Your Subconscious Mind

You know how sometimes you’re working on something and no matter how much effort you put into it, it doesn’t seem to want to resolve itself? Then some online guru tells you that in order to solve a problem, sometimes you need to step back from it and look at the whole picture, focus on the forest, because your nose is buried too deep in the tree, and you wish you could take a step back…and you promise you would take a step back, if only you could solve it…

Well, take that break. It does work. Sometimes. When you’re consciously not thinking about the problem, your subconscious mind back there is working. Plus, sometimes it works as a valid excuse for procrastinating. “I’m taking a break so my subconscious mind can work on the problem.”

I remember an exam I sat for once. A question annoyed me during the exam because I felt like the answer was lodged in my brain somewhere, but for some reason that section was inaccessible. Needless to say, I submitted the exam, went to my room, went to sleep and when I woke up…seriously, the moment I woke up, I found myself thinking about the solution. “Way overdue…way overdue…”

Mental note: next time you get stuck in an exam, put your head on the desk and take a nap. Just don’t take my word for it.

So my friend and I were talking about Facebook today. I have personally developed an unfathomable aversion to it, which is why I deactivated my account even though it used to boost my blog stats. But seriously, how many of us, on some subconscious level, use facebook (and/or twitter) to feed the narcissistic part of us? The part that loves the attention and comments and the likes.

Personally I like twitter because it allows me to follow ideas and not people. I’ve written about it before here.

Last but not least, if you’ve read this post to the very end then you’re disproving statistics on StatisticBrain.com that say that the average attention span has dropped from 12 s in 2000 to 8 s in 2012. Compare that with the reported information that the attention span of a gold fish is 9 s. Of course, anyone would eye that sort of information with skepticism (especially if you’ve taken a statistics course where you learn that the numbers can say anything you want them to if you know how to play with them).

Ciao.

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