The Unconscious Mind
One of my friends asked me the other day if I could cover the topic of the unconscious mind because she'd been having this strange recurring dream. Having always been interested in psychology (and a huge fan of Dr. Phil), I told her I could most certainly do that. As I indulged in the research for this topic, I got the chance to uncover as well as absorb fascinating new information about how our brain works. As I'm writing this post at this moment, it still baffles me how limited our conscious minds are -- how much we're actually missing. In addition to that, I never thought about how our unconscious mind is directed connected to falling in love. Well, today, we're going to unveil all of that.
Conscious vs. Subconscious vs. Unconscious
Before we get to the bits and pieces of the unconscious mind, let's talk about our three states of minds.
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Conscious Mind: Our conscious mind is what we're aware of at this very moment. In a way, it's the tip of the iceberg.
Basically, it's what we're aware of physically and mentally. For instance, you're aware of what you're reading right now, or you're aware that it's hot or cold where you are right now.
Subconscious Mind or Pre-conscious Mind: Generally speaking, the subconscious mind is what lies below the conscious mind. The information there is easily accessible, though not always present in your conscious mind. For example, you don't consciously think of your daily trip from home to work or school. Or you can go to the shower without consciously thinking of what to do.
Unconscious Mind: Information in the unconscious mind isn't easily accessible. It also consists of intuition, and primal instincts. The unconscious mind stores memories and experiences that shape us into the person we are today, though we're not always sure nor can we always recall those memories.
Our Lenses of the World:
Magic tricks are about illusions, and illusions are false assumptions of our brains.Our brain makes assumptions all the time. We seek pattern in things, and we predict what's going to happen next. One example would be when looking at a straight line, we jump right to the end because we can already predict the pattern of the line. Dr. Shawn Smith, a psychologist in Denver, Colorado said: "We perceive only bits and pieces of the world around us, but our
minds fill in the blanks to create the illusion of a seamless experience." This is why we're easily by optical illusions. Neuroscientist Stephen Macknik states that if you hold your thumb at arms length, your thumbnail is the same of your fovea, which is part of your retina where you can see. He further claimed that anywhere else, you're essentially legally blind.
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Our conscious mind is located in the cerebral cortex, which is about one millimeter thick, and containing 15 billion neurons. It is estimated that our unconscious mind process 2,000 times more data than our conscious mind. We can only consciously cope with 4 to 5 things happening at a time. According to the American Psychology, our conscious brain actually absorbs 11 million units of information, while we are only aware of a maximum of 40. Clearly we can see how dominant our unconscious mind is in our daily life. In addition to that, our conscious mind perceives information one-third of a second later than our our unconscious mind. Basically, not only are we late in taking in what's going on, we're also missing out on more than we're taking in. Our consciousness is considered as an afterthought.
According to research, accidents involved with cyclists happen less in cities with more cyclists. The reason to that is because the more accustomed we are to something, the better we are when we're on autopilot mode, which is most of the time. As a matter of fact, 99% of what we see is projected from our memory, whereas only 1% is added by the sensory organs. To further support this, Professor Daniel Simons has done various experiments to show how we are consciously aware of very little of our surrounding and how easily we can manipulated. I have linked some of his experiments in the "Sources" down below.
What's With the Limitation?:
Now that we have a basic understand of how our conscious mind and unconscious mind work, let's get to the reason why. A part of our brain called the "thalamus" is responsible for deciding what piece of information is important enough to share with our consciousness.
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It all boils down to the fact that our brain functions faster and more efficient when in autopilot mode. In fact, consciously thinking about something slows us down and makes us become more accident-prone. In addition to that, when we think hard about something, our brain creates contradicting ideas. For instance, when you're playing basketball or when you're driving, if you're constantly paying close attention to the position of your arms and legs and what movement you're going to make, there's going to be a lot of confusion and mistakes. Have you ever tried paying attention to how you walk and which foot to put in front of the other? I guarantee you'll fall down after a while. Thinking hard actually makes our brain burn energy as much as our muscle.
This is also somehow related to evolution. Our unconscious mind makes assumptions of what is dangerous and what is safe, so that we can have the space in our conscious mind to be aware of other useful things. Back when we were cavemen (and cavewomen), it was very vital that we could think on our feet, and our unconscious mind had a l
ot to do with that.
Now I've realized that I've only written about half of this topic. There are still many more to share about our unconscious mind, especially when it comes to social interaction and falling in love. To avoid making this post look like a short novella, I'll continue with the relation between our unconscious mind and our social interaction in the next post. When they say love is blind, it's because our unconscious mind blinds us to it. Stay tuned for more of that.
Love, Catherine
XOXO
Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo (Daniel Simons experiment)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ (Daniel Simons experiment)
waiting to read abt unconscious mind and falling in love thing
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