Suconscious Motivators to be Mindful Of:

 

To answer the author's question at the bottom, I was aware of all ten.  There's nothing particularly special about that fact - I have simply been motivated to understand how this mind stuff works.  You can do the same, if that's a choice you make.

 

10 Truths About the Unconscious You

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. ~ Auden

What if I told you that your unconscious mind actually controls your conscious mind?

 

Not exactly what you had in mind, now is it?

 

In my studies of neuroscience and neuro-practices, I've learned truths about our unconscious minds that literally blew me away. Many of the beliefs I'd been taught for decades became little more than urban myth.

 

I want to share some of these powerful truths with you. The more we understand about our minds, the easier it becomes to step into our full potential. Our minds are designed for each and every one of us to create BIG potential!

 

Today I'm sharing a list of 10 truths that IMO we all should know. Over the next few weeks, I'll post more about each truth and how it impacts our business and personal worlds. So here goes!

Your Unconscious Mind(UM):

1) Processes all of the data inputs from our five senses.

That's now around 11M bits/second, which is a lot of info to handle. More than any supercomputer out there can manage. Your UM uses deletion, distortion and generalization to manage all that data. We'll talk more about this process on Wednesday.

2) Is the master of your conscious mind.

In fact, your conscious mind only gets involved in data processing and responses when the unconscious mind calls upon it. That's when the UM decides it needs logical input to analyze something that's new and different, that doesn't fit the known patterns. Until then, your unconscious rules.

3) Is symbolic.

Your UM stores all of your memories in symbols and images - not in text or paragraph form. That's one reason why visual is a stronger communication/memory system than simple text.

4) Enjoys serving you, but needs clear direction.

Your UM is programmed to serve you. It runs all of your body's systems, instinctually responds to danger and more. It's designed to serve you but it also needs very clear direction. That's where we humans sometimes get in trouble.

5) Does not process negatives.

That's right - your UM does not hear that negation or negative. When you talk or think about what you do not want to happen, it's the same as telling your UM to go out and get that very thing. That's why it's so important to say what you want.

6) Takes everything personally.

Since perception is all about our own unique meta programs and processes that are used to analyze, store and respond to information - everything is personal to your UM. Each of us has to consciously strive for objectivity, stepping beyond our unique programs and perspectives to see various viewpoints.

7) Controls and maintains all perceptions.

Our initial perceptions are formed in early childhood. Between the ages of 0-7, every single thing that happens in our world becomes a truth to our UM. We then build on those initial perceptions and they become like fly paper - attracting more experiences that match the perception to make it true.

8) Works on the principle of least effort.

Our minds want to use the least resources possible to manage inputs, run our bodies and more. The smaller the effort, the more mental capacity we have for emergency processing - like when that woolly mammoth charges us or when all heck breaks loose in our business.

9) Maintains instincts and generates habits.

The more we can respond out of habit or instinct, the less energy our UM has to use. We create habit after habit to allow our minds to have excess capacity for those all important moments. The challenge is that those instincts and habits often get in the way of our own best path.

10) Is programmed to constantly seek more and more.

This is why there is always more and more to discover, why we never stop learning and expanding. It's the function of our UM to expand and as such, so does mankind.

___

I'd love to know how many of the above truths you knew before you read this post. I had inklings of a few but didn't really know the reality! How about you?

 

Check back over the next few weeks. I'll be sharing about individual truths on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Dan Ariely Videos on Cognition and Truth

Because my blog isn't letting me post 'em in the video column.

Why post at all, you might ask?  Never memorize what you can look up.  If it worked for Einstein, who am I to argue?

The Truth About Dishonesty


Are We In Control of Our Decisions?

Our Buggy Moral Code

Art Imitates Life

 

 

 

The script was informed by Russell's own experiences with people who have struggled with mental health problems, the filmmaker said on Sunday.

 

 

World War II and the probing fingers of media shot our collective illusions of independent solitude full of wholes.  Now, the immediacy and addictive transparency of social media is shining strobe lights on the glass houses of our inner most selves.  In the words of Don Tapscott, we're all consciously naked in this new reality - yet only some are looking for fig leaves to cover themselves with.  Sprouting up here and there is a willingness to be naked and to let the sun light our souls.

 

 

Those who have stripped themselves of the cloisters of their solitude are being bombarded by consciousness of the world that inhabits them; the ecosystem that we are all, consciously or not, part of.  As the veils of illusion fall away, the realities laid bare are both inspiring and horrifying.  There is no Other; what we fear is just a reflection of ourselves.  Those we look upon as lesser than - less moral, less pragmatic, less sensible, less human - are equally valid in their judgements of us.  Beyond the Garden of Good and Evil, the world is a far less binary place.  There are no easy answers, no simple choices; decisions must be considered with content, context and consequence in mind.

 

 

While these pilgrims grapple with the vertiginous awareness that they are but trees in the forest, there are others who continue to see themselves as islands in the gulf, or points of light in the darkness.  These folk see safety in walls and threats in diversity; to them, reality is as it was intended and the only natural law is survival of the fittest.  The social ecosystem, as diverse and connected as is the natural one is not, to them, evolution; it's a fall over the edge of the world they know. 

 

 

Hence, we round out 2012 with hopeful films about the connectivity of people through space and time like Cloud Atlas and meditations on the silos of the self like Cosmopolis.  Elections on both sides of the Canadian/US border aren't about politics, they're about the end of our countries as we know them.  Even in our outlooks on diversity, we come down to poles.  But the world isn't like that; ours isn't a bipolar existence, it's a cyclical one.  There's also a little film called The Master, which is about people's need to believe in something and what they're willing to sacrifice on behalf of those beliefs.

 

 

What does all this have to do with a film about mentally ill people trying to support each other in building a new life, directed by a man not afraid to talk about his own brushes with mental illness?

 

 

That's for you to interpret.

Between Rage and Serenity: X Marks the Spot

“I believe that true focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity.”

   - Professor Charles Xavier

This piece on the differences of thought between people on the political left and those on the political right brought me back to an argument I’ve been making for a while now.

We are dividing the political spectrum in lateral, convenient ways, but they’re not particularly accurate.  Communist regimes and dictatorships aren’t polar opposites – they’re equally oppressive and dominance-focused.  Thoughtful Conservatives, Liberals and NDP can come to the same, logical conclusions – it’s the emotional pieces that shaped their politically-oriented policies that polarize them.

By this light, fundamentalist Christian movements are exactly the same as fundamentalist Islamic movements; they use different language and are trying to protect different models, but their approaches are exactly the same.

It’s not left vs. right – it’s selection-of-the-fittest vs. strengthening the collective.  Put another way, it’s biological evolution vs. social evolution.

The X-Men franchise provides a great example.

“I will bring you hope, old friend – just don’t get in my way.”

Magneto believes in a coming, inevitable war between mutants and humans.  His focus is the differences; only one group can dominate.  Obviously, he feels his tribe is the natural party for this.  Magneto feels so strongly about his beliefs that he’s willing to sacrifice others – including his own kind – to achieve his goals.  For him, peace was never an option.

Magneto’s power?  The ability to manipulate the world (metal, but there’s metal in most of our social trappings) around him through sheer force of will.

“There’s good in you too, and you can harness all that.”

Then there’s Professor X.  He believes in a collaborative future between mutant and human, with a sidebar thought that, through evolution, mutants will likely overcome humanity through natural processes, just as homo sapiens did Neanderthals.  Xavier is a negotiator; he feels there is always room for dialogue and is willing to sacrifice himself to keep the conversation going.

Xavier’s powers are of the mind – control of self and, through that internal control, the ability to control others.  Like Loki, he’s a trickster, but unlike tricksters of old, the tricksters of today are seen as the heroes.  They want to solve through words, not violence.  Killing, says Xavier, won’t bring peace.

If we pay attention, there’s a trend, here – from reactive to proactive, from dominance to manipulation to collaboration.

When you look where we’re headed, it's not away from something, but rather towards a common centre.

X marks the spot.

The Limbic Baby

"A growing body of research indicates that babies are much more tuned into their environment than we realized."

This really shouldn't come as a surprise.  Human babies are the product of tens of thousands of years of primate evolution; like all baby animals, they come hard-wired with inherited mental models that help them survive.  A baby goat can walk in short order; baby turtles have natural directional tuning.  Our latent abilities just run in a different direction.

Human babies are, physically, helpless - they can't even eat on their own.  What they can do, though, is ascribe value to behaviour and infer what it means to them.  We're built to be socially manipulative.

Mothers are sources of food and safety, so it's good to know who they are and give them some positive feedback (or withhold it to incite a behaviour change on their part).

Understanding happy and angry behaviour (in people, dogs, whatever) helps determine what's a threat, what's an opportunity and what's merely a curiosity.

Another cute little baby fact - babies get bored.  In fact, they cry when they're bored.  Their little brains are rapidly building synaptic connections, perceiving and linking the sensory stimulus of their world within their expanding mental reference library.  If you give their brains nothing to do, it's like flooring the pedal with the emergency break on.  

The thing to remember is that each of us started as babies; all our cognitive hardware has been built around that same, hard-wired reactive system.  As such, we're all programmed to respond to certain stimuli in a pre-determined way.  We can shape these responses, to a degree, when we understand the process - problem is, so few of us do.

If you doubt that at all, look at the four pictures here and think about how the different elements of each made you feel. 

You see my point.