Consciously conscious
by Jon Worley

Every once in a while I like to dip into the heavy science bag and find out what's going on with the guys in the white coats. Last week, I decided to catch up on the notion of consciousness, reading The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders.

Okay, so the book was written eight years ago. I don't read Danish, so I had to wait for the book to get published. I'm sure this information is somewhat behind the times, but since my notions weren't particularly scientific, any help is appreciated.

See, like most folks I've heard the old saw about how we only use 10 percent (or 20 percent or five percent or whatever) of our brains, and wouldn't it be great if we could use, say, 50 percent of our brains. We would be superpeople or something. I can't tell you where I heard this first, but I know it was in elementary school. And it seemed to make some sense to me. I mean, sometimes my mind feels like it's ready to split a few atoms, and sometimes it's just splitting.

As it turns out, those ratios weren't even close to accurate. Every second, our senses (and thus, our brains) receive more than 10 million bits of information a second. A bit is a single yes/no answer to a question (pressure/no pressure, light/not light, whatever). Now, guess how many of these bits of information we can actually perceive.

Somewhere between 16 and 50 (these figures were arrived at using different methods, but the scale remains approximately the same). So, in fact, we are consciously using something like one-millionth of our brains. That's .0001 percent. A bit less than 10 percent, for all you keeping score.

Of course, this isn't quite the same question. In my original statement, I said we were only using a certain portion of our brain. As it turns out, every single one of us is using all of our brains. It's just that we're not particularly aware of it happening. And before you say, "Well, maybe the really smart people can process, say, 100 bits per second, and that's how they 'use more of their brains'," let me assure you that scientists say everyone processes about the same amount of conscious information.

But that leads us to the real question: How well do you allow your subconscious mind (that great sleeping beast) to influence your conscious mind (the part of you that is easily defined as YOU)? This, it turns out, is the key to personal greatness. In his book, Norretranders details interviews with big sports stars (Joe Montana and Danish football star Michael Laudrup, recent World Cup hero) who say they are not consciously thinking when they make the big plays. Or, if they do think, it is only to plot simple moves while the subconscious takes care of the real business.

This notion also can be applied to artists, businessmen, lawyers, teachers and most anybody else. All of us have had those moments when we think we're acting without thinking, and what we're doing is really, really impressive. Some of my best writing has come when I just sat down and wrote without consciously guiding my thoughts or fingers. Most songwriters I know work to get in a similar state, so that the songs just come to them. The people who seem particularly gifted in one way or another have figured out how to allow their subconscious to cooperate with their consciousness. Or, to use some sporting terminology, these folks know how to get "in the zone".

You know, I think it might just be that simple. Oh, Norretranders has lots of formulas and philosophical musings to back up these ideas, but what it seems to come down to is that consciousness is always augmented by the subconscious mind. The key to achieving impressive mental or physical feats (and don't kid yourself, both are highly influenced by brain power) is in how our unperceived overlord and our acknowledged "captain" work things out.

There's plenty of other cool notions in the book, both scientific and philosophical. Like calculating the approximate moment when mankind achieved consciousness (best bet, around the time of Moses, at least when we're talking about western cultures), if it somehow lost consciousness at some point after that (like, say, during the Middle Ages) and if we might lose consciousness again or simply transcend it. That stuff is kinda out there, and I can't really explain it in a single column. Norretranders had 400 pages, and even that seemed a bit light at times. I'm having a tough enough time just getting the baseline conscious-subconscious argument across here.

Anyway, I find this stuff amazingly fascinating, and I'm rather pleased that the relatively dreadful library here in not-quite-Amish Country had this book on its shelf. Always fun to ponder what lies beneath the skull. Even if that means I had no idea what was gurgling there in the first place.

Jon Worley is conscious of the fact that most folks will find all this thinking tedious, if not outright silly.

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