Subconscious Perception—The Plot Thickens:
To this point I’ve been talking about awareness and consciousness and perception, and it’s sounded like they’re all pretty much the same thing. Well, that was the easiest way to explain everything to this point. But guess what…
Consciousness is pretty much what it sounds like—all the things you’re thinking about at any given moment.
Awareness is basically the combination of your consciousness and subconsciousness.
Perception is the meaning you attach to all of the information you have available for use in your consciousness and subconsciousness.
Now here’s the trick: There are a whole lot of levels to your subconsciousness. How much you use any piece of information depends on which level it’s on. Some of it affects your perception a lot, some of it affects your perception a little bit, and some of it doesn’t affect your perception at all because it’s been repressed or just completely forgotten.
Your interaction with the world begins with your senses. With your senses you take in information.
From there you put the information into the sense filter part of your brain, where your brain sorts through it and figures out where to send it from there. Some of it goes to your subconscious directly, some of it goes to your long-term memory, and some of it goes to your consciousness. Of course, the same piece of information can go to multiple places at once.
For the sake of discussion, we’ll say that all the information that gets directed to your subconscious and nowhere else is all the information that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. You basically discard it, but it’s still there in your brain somewhere. (In writing this section I have the choice between being very specific and using a lot of words you probably wouldn’t understand, or using words you will understand but simplifying my explanation.)
Information that goes to your long-term memory but not to your consciousness is information that might be important to you, but doesn’t seem important right now. So you’re storing it somewhere where you could remember it if you needed to and where it will affect your decision-making subconsciously, unlike the information that you dumped somewhere in your subconsciousness and forgot about. There are a lot of levels to your long-term memory, so some of the information stays closer to your consciousness than other information, and affects your decision-making more.
Information that goes to your consciousness is the information you think is the most important. Information in your consciousness can pull information out of your long-term memory if it seems to relate to it. And once you’re done with information in your consciousness, you can store it in your long-term memory for later use, or else you can discard it into your subconsciousness.
Once your information is distributed, there are five basic ways you can make decisions. Of course, there are some combinations of these that you can do simultaneously.
Information can be routed from your sensory input directly to the instinctive reaction part of your subconscious, which will make you react without any memory of anything being necessary. If you hear a loud noise, you jump. If you see something flying at your face, you duck. Some psychologists have even experimented with newborn infants and showed them pictures of people’s faces about 10 minutes after the infants were born. Some of the pictures were scrambled up, so their eyes, noses, mouths, and ears were in the wrong places, while the other pictures weren’t scrambled up. The infants reacted favorably to the non-scrambled pictures, and unfavorably to the scrambled pictures. So literally, infants are born into the world expecting to see people’s faces.
Information can be routed to your consciousness where it will remind you of something and pull other information out of your long-term memory to compare it to. This is what happens when you hear the opening chords of a song on the radio, immediately recognize the song, and remember all the lyrics.
Information can be routed to your consciousness where it doesn’t remind you of anything, or at least, not of anything that’s terribly relevant to your situation. This is what happens when you hear the opening chords of a song on the radio and don’t recognize it, so you have no idea what the song is or whether or not you’re going to like it. Technically, this is just a different version of the last example, because hearing the opening chords of the song does pull some information out of your long-term memory anyway—things like, reminding you that you’re listening to the radio and that you know what music is. But really, in practical terms, how useful is that? So those realizations don’t reach your consciousness.
Information can be routed to your long-term memory, where the related memories are so well ingrained that you don’t need to bring the information or your memories to your consciousness to be able to act upon it. To use myself for an example, when I receive the information that I’m finished eating breakfast, I get up and put the milk back in the refrigerator and my bowl in the sink. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on my way to work and thought I forgot to put the milk away. But I’ve never forgotten to put the milk away, I just never remember having done it.
Information can be routed to your consciousness where it will remind you of something and pull other information out of your long-term memory, but without those long-term memories making it all the way to your consciousness. You then act upon the conscious information and the subconscious information, but without realizing that the subconscious information is affecting your decision-making. You think that you’re acting upon the conscious information only, so you don’t realize that you had more choices than you thought you did. Some of the choices you could’ve made you decided against without realizing it, because you decided against them subconsciously.
This last one is hard to compare to anything, because you have no idea when you’re doing this. So here’s an example. In the last book I talked about how parents who let their infants cry themselves to sleep inflict emotional damage on their children that can stay with them for the rest of their lives. The infant who cries himself to sleep can end up feeling lonely or insecure or like there’s something wrong with the world and he has no idea what to do about it, or whatever. That feeling becomes a part of his childhood development, so it gets built into his developing brain and stays with him the rest of his life.
Then as an adult whenever he gets information into his consciousness, he’s going to act upon that information along with the subconscious “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information. Suppose the information he had in his consciousness at some point was a choice to get a job right out of high school or go to college. He might not perceive that as a choice, he might only perceive that as someone offering him the chance to get a job and someone else talking about people going to college. If he’s subconsciously combining this information with the “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information, then he’s probably going to want to play it safe and not take his chances on going to college. If he wasn’t acting upon the subconscious “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information, he’d have more opportunities in life, and maybe going to college would work out better for him than getting a job right away. But he can’t make that choice, because he can’t even perceive that there’s a choice there to make.