Mental Floss

Part of my rehabilitation, during this hiatus from work, is to work on my memory. I'd like to strengthen my mental skills all around, in fact, but mostly I need to focus on recollection. I have sharp short term recall, but have been cursed with one of the worst long term memories of anyone I know. I'd almost prefer it was the other way around. While it's great to be able to distinctly remember everything that's happened or was said over the past several months, sadly there are huge parts of my personal life that I simply can't recall. So I have to rely on friends to retell stories as if I wasn't there.

Part of strengthening the mind is understanding how it works. While scientists on a whole are still in the early stages of identifying and mapping brain function and linking it to what we perceive as our mind, we actually have a unique opportunity, each of us, to explore how the mind works ourselves, having access to a fully operational one at all times as we do. The trick, of course, is to get past the concept that you are using a tool to analyze itself, which some say is why we will never be able to fully understand how our mind works. I wholeheartedly disagree with this - our mind is capable of visualizing such unimaginable things such as invisible protons or vast solar systems - so why not think that one day we will be able to use it to understand how we think?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. My perception of the mind (based solely on the exercise of being aware of my own thoughts and where / how I become aware of them) is that it is made up of two distinctly separate pieces: the conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious mind operates exactly like the mind of an alligator or a dog or a cat; it is what allows us to function, to eat, to sleep, even to experience emotions. The conscious mind is a completely different animal, and seems to be capable of logical thought (based on pattern recognition and the ability to predict outcomes and make decisions accordingly).

This is pretty close to scientifically proven, and it doesn't contradict Dr. Freud - he was talking psychology and we're talking pure thought here. In fact, there are literally two different physical areas in the human brain that when measured for activity during different mental challenges each fire at different times. Scientifically, this seems to support the theory of dual conscious and subconscious minds by indicating that these distinct thought patterns take place in completely physically separate places in the brain.

Separate they may be, however these two pieces of our mental fiber are in constant communication with each other.They don't act as one, but they work together in near-perfect harmony.

Ever try your hardest to remember something only to fail and then have it pop up later when you are thinking about something completely different? That's your subconscious working in the background, executing a search, and then passing the results back to your conscious mind in the mental equivalent of a browser popup window. Ever have deja vu? That's your subconscious mind constantly comparing current sensory input with previously-recorded memories and sending an alert to your conscious when it finds a match that is worth noting.

I tend to think that we dream in our subconscious mind, and in a rested state with no sensory input, our conscious mind wanders over and watches from time to time, like some residential voyeur peeking over the fence at a suntanning neighbor's wife. This gives us a glimpse into the strange and jumbled world of our subconscious, a peek into how we actually think and process input.

Like dreams, this process is is illogical, intuitive, nonsensical, and completely meaningful.

It's also stubborn. While our conscious mind can be reasoned with, our subconscious cannot. It learns from repetition, and unlearns the same way. Have a cigarette with your coffee every morning for a year, and the first day you have a coffee and skip the cigarette, your subconscious (albeit fueled by chemical dependencies) will scream out for a smoke, desperately sending images of your favorite brand pack of smokes to its conscious cousin. Wake up every Monday dreading your work day for long enough, and even after you quit your job, Monday morning will arrive along with that same feeling of dread - now out of place and illogical, when viewed in the perspective of the rational conscious mind.

This is how I started my day today. Saturday and Sunday I rose full of hope and rested (despite not sleeping well), but this morning I woke up with the same nagging feelings of dread I used to get knowing that checking my e-mail would open a Pandora's box of misery to kick off my work week.

This is interesting insight, to say the least, into how complicated - and yet simplistic - the subconscious mind is. It tracked the day of the week in order to prepare me for my Monday, but couldn't track current events enough to know that work was no longer a factor.

Or, more to the point, it couldn't reason and predict that quitting my job meant that Mondays would no longer be depressing to me.

That's a task for the conscious.

And so the conscious and subconscious work together quite well, but then again are completely independent creatures and that's where we fall short of our true potential. The duality of man, so to speak, in that we literally have two minds operating for us (and against us) at any given time. How frustrating that I can be conscious of the difference of this Monday and last Monday, but still be a slave to my subconscious defenses that kicked in despite being no longer relevant.

Just like deciding to quit smoking isn't the same as quitting smoking.
(For those keeping track, by the way, it's day 4 and I'm not looking back. My subconscious mind can eat it.)

It seems to me that the key to life then, the key to enlightenment, and perhaps even the key to happiness is to tune our independent minds to work as one. Imagine how powerful a man would be if he could harness the strength of both halves of his mental capacity; the whole undoubtedly being greater than the sum of its parts.