| | | I have also been thinking a lot about both the subconscious mind and how to think about the brain. I think the most startling thing I have learned in the last five or so years is how powerful and to a certain degree programmable the unconscious mind is.
The first part of my working life I worked in politics and for state government developing and implementing social programs. I was constantly working over my head. At times it was a brutal experience. After I took early retirement, I started selling real estate. And in real estate, one has to juggle many personal stories, and dates when certain things have to be accomplished e.g. a house is to be shown, an engineers inspection, and appraisers inspection, etc.
When I first started I was constantly overwhelmed by the amount of information I had to organize and remember. I filled up notebooks with names, phone numbers and appointments and notes about the client. But it seems that over the years my mind totally unbeknownst to me has developed a software package that now does most of that unconsciously.
For example, I no longer write down any meetings. If I have an engineers report in two weeks at 2 o'clock. I will just remember it. The way my mind has set it up is that it regurgitates that appointment several times over the next two weeks so that it sticks in my mind. It has been the strangest thing because I've never been able to do that before.
The other thing I've noticed is how time after time I will be confronted with a problem that I cannot see a solution to, but will sleep on it and the next day the answer will be there. Or sometimes it may take two or three days, but time after time I come up with solutions that I had no idea about to begin with. Just this morning I solved one of the most difficult problems I've ever had and it was my unconscious I'm sure doing it knowing that I had to have it figured out by tomorrow. I've been chewing on it for a couple of weeks.
I have come to the point now that when I'm confronted with a difficult problem, or my client is I just automatically tell them to sleep on it. Robert Ornstein who wrote the evolution of consciousness says in his book that he feels the unconscious mind does most of the big thinking and the conscious mind is almost nothing more than an observer.
Anyway, I have a degree in psychology but was never taught any of this stuff. Nor have I ever read about it anywhere. One last thing Robert Ornstein believes we have a brain much different than the classical understanding. We don't just have one big monolithic brain, we have many brains and layers of brains. As Carl Sagan once said in his book Brocca's brain, sometimes we see the world through the eyes of a lizard |
|
