Exploration of the subconscious mind.

For many years, the subconscious mine was an enigma. How and why it worked were a riddle. Modern science, however, has begun to offers some insight into the working of the subconscious.

The first part of the subconscious mind is the autonomic system which we discussed in the last chapter. This controls automatic functions such as breathing, heart rate, etc. The other part of the subconscious mind is even more mysterious. It is responsible for our dreams, long-term memory, and occasional flashes of inspiration.

Did you ever hear the phrase, "I'll sleep on it," meaning "I'll push the problem to the back of my mind and wait for some flash of inspiration." That flash of inspiration is the subconscious mind communicating with the conscious mind to say "I found the solution.". Oddly enough, those flashes of inspiration, those insights, often come when our subconscious mind is most active... when our conscious mind sleeps.

The subconscious and memory.

It is uncanny, but under the correct controlled conditions that human mind exhibits almost perfect recall. Conscious, waking memory is flawed. We constantly forget things. Our recall of events is imperfect. This can be seen in the case of criminal investigations, where multiple witnesses can give different descriptions of the same person or event. Didn't they all see the same thing? They did. However, their short-term memory was corrupted. That corruption is due to the conscious mind's filtering of sensory inputs. The brain doesn't need perfect recall in short-term memory to do most daily functions. The amount of data required to actually live your daily life is only a fraction of the data actually absorbed by your senses in the course of a waking day.

Is it really necessary to remember the color of the shirt that each person wore in the office today? Is it really essential to remember the exact height, shoe size, or birthday for each one of your friends and family members?

The conscious mind filters everything it takes in, storing what it thinks is important and essentially discarding details that it deems unimportant. As we shall see, however,it doesn't really discard them. It stores them in a buffer, or holding area, to be sorted out later. That sorting process generally occurs when we sleep, which is when the conscious mind sleeps and the subconscious is most active.

Moving Memories: Changing Locations.

You just bought a new type of frozen dinner at the store. Perhaps you bought a few of them. The first time, you read the cooking instructions. The second time, you probably don't remember them, so you read the instructions again! By the third time, the instructions are stuck in your head. You have moved the memory of the cooking instructions from short-term to long-term memory through repetition.

This process of repetition is how the conscious mind sorts important from on important information.

Of course, there are other methods that the mind use to shift information from short-term to long-term memory. Repetition is only one. For example, the conscious mind tends to more rapidly store music, rhymes and pictures. That's why we remember our ABCs when they are song to us, rather than just repeated verbally. Our mind much more easily remembers the ABC jingle. The music is a key to move the information from short-term to long-term memory.