The Pinged Hobbit

In Part 1 I talked about how sometimes snap decisions can work out just as good or even better than choices that we spend a lot of time thinking about. How our subconscious mind can process a great deal of information with out input from the conscious part of our mind. This part that of our brain that is almost like a locked door, behind which a great many thoughts occur that but we have no idea about what is going on there. The part of the brain that deals with all processes needed to do something like walking. This part of our mind has basically become trained to perform certain actions, it learns and develops as we do different tasks. For instance walking, when a child learns to walk the conscious side of the brain is highly involved, it’s not a skill that we are used to needing, but given a short amount of time our brain adjusts and it becomes natural for us to walk. We can move around and do other tasks, we don’t have to concentrate on our balance and movement because the thought processes are taking place behind the closed door.

This same process can is used by the other skills we develop over our lifetimes, as we do things our brain learns to do them without conscious thought. We effectively do a lot of things on autopilot and they seem to get easier. This can be new skills like walking or driving, but it also applies to things subjects that we have knowledge of, or things that we study. People who become experts in a certain field almost seem to be able to sense when something is wrong even without really looking into it. A mechanic can sometimes diagnose a problem with a car merely by driving it a short distance, he may diagnose a fault that some one has been looking at for a long time but he wont be able to tell you how he knows, merely because his brain process a variety of information without him noticing it. This ability to process information without really thinking about it is not a skill held only by a few, it is something we are all capable of. The problem is that when we notice something peripherally like that, we don’t always realise that we have noticed it. When we consciously come to a conclusion it is broadcast loud and clear in our mind but when the subconscious reaches a conclusion it’s almost like it has slipped a note under the door while we were a sleep, sometimes we miss the note when we wake up.

Rather than being at the front in our mind we notice the answer or fact as a hunch, a gut feeling and sometimes we simply dismiss it as something else.