Seekers 💡☀️
"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."
—Sigmund Freud
> godspeed | cringe
The 19th Century psychologist Sigmund Freud wasn't the first to see the human mind as two abstract parts: the conscious and unconscious minds.
Philosophers and thinkers for centuries investigated the relationship between so-called instinctive thinking and conscious reasoning.
- The unconscious, intuitive mind reacts hot and fast to help us make decisions quickly. But it's highly prone to error. 🔥
The conscious mind reacts cool and slow and works to keep us from doing dumb, cringeworthy things in front of people we value.
Later after Freud, two psychologists, Michael Posner and Charles Snyder, refined his conception. They adopted new terms that better reflected the contrasting roles of the two minds: controlled (conscious) and automatic (unconscious).
Decisions in the automatic mind can't be easily controlled or stopped by our conscious minds. It houses our gut feelings and motor skills and impulsive intuitions.
The controlled mind is much more intentional and deliberate and effortful and can be stopped voluntarily.
- It sometimes might feel to us like the two minds are vying for power.
- Consider how fast we jerk the wheel when someone swerves into our lane. How involved were we in that decision?
Now imagine trying to block yourself from jerking the wheel. The jerk is an automatic behavior that occurs faster than your conscious, controlled, aware mind can keep up.
You jerk the wheel "without thinking about it."
But you were thinking about it all along.
There's more.
Scientists say the human mind makes 35,000 decisions each day. How could we ever come close to intercepting them all to screen for proper reason and logic?
How many of our behaviors are automatic, unchecked, and irrational that we don't take the time to scrutinize?
- next time "Why do we have consciousness at all?"
- listening Buck Owens "Cryin' Time"
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