. It’s been shown that your subconscious mind makes up your mind for you split seconds before you’re consciously aware of it. It’s almost as if it was predetermined.
Your subconscious mind bubbles along under the radar without an actual conscious input from your self-aware you, processing, ever processing. What should be random bubbling like boiling water should therefore result in a mess – a hodgepodge. Instead, you seem to get a purposefully and linearly directed nebulous something which at the least expected time pops through your grey matter’s ‘wormhole’ that links your subconscious mind with your conscious mind. Your conscious mind cannot seemingly draw out of your subconscious mind the nebulous something you need when you need it.
So how does your subconscious stay on the straight and narrow without your conscious input? I have no idea, but it apparently does. When your conscious thoughts go off the rails, say you’re distracted by something not relevant to the task at hand; well you can quickly force your conscious mind back on track to the task at hand. You don’t have to do that with your subconscious since the subconscious apparently can’t be distracted.
So I wonder whether the world’s greatest thinkers – scientists, philosophers, inventors, writers, etc. weren’t really conscious thinkers at all but derived much of their inspiration from their subconscious.
It’s not your conscious mind that connects the dots, it’s the subconscious. How often do you hear, or even tell yourself, “I’ll sleep on it” (which is why it is probably a good idea to always have pen and paper or a Dictaphone next to the bed)? How many people can relate to solving an out of the ordinary mental puzzle in their dreams, or the solution comes to them ‘out of the blue’ while preoccupied with something related. There are no tools, only the resources in your own mind. In fact if you consciously try to come up with an original creative idea, you’ll probably fail, but when you’re in mental neutral gear – eureka.
Ever immediately forget something you thought of just minutes before and cannot now for the life of you consciously recall? Throw your mind into neutral and when you least expect it, there it is back to the fore again. Now quickly, write it down!
Here are a few other examples where the subconscious rules your roost.
We’re all aware of hypnosis drawing out memories locked away, in the subconscious of course. You have no control in your conscious ability to recall. It takes a more extreme form of that “gotta put my mind in neutral”, the hypnotic state, to bring the data to the fore. Of course unethical or badly trained or amateur hypnotists can implant false memories or manipulate those already there thus producing unreliable results.
It’s not at all extraordinary for a minority (10 – 25%) of absolutely normal adult humans to have at least one vivid hallucination during their lifetime – a product of their subconscious that’s probably much more common in children’s ‘make-believe’ like there’s a monster in the closet or their inevitable invisible playmates. As our minds grow older and mature, we become less likely to have subconscious hallucinations, but they can still happen.
Perhaps connected, we’ve nearly all experienced involuntary (as to subject) daydreams, which, like sleeping dreams, is a product of the subconscious.
Speaking of sleep, when you go to sleep you go into lockdown mode courtesy of the subconscious so you don’t physically act out the actions you dream about. That makes sense otherwise you could do yourself and others in your immediate vicinity a serious mischief, but you have no control over that lockdown process.
An ordinary conscious level mental puzzle might be how to get from A to B on the bus when your car is in the repair shop. These are the sorts of ordinary every day mental gymnastics that usually require tools – hammer and nails; a cookbook; a train timetable; a table of trigonometry functions; and memory. However, in order to utilize them, you have got to have concepts of them filed away in your subconscious cubby-holes*, so everyday mental, and apparently conscious activity have mandatory roots in the subconscious, otherwise, no go.
Just as an aside, there’s another version of subconscious activity that usually deals with body language. How often do you see someone talking on the phone to someone else, neither party can see the other, yet probably both parties are making all sorts of hand gestures and using other kinds of body language as if they were talking face-to-face? Probably quite frequently – it’s the norm. Or you see a woman sitting on a bus or in a café or some such, and she’s preening her hair, running her fingers through it but not even aware she’s doing it.
When you only have microseconds to act, say when you’re standing in the batters box 60 feet, 6 inches away from the pitchers mound and a rapidly rotating baseball is heading towards you at 95 mph, do you stand there and consciously crunch the numbers before your go/no-go swing, or just turn the issue over to your subconscious to go for it, or let the ball pass you by. Ditto that for an outfielder chasing down a fly ball. In such situations your conscious mind is worthless baggage. Instinct, training, practice and all those other facets embedded in your subconscious required come to the fore and takeover. You can do the physics calculations at your leisure after the game.
*You shouldn’t think of those cubby-holes literally as individual compartments within your brain. It’s just a convenient analogy or way of looking at things. Memory is apparently dispersed throughout your wetware similar to your documents or files on your PC not being located here or there or on this or that piece of hardware, but rather your files, the bits and pieces of your documents, are scattered wherever there’s a bit of space available, which is why every now and again you need a defragmenter program to bring the pits and pieces back together again so that your PC doesn’t strain itself unnecessarily bringing it all together.
To be continued…
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