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| Better Communication with Your Subconscious |
Better Communication with Your Subconscious
The more you learn and the more you organize your memories, the more powerful your thinking becomes. As the quantity and quality of your neural pathways increase, the potential for making more effective use of your subconscious increases. Your subconscious then becomes a library of neural networks that you can learn to access more effectively.
Modifying subconscious subprograms
Your subconscious normally runs a number of subprograms to keep you alive and functioning. In addition to its standard maintenance functions, your subconscious occasionally injects emotional input and survival urges into your consciousness. It also monitors what your conscious mind is up to, so it can retrieve needed information
from memory and add intuitive conclusions.
This activity of your subconscious leads to a vital question. What impact can your conscious mind have on what your subconscious does? Autonomic subprograms
We know the subconscious runs a number of subprograms that control functions such as breathing, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, and blinking, and coughing reflexes. Do you have any conscious control over these subprograms?
Most of the time, you breathe without any conscious thought. While you cannot consciously decide to cease breathing, you can alter your breathing patterns. You can choose to take deep breaths or shallow. You can choose to breathe slowly or rapidly.
You can even choose to hold your breath for about a minute. Your eyelids blink every few seconds to clean and moisturize the surface of your eyes.
You can choose to blink more rapidly, to wink by blinking just one eye, and with effort can stop your eyes from blinking for a few minutes at a time.
To some extent you can even consciously alter your heart rate and blood pressure. Vigorous activity and threatening situations will cause your pulse and blood pressure to rise. It is also possible to practice relaxation techniques to reduce your heart rate and lower your blood pressure.
The key point is that even functions that are normally considered beyond conscious control can be modified to some extent by conscious effort.
Emotions as subprograms
Your limbic system provides you with primitive and high-speed emotional responses to life’s challenges and opportunities. Your limbic system can bypass reason, logic, and normal morality. In social settings your limbic system can, and sometimes does, get you into hot water. If, after an emotional outburst or inappropriate behaviour, you ask yourself, ‘Why did I do that?’ or ‘Why did I react that way?’ chances are you are recovering from a limbic system outburst.
You do not want to suppress all of your emotions. You want to be able to encourage and prolong positive emotions. Even some negative emotions provide motivation to alter your behaviour in a positive direction. For example, at times feelings of shame or guilt can help to steer your behaviour in a more constructive direction. However, if not justified, those same emotions can inhibit your normal behaviours. Negative emotions such as anger, hate, and vengeance are emotions that are best managed as effectively as possible.
There are a few simple approaches to managing your emotions:
1. Do all you can to insert a time delay between a stimulus and an emotional reaction. A time delay of just a few moments gives your conscious mind and your subconscious at Level III an opportunity to assess the situation in a more logical and rational manner. Your initial emotional reaction may prove to be justified, or it may not.
2. Develop the habit of analyzing your emotions. Ask yourself, ‘Why am I feeling this way?’, ‘What stimulus has evoked this emotion?’ and ‘Should I pause and extend this sensation, or should I squelch this sensation?’
3. Practice creating your own emotions in controlled situations. Find activities that make you happy, situations that make you sad, conditions that arouse your anger, images that frighten you. The key is to become aware of the stimuli that trigger your emotions. Then you will be better able to manage emotions that are generated by external stimuli.
The more important a decision is to you, the more important it is to separate the logical and the emotional components. You will probably experience strong emotions when you are about to marry someone, start a business, buy a house, enlist in the army, or join a mob. Those are precisely the situations that require a careful analysis before you act.
There is one more important point to make regarding your emotional subprograms. You should always keep in mind that there are people out there in your social nvironment who are expert at manipulating your emotional responses for their own benefit. Some may be well-intentioned, but most are deliberately short-circuiting your rational thinking to achieve their own ends.
Skill subprograms
Every time you master a skill through practice and repetition you have trained your subconscious mind so that it is able to take over basic tasks related to that skill.
While your subconscious handles the basics, your conscious mind is free to focus on more challenging aspects of your day.
Knitting provides a simple example. When you are first learning to knit, you have to pay close attention to the movement of the needles and the position of the wool.
Skilled knitters can engage in conversation while their knitting needles are clicking away so fast that an observer can hardly follow them.
Playing a musical instrument provides another good example of a skill subprogram that, once mastered, is managed by the subconscious. A beginning guitar player has to pay close attention to the fingering for chords, notes, and the various scales. Once these basic skills have been mastered, a guitar player can focus more on the flow of the music and the development of musical style.
Our ability to develop physical skills demonstrates that we are able to deliberately create new neural networks in our subconscious. We can also practice and develop skills based on abstract thought processes. We can become skilled at making comparisons, analyzing information, writing speeches, finding patterns, and evaluating real estate or a country’s potential for war. As our conscious skills get better in these areas, so do our subconscious skills.
Biofeedback
In the field of system analysis, ‘feedback’ occurs when part of a system’s output is diverted and added to the input stream. Normally, feedback is used to regulate a system to keep it performing within acceptable limits. A room thermostat monitors part of the output from a furnace and sends a signal back to the furnace controls, which then switch the furnace on-and-off as required to maintain a steady temperature. When riding a bicycle, if we start to tip off to one side our internal sense of balance is alerted and signals are sent to turn the handlebars to correct the situation.
‘Biofeedback’ is a term that was coined in the 1960’s to describe a technique in which people could be trained to control certain internal processes, when given the ability to monitor subtle physical responses. These feedback signals may be as simple as a flashing light or as elaborate as a multi-dimensional video display. Biofeedback became a more practical technique as advances in electronics led to more sensitive and less expensive detectors. The three main types of detectors are:
1. Electromyography, which measures muscle contraction
2. Thermal biofeedback, which measures skin temperature
3. Neuro-feedback, which measures brain wave activity.
With biofeedback, you can be trained to lower your blood pressure, slow your heart rate, and relax your muscles. Biofeedback is now used to help patients cope with a whole range of conditions from attention deficit disorder, to muscle spasms (Association for Applied Psychology and Biofeedback, www.aapb.org). Tthere are many accepted applications of biofeedback, and the field is still under active development.
Biofeedback is another means for the conscious mind to communicate with the subconscious mind. The success of biofeedback is another clear indication that such communication is possible.
Direct communication
In order for you to survive, communications between your conscious and subconscious minds must proceed efficiently and effectively every day of your life. You can facilitate those communications by organization, by training, by managing your emotions, by developing specific skills, and through the use of biofeedback.
On occasion it would be helpful if you could communicate directly with your subconscious and thus have more direct access to some of its capabilities. Imagine the possibilities if you could talk directly to your subconscious and make requests such as:
‘My lower back on the right is aching, please relax those muscles.’, ‘The cut on my foot seems to be infected, send more white blood cells to that location.’, ‘I remember that man’s surname is Jones. I was introduced to him last week. Check my memories for his first name’, or ‘Search my memories for everything I know about the connection between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.’
When people talk to themselves, they are voicing their thoughts, framing questions, and testing their ideas. Expressing your thoughts aloud can be an effective way to organize your conscious thinking. According to the model of the mind developed above, your subconscious is always monitoring your environment like a NSA satellite, so every word you express is analyzed for significance. (The National Security Agency monitors world communications for information related to the interests and security of the USA, www.nas.gov )
If you can talk directly to your subconscious, just by shaping the words or creating a vision in your conscious mind, is it reasonable to expect a response? If it was easy to conduct that kind of communication, we would all be doing it and the question would be irrelevant.
While you consciously work on a problem, your subconscious mind often seems to be looking over your shoulder and working on the problem as well. Now and then ideas and insights just pop into your conscious mind. Here are two famous examples from the history of science:
1. Archimedes (c287 – 212 BCE) is often remembered for his discovery of the principle of flotation. As the story goes, while taking a bath in ancient Syracuse one day, he noticed that the water level in the tub rose and fell as more or less of him was submerged.
2. August Kekulé (1829 – 1891) was a noted German chemist who did pioneering work on the structure of molecules. Among his discoveries was the ring structure of the chemical, benzene. He claimed that the idea for the ring structure came to him in a daydream in which a snake seized its own tail.
Note that great ideas cannot materialize out of the blue. You have to be seriously working on a problem before your subconscious can help you out. The overall conclusion is that while part of your subconscious is inherited, other aspects are formed during your daily experiences as you develop new skills and knowledge. With practice and organized effort you can begin to make more efficient use of your subconscious capabilities.
The more you learn and the more you organize your memories, the more powerful your thinking becomes. As the quantity and quality of your neural pathways increase, the potential for making more effective use of your subconscious increases. Your subconscious then becomes a library of neural networks that you can learn to access more effectively.
Modifying subconscious subprograms
Your subconscious normally runs a number of subprograms to keep you alive and functioning. In addition to its standard maintenance functions, your subconscious occasionally injects emotional input and survival urges into your consciousness. It also monitors what your conscious mind is up to, so it can retrieve needed information
from memory and add intuitive conclusions.
This activity of your subconscious leads to a vital question. What impact can your conscious mind have on what your subconscious does? Autonomic subprograms
We know the subconscious runs a number of subprograms that control functions such as breathing, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, and blinking, and coughing reflexes. Do you have any conscious control over these subprograms?
Most of the time, you breathe without any conscious thought. While you cannot consciously decide to cease breathing, you can alter your breathing patterns. You can choose to take deep breaths or shallow. You can choose to breathe slowly or rapidly.
You can even choose to hold your breath for about a minute. Your eyelids blink every few seconds to clean and moisturize the surface of your eyes.
You can choose to blink more rapidly, to wink by blinking just one eye, and with effort can stop your eyes from blinking for a few minutes at a time.
To some extent you can even consciously alter your heart rate and blood pressure. Vigorous activity and threatening situations will cause your pulse and blood pressure to rise. It is also possible to practice relaxation techniques to reduce your heart rate and lower your blood pressure.
The key point is that even functions that are normally considered beyond conscious control can be modified to some extent by conscious effort.
Emotions as subprograms
Your limbic system provides you with primitive and high-speed emotional responses to life’s challenges and opportunities. Your limbic system can bypass reason, logic, and normal morality. In social settings your limbic system can, and sometimes does, get you into hot water. If, after an emotional outburst or inappropriate behaviour, you ask yourself, ‘Why did I do that?’ or ‘Why did I react that way?’ chances are you are recovering from a limbic system outburst.
You do not want to suppress all of your emotions. You want to be able to encourage and prolong positive emotions. Even some negative emotions provide motivation to alter your behaviour in a positive direction. For example, at times feelings of shame or guilt can help to steer your behaviour in a more constructive direction. However, if not justified, those same emotions can inhibit your normal behaviours. Negative emotions such as anger, hate, and vengeance are emotions that are best managed as effectively as possible.
There are a few simple approaches to managing your emotions:
1. Do all you can to insert a time delay between a stimulus and an emotional reaction. A time delay of just a few moments gives your conscious mind and your subconscious at Level III an opportunity to assess the situation in a more logical and rational manner. Your initial emotional reaction may prove to be justified, or it may not.
2. Develop the habit of analyzing your emotions. Ask yourself, ‘Why am I feeling this way?’, ‘What stimulus has evoked this emotion?’ and ‘Should I pause and extend this sensation, or should I squelch this sensation?’
3. Practice creating your own emotions in controlled situations. Find activities that make you happy, situations that make you sad, conditions that arouse your anger, images that frighten you. The key is to become aware of the stimuli that trigger your emotions. Then you will be better able to manage emotions that are generated by external stimuli.
The more important a decision is to you, the more important it is to separate the logical and the emotional components. You will probably experience strong emotions when you are about to marry someone, start a business, buy a house, enlist in the army, or join a mob. Those are precisely the situations that require a careful analysis before you act.
There is one more important point to make regarding your emotional subprograms. You should always keep in mind that there are people out there in your social nvironment who are expert at manipulating your emotional responses for their own benefit. Some may be well-intentioned, but most are deliberately short-circuiting your rational thinking to achieve their own ends.
Skill subprograms
Every time you master a skill through practice and repetition you have trained your subconscious mind so that it is able to take over basic tasks related to that skill.
While your subconscious handles the basics, your conscious mind is free to focus on more challenging aspects of your day.
Knitting provides a simple example. When you are first learning to knit, you have to pay close attention to the movement of the needles and the position of the wool.
Skilled knitters can engage in conversation while their knitting needles are clicking away so fast that an observer can hardly follow them.
Playing a musical instrument provides another good example of a skill subprogram that, once mastered, is managed by the subconscious. A beginning guitar player has to pay close attention to the fingering for chords, notes, and the various scales. Once these basic skills have been mastered, a guitar player can focus more on the flow of the music and the development of musical style.
Our ability to develop physical skills demonstrates that we are able to deliberately create new neural networks in our subconscious. We can also practice and develop skills based on abstract thought processes. We can become skilled at making comparisons, analyzing information, writing speeches, finding patterns, and evaluating real estate or a country’s potential for war. As our conscious skills get better in these areas, so do our subconscious skills.
Biofeedback
In the field of system analysis, ‘feedback’ occurs when part of a system’s output is diverted and added to the input stream. Normally, feedback is used to regulate a system to keep it performing within acceptable limits. A room thermostat monitors part of the output from a furnace and sends a signal back to the furnace controls, which then switch the furnace on-and-off as required to maintain a steady temperature. When riding a bicycle, if we start to tip off to one side our internal sense of balance is alerted and signals are sent to turn the handlebars to correct the situation.
‘Biofeedback’ is a term that was coined in the 1960’s to describe a technique in which people could be trained to control certain internal processes, when given the ability to monitor subtle physical responses. These feedback signals may be as simple as a flashing light or as elaborate as a multi-dimensional video display. Biofeedback became a more practical technique as advances in electronics led to more sensitive and less expensive detectors. The three main types of detectors are:
1. Electromyography, which measures muscle contraction
2. Thermal biofeedback, which measures skin temperature
3. Neuro-feedback, which measures brain wave activity.
With biofeedback, you can be trained to lower your blood pressure, slow your heart rate, and relax your muscles. Biofeedback is now used to help patients cope with a whole range of conditions from attention deficit disorder, to muscle spasms (Association for Applied Psychology and Biofeedback, www.aapb.org). Tthere are many accepted applications of biofeedback, and the field is still under active development.
Biofeedback is another means for the conscious mind to communicate with the subconscious mind. The success of biofeedback is another clear indication that such communication is possible.
Direct communication
In order for you to survive, communications between your conscious and subconscious minds must proceed efficiently and effectively every day of your life. You can facilitate those communications by organization, by training, by managing your emotions, by developing specific skills, and through the use of biofeedback.
On occasion it would be helpful if you could communicate directly with your subconscious and thus have more direct access to some of its capabilities. Imagine the possibilities if you could talk directly to your subconscious and make requests such as:
‘My lower back on the right is aching, please relax those muscles.’, ‘The cut on my foot seems to be infected, send more white blood cells to that location.’, ‘I remember that man’s surname is Jones. I was introduced to him last week. Check my memories for his first name’, or ‘Search my memories for everything I know about the connection between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.’
When people talk to themselves, they are voicing their thoughts, framing questions, and testing their ideas. Expressing your thoughts aloud can be an effective way to organize your conscious thinking. According to the model of the mind developed above, your subconscious is always monitoring your environment like a NSA satellite, so every word you express is analyzed for significance. (The National Security Agency monitors world communications for information related to the interests and security of the USA, www.nas.gov )
If you can talk directly to your subconscious, just by shaping the words or creating a vision in your conscious mind, is it reasonable to expect a response? If it was easy to conduct that kind of communication, we would all be doing it and the question would be irrelevant.
While you consciously work on a problem, your subconscious mind often seems to be looking over your shoulder and working on the problem as well. Now and then ideas and insights just pop into your conscious mind. Here are two famous examples from the history of science:
1. Archimedes (c287 – 212 BCE) is often remembered for his discovery of the principle of flotation. As the story goes, while taking a bath in ancient Syracuse one day, he noticed that the water level in the tub rose and fell as more or less of him was submerged.
2. August Kekulé (1829 – 1891) was a noted German chemist who did pioneering work on the structure of molecules. Among his discoveries was the ring structure of the chemical, benzene. He claimed that the idea for the ring structure came to him in a daydream in which a snake seized its own tail.
Note that great ideas cannot materialize out of the blue. You have to be seriously working on a problem before your subconscious can help you out. The overall conclusion is that while part of your subconscious is inherited, other aspects are formed during your daily experiences as you develop new skills and knowledge. With practice and organized effort you can begin to make more efficient use of your subconscious capabilities.
