It is a bit spooky to think that there is this whole section of our mind that is separate and hidden from our conscious mind. The subconscious mind works faster and more effectively than the conscious mind, and to be honest, it makes most of the decisions, just sending them up to your conscious mind to sign off on!

Think about it: we receive more than 11 million pieces of data per second from all of our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. That is 660 million pieces of data per minute or 70 billion pieces of data per day. If our conscious mind was tasked with the job of processing this information, it would take a lifetime to process the data that we received in just one single day through our senses. So, the subconscious mind takes all this in and only feeds us up the data that we need to make a decision on.

How does your subconscious mind speak to you? I find that my subconscious mind speaks to my conscious mind with little bursts of emotion, or little visions. Perhaps my subconscious mind had been considering lunch this morning, which was why, when I was learning about it, it decided to throw up a delicious and tangible vision of a particular chickpea and white bean falafel at Fonda on Smith Street. My subconscious mind will give me the grind, if it thinks a course of action is not the right one, and sometimes I think that my subconscious mind is aware of more that is going on than just inside my house or my body, as on occasion it has told my conscious mind about things outside that I couldn’t possibly know. Perhaps it is possible to develop or tap into our subconscious mind to engage in practices such as telepathy or a kind of sixth sense about what is going on in the world.

Proof that the subconscious works to solve problems

The fact that the subconscious mind is processing data and solving problems in the background can be determined by this experiment done by Pawel Lewiki in the 1980’s. He gave students an animated grid with one ‘X’ in one of the quadrants as shown.

He asked students to guess where the X would appear next – so what quadrant the X would appear in.

Unbeknownst to the students, the computer had some complex but explicit rules about where the X would appear next. It could not appear in the same quadrant twice and there was a relationship between the second placement and the third placement of the X.

The students became better at guessing where the X would appear and they became faster at guessing too, but when they were asked what the rules of the placement of the X, the students could not say. Even when offered a substantial cash prize they could not tell the researchers what the rules were.

This proves that the subconscious mind does problem solving work in the background, and does not mention to the conscious mind about what it is doing or how it is doing it!

Self awareness is power

Interesting, no? And yet, not foolproof! We still make mistakes and missteps, even with a subconscious mind that is processing all these billions of pieces of data. I do think that learning about how our mind works can help us to better use it though.