The difference between unconscious, subconscious and conscious

When talking about the unconscious, it might be good to explain what the difference is. Being subconscious and being unconscious get quite mixed up and it is good to take a moment to explain what the difference is then.

Subconscious and unconscious

The subconscious mind stands between the conscious and the unconscious, so to speak. About that which you are unconscious, you remain unconscious, such as your blood flowing, your organs just working and cells renewing for example.

But what's in your subconscious can occasionally seep up like a Déjà Vu, for example. I personally use the word unconscious because you are essentially addressing those two levels and often what is subconscious is also unconscious to people.

By the way, Ab Dijksterhuis has written a good little book on this and it says that we all take in about 11.2 million bits of information per second.

Now you may be wondering what such a "bit" is. Five bits is a letter, like the letter A. So 11.2 million bits are 2.24 million letters of information coming at you every second.

All those numbers don't mean much to you I guess, but converted that's 2 thick books (400 pages) of information coming in every second. That's a lot of information you have to process.

When you then consider that from those thick books you only process 12 letters, or an average of 1 word consciously, I think you understand that your unconscious is a very powerful mechanism.

When we calculate this further, we find out that the old models are wrong. Even the somewhat modern models such as 95% unconscious and 5% conscious are not correct. In fact, it is many times less.

It is only 0.00054% conscious and 99.9995% unconscious ...

Conscious thinking is overrated....

Well, we don't do very consciously apparently and that makes sense according to Daniel Kahneman, a well-known psychologist who wrote the book "Fast thinking, slow thinking. In that book he describes the unconscious and the conscious as system 1 and system 2 thinking.

System 1 wants to save energy and will do whatever it takes to save energy as well. You should know that your brain consumes 20% of energy at rest. If you then also consider that your brain weighs only 3 pounds (about 2 to 3 percent of your body weight), that's huge. For the rest of your body, that leaves you with a lot less energy.

When your brain has to work harder it drains the energy from your body. Chess players can lose as much as 4 pounds during a chess tournament, simply because their brains are demanding so much that they use up enormous amounts of energy. Fascinating.

So you can also imagine that your brain likes to be low energy so it almost always works in system 1, or the unconscious.

Difference between conscious and unconscious

When I ask you what is 5+5, you probably (and hopefully ;-)) get the answer immediately in your head. That's automatic and takes no energy. That's system 1 thinking.

When I ask you what is 325 X 658, you are probably mentally hooking off right now. Do you notice that? Most people are not going to calculate this because it takes effort. But anyway, now imagine doing it. Just on paper.

Then you notice that your breathing changes, your heart rate speeds up and you start to perspire a little more. This is because your brain has to work and starts drawing energy from your body. That takes effort.

How many times a day do you do this?

Solving these kinds of issues with the effort involved?

1 hour a day? Or do you only do this very occasionally?

Most people will find that they almost never do this and if you do have to do this often you often come home from work wrecked and dead tired. If we have it our way we don't do these kinds of issues for even a second of the day. We make assumptions very quickly and just stick to them. That's the easiest and the most efficient. That's what it's all about.

You don't want to sit at home burned out either so you constantly make all kinds of assumptions that are energy efficient. Logical, only you know, I think, that not all those assumptions are equally correct. And therein lies the danger.

Our unconscious mind is very interesting and filters those 11.2 million bits in the following way.

Our unconscious:

• Leave out a lot
• Distorts
• Generalizes

First of all, our unconscious mind leaves out a tremendous amount of information otherwise we go stark raving mad. If we completely absorbed that two thick books of info every second we wouldn't last long.

So to keep ourselves healthy we leave out a lot. You might think about seeing auras for example. I myself don't see them but I know people who say they do see them. Ok, that could be and maybe I leave that info out. I mean if I filter out almost two books a second then it could be.

That's why I have an open mind myself when it comes to phenomena like that. It could all be, I don't know.

If we get past those phenomena for a moment and stay "down to earth" that filter is perfectly active there as well. I myself remember when my wife was pregnant with twins and suddenly we saw twins everywhere. Really a lot and when our twins were born, those other twins suddenly disappeared. That's a very strange experience.

By the way, you have to be careful with that too, because if you think everyone is pregnant then you could be wrong. You only do that once, by the way, I've noticed.

Furthermore, you can naturally have that with a new car (suddenly you see them everywhere), a favorite piece of clothing or with certain types of people (always that wrong guy...). What we subconsciously focus on we will perceive. We have a great system in our brain for that, our RAS or Reticular Activation System.

That system is also super efficient and also helps you save energy by showing you only the things you want to see. But even if you think "If only I don't run into that person...," your RAS will also look for that person. This is because the word 'not' exists in our language, but not in our RAS.

You probably know the saying "Don't think about a pink elephant. Especially now don't think about it. Don't think about a pink elephant in bathing slippers.

You do notice, I think, that your brain immediately creates a picture and then you have to start denying that picture. That's very difficult and takes energy. So more efficient is to show you that so and you're going to focus on it.

So it really does pay to formulate everything positively. Your RAS is then of course also activated only it will then look for all the opportunities that are out there to help you reach your goal.

So it does pay to make positive pictures for yourself!

What is your experience with this? I'd love to hear about it below 🙂