Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions

[Dover]

Mysteries of the mind
Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

The snap judgment. The song that constantly runs through your head whenever you close your office door. The desire to drink Coke rather than Pepsi or to drive a Mustang rather than a Prius. The expression on your spouse's face that inexplicably makes you feel either amorous or enraged. Or how about the now incomprehensible reasons you married your spouse in the first place?

While these events are all superficially unrelated, each reveals an aspect of a rich inner life that is not a part of conscious, much less rational, thought. Today, long after Sigmund Freud introduced the world to the fact that much of what we do is determined by mysterious memories and emotional forces, the depths of the mind and the brain are being explored anew. "Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious, " says University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan. "Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness."

Fueled by powerful neuroimaging technology, questions about how we make snap decisions, why we feel uncomfortable without any obvious causes, what motivates us, and what satisfies us are being answered not through lying on a couch and exploring individual childhood miseries but by looking at neurons firing in particular parts of our brains. Hardly a week passes without the release of the results of a new study on these kinds of processes. And popular culture is so fascinated by neuroscience that Blink, journalist Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of "thinking without thinking," has remained on the bestseller lists for four weeks...cont'd

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050228/health/28think.htm

[northamericancitizen]

1. Forefront of our consciousness ouch!

as far as I remember I always knew about my consciousness.

The last thing I need is to be explained why my neurones are doing fucking fireworks.

Nobody really wants to know anyway.

And to be aware of being aware of being aware of a fucking consciousness is just a passage like any other.

Why not.

[NJCher]

2. long read but well worth it

I'll save this article, too, for my writing classes. I try to teach my students how to write by taking advantage of the unconscious mind. To me, it's much easier to write that way.

This is the first article I've read that documents how much of our waking lives are intertwined with the unconscious. I must admit, even as a person who has studied this and been fascinated with it for over 20 years, this article surprised me. The unconscious has a big role to play in our lives.

I think anyone who studies dreams or does meditation is studying and working with the unconscious. I so wish that it was more emphasized in our society. There would be so much more wisdom in the world if it were.

Hey, Dover, another hit! You post the best articles. Thanks so much for your contributions. :)


Cher