If I ask you what you’re doing right now, you’d probably have a good answer for that. If I asked why, then you might find it a strange question, but you could answer. But what if I asked why a few more times? How deeply do you understand your actions?
It’s pretty normal if you can’t answer all the way down. Most people’s understanding of things is quite shallow. Think about your smartphone. You know it works, and that’s about it unless you are a computer engineer. Why is it that we know so little about something so important to our lives? That’s simply because it is far too complicated.
In order to live our daily lives, we don’t need to know how the code interacts with the OS and the interface. We just need it to work. What about your actions, though? Are you thinking at full capacity?
Unconscious Actions
Most people are drifting through life on autopilot. It’s not hard to see. Imagine you are walking in your house. Did you think about that pile of trash you walked around before you left the house? Did you think about how to open the doors, or how to get from your bedroom to said door?
Of course not! You already have a system for that ingrained in your unconscious. Your mind does that on autopilot and frees your brain for higher-level thought. That is a wonderful thing! When your unconscious is working in your favor, that is.
Often times when we are on autopilot, it is so we can chase a goal. Out automatic actions function while we are thinking about the goal. This ties in our reward systems so we can see the progress toward the goal and get positive emotion. However, think about your phone again.
As long as the phone works and you can send your messages or do your googling, everything is fine. However, what if your goal requires your phone to do something it can’t already do? Would you just say, “Oh well, I guess I won’t do it.” No, you’d likely download an app that does the thing.
What if the app doesn’t exist? Maybe you are planning to make the app instead.
Conscious Thought
Now you have a goal where you are not simply using a tool (the phone) passively towards your goal. Instead, you are going to actively use it to enhance the phone’s capabilities. This requires conscious thought!
When you reach a roadblock, you don’t simply stop and give up. No, your conscious mind will take over and begin doing the work in place of the unconscious. But it all depends on your goal!
Take, for instance, Christopher Chabris’s gorilla experiment. You watch a video, and your goal is to watch one team passing a basketball and count their passes. Your brain sets up its autopilot features so you can consciously think about the higher-order goal, counting the passes. At the end of the video, you tell the answer and are happy you got it right. Then they ask if you saw the gorilla. You think, “Gorilla? There wasn’t a gorilla. I’d have seen one if there was.”
When they playback the video, your conscious thought is set on looking for the gorilla. Your autopilot features are reorganized for the new goal, and, sure enough, there’s a six-foot man in a gorilla suit that walks on stage for a bit and walks off stage.
This is a prime example of your brain’s ability to autopilot and hyperfocus on a single goal. However, it means you need to have your autopilot features set up properly first!
Are you Really Thinking?
Ask yourself if you are thinking at full capacity. You might think you are, but you probably haven’t realized all the little things you’ve missed. You unconsciously move and take action without realizing the effects it’s having.
The way to tell is if you understand your goal at the deepest level possible or if you are working towards it actively. If you don’t have a goal, then think about whether you are actively trying to improve on something or find a goal or not. If you say, “I’m just letting things happen. I’ll wait and see. I wish I had a passion/goal,” then you likely aren’t really thinking consciously.
What you are doing is going through the motions and letting your focus wander.
Consciously pursuing things is not easy, though. It takes a lot of effort and time. You have to slow down, think, and learn. You must ask questions. To set up your autopilot features, you must first consciously work on them. It is the same principle as developing new habits. You want to think about them a lot until they are correct for your goals, and then you set them on autopilot.
Mindfulness and Conscious Thought
Mindfulness is such a big deal right now because it is the layman’s term for conscious thought, though it doesn’t really explain why it is so important.
Conscious thought (mindfulness) is the act of deliberately thinking with your frontal lobe rather than your cerebral chassis. It is taking all the things you do unconsciously without paying attention and bringing them to the forefront. If you are a writer, like me, you may want to improve your skills.
To do so means to stop just putting words on the page. Instead, put words on the page and THINK about them. Why that word? Why that phrase? Do these paragraphs align here? Should I add more or less detail to this character? Is the pacing of this novel too fast?
Notice that I started from the bottom, most simple level, and worked my way up to the highest level of abstraction. That is me consciously working on the basics and moving up to the complex. By the time I make it to the exceptionally complicated idea of whether or not a character is both believable and well developed, things like grammar, sentence structure, and word choice are already properly sorted and set to autopilot.
Likewise, you can also achieve this level of mastery by reprogramming your unconscious actions with conscious thoughts. Habits, focus, and goals are all part of the process. The starting line is a single question: Are you thinking at full capacity?
If this topic interests you, read some of our other articles about self-improvement. Let us know what you think about the article as well.