Interesting Experiment

In the book they talked about an experiment that I thought was really interesting. They asked people to pick who they would vote for for President just by looking at their picture. They found that most people who were democrats picked the democratic person and the people who were republican pick the republican candidate with out knowing anything about either candidate. Your subconscious minds job is to leap to conclutions and use all of the information you've ever gathered and the opinions your conscious mind creates tell you which choice is better. When asked why they chose this candidate over the other they couldn't say why, most said it was just a "feeling." This is the exact jod of our subconscious mind.

Now The Hidden Brain is leading into some of the other topics it will discuss and there are some points he makes that are exactly what I'm interested in.
Points like " You know the answer, but you don't know how you know the answer," and " . . . It was clear his words upset you, but were you really aware of what was going on in your brain as you lost your temper? . . . but if you didn't conciously decide to get angry, where did the anger come from?" Vedantam also states that we make many conscious decisions every da,y like picking job applicants based on qualifications. He then proves that even these carfully thought out decisions are flawed. This is shown by many experiments run on overweight job applicants. It was proven that anyone who was over weight had a much slimmer chance of getting the job, even if they had the exact same qualifications. Not only that, but also if a healthy-weighted individual was sitting next to an overweight person before the interview they were less likely to be choosen. The hundreds of people they asked to be the interviewers did not consciously decide that the applicant was less qualified because they were in the proximity of an overweight person; their mind simply, because of it's surroundings and all of the things it has been fed and held onto, subconsciously leaped to conclutions, which is it's job.

Ch. 1 The Hidden Brain

The Myth of Intention
In this chapter Vedantam sppeaks about a women who was raped and was certain, 100 % sure, that this man that they brought in was her assulter. After the man spent 14 years in prison, 14 years of her being positive that he was guilty, they found DNA evidence that he was not her rapist. When the event occured she had memorized every detail of the mans face but in the midst of the trail she had gotten caught up and missed that this man had crooked teeth and the other had not. He then explains all of the factors that explained why she was sur esh ewas right.
1. All of the pictures of men she went through weakend her memorry of the real rapist
2. Your emotions effect you rmemory and judgement
3. To keep herself from further distress the victim enabled a defensive mechanism that kept her from feeling her doughts
4. She left out the teeth in her innicial description because her mind told her it was too ordinary and unimportant

All of these things were not the victims fault, they were natural instincts. This reminds me of a ted video I saw called "Why Eyewitnesses Get it Wrong" in it Scott Fraser explainted how our minds fill in the gaps in our memory with out our control. So we may believe that something is 100% true it could not be.  Kind of a scary concept that we cant even trust ourselves, but it is true.

I started another book...

So I was getting really bored with the other book, which happens a lot. Ill probably come back to it later. Anyway, the book is The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam and seems really interesting. Its about how we behave due to our subconscious minds and how things affect it. Ill get back to you about the first chapter soon.

sleep deprived

So sorry everybody, the tell-yourself-to-wake-up-at-six-and-you-will thing didn't work. I really wanted it to.  I have trouble waking up in the morning so if this worked I was going to be super exited, and maybe even start to believe this guy. Now I have very little faith, but ill keep on reading and see if I can find some more solid facts in it.

Ch 1 continued

Outstanding Differences and Modes of Operation

Here Murphy uses a captain and crew analogy where the captain is the eyes and the crew simply follows his exact instructions. He says your subconscious is the crew and just takes orders from your conscious. So be positive, then your feeding your self good outcomes. I think this is true I feel that bring positive really reflects well on your life but then he loses me with this story.

"Last Christmas Eve a beautiful young university student look at an attractive and rather expensive traveling bag in a store window. She was going home to Buffalo, New York for the holidays. She was about to say I can't afford that bag when she recalled something that she heard of one of my lectures which was "never finish negative statement reverse it immediately. And wonderful things will happen in your life"
She said, "that bag is mine, it is for sale and I accept it mentally, my subconscious sees it that I received it."
At eight o'clock that evening her fiancé gave her the exact bag."

He then proceeds to explain that this was because of her telling her subconscious that this bag was hers. Now I highly doubt that is true I mean it sounds pretty far fetched. I'm not saying that if you shouldn't follow his little never be negative rule I think it's a great idea. However don't expect a Porsche to show in your drive way tomorrow morning because you told yourself it would.

Next he tells a few more stories like this one and summarizes the whole chapter. In this summary Murphy specifically days that if you tell your subconscious mind right before bed to wake you up at six o'clock it will. I am going to put this to the test tonight and let you know if it worked. See you tomorrow morning.

Book talk

I figured out I was reading the book completely wrong, it is actually set in a book format not just random sections like I thought. Oh well, I just started to read it from the beginning again. So the first section just talks about why he wrote the book and all that stuff which is boring. You don't really care about that so ill just move on to the other stuff.

Ch 1- The Treasure House Within You
In the intro he talks about how some people end up really successful and others really struggle. He says that the struggling man is full of doubts and fears and the other is full of confidence and faith. I don't think that this is really true some people that I have seen dont doubt enough and end up getting in some really big messes. But basically what he is saying is that some how he will make you the confident faithful man "born to win and succeed". He then proceeds to tell you that in order to do that you need to train yourself to use your subconscious mind (he wants you to do this by talking to your two minds out loud and demeaning your conscious mind). This all seems kinda like a load of crap to me, I am the complete opposite of gullible, but I try to keep an open mind so if you really believe in it I respect that and completely understand. Actually, I believe that if you really believe that it will work it most likely will. Now this kind of self help book is not what I was looking for. But then he starts to move into some more solid factual things not just his own theories.
Necessity of a Working Basis (each chapter has subsections)
Here he explains his working basis "The universal truth that what ever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as condition, experience, and event".Then he talks about praying which I think is very random and unimportant. Even as a practicing Catholic I thought this was very miss placed.
The Duality of Mind
Here Murphy starts to regain my interest. He explains that which I have already learned in a new way. "You have only one mind but possesses two distinct characteristics...The objective and subjective mind, the conscious and subconscious mind, the waking and sleeping mind, the surface self and the deep self, the voluntary and involuntary mind, the male and female, and many others". (male and female gave me a good laugh) So I guess the whole subconscious and unconscious being the same thing is true (according to this ,apparently Ph.D, D.D, guy). He proceeds to talk about the reasoning and not reasoning which I have already talked about then tells me to follow my unreasoning mind? Huuuumm sound a little suspicious.
To be continued....

New book!

I started to read "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" it is split up into little sections and I read the "Conscious And Subconscious Terms differentiated". It is quite obvious what it was about, but it was written in a way that made it easy to understand. What it said was that the conscious mind is your reasoning mind, it tells you what must be right and what must be wrong. Your subconscious has no reasoning abilities it simply stores anything that you once believed as true no matter how false it may be. This made me understand a lot more about how we learn and understand things. Have you ever noticed that when you learn something it's almost impossible to unlearn? Like when one of your teachers teaches you something one way then another teaches you a different way it's really hard to follow the new way. I also believe this is why older people have a hard time being open minded and willing to change, their mind has been stuffed with "truth" their whole lives while younger generations are still learning all those "truths" so are more excepting of new ideas. Sorry to cut it short but I have to go I'll elaborate on this more later.

An Update

Yesterday I went to the library and got two new books; The Power of Your Subconcsious Mind by Joseph Murphy and The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam. They seem to be more what I was looking for hopfully I'll find them more interesting than my original book. Sorry I wasn't able to start reading already, my brother broke his arm last night and I was at the hospital. I'll keep you posted on that, oh, and I'm currently trying to contact Candace Pert.

Book fail

I had a book called "Structure of Mind" that I thought would help me with my topic but so far it really hasn't so I'm getting a new book. Thats why I haven't really been posting much. But I'll get on it and try to keep you posted on some stuff I find else where. I have also found that Freud is very well known for his works on the subconscious I'll also try to get a good book of his experiments and findings.