Brain Power

Estimates vary on the percent of our brain our conscious mind uses.  Our subconscious mind probably uses around 80 percent of our brain.  Why do we assume people will make rational decisions when they aren’t using the majority of their brain for conscious thoughts?

People make intuitive and irrational decisions all the time.  Retailers know this and depend on impulse buying for sales.  People know in their gut and make decisions based on how they feel every day.  Our subconscious mind processes our experiences every night in dreams and we day dream every day about how our life could be different.

However our subconscious mind doesn’t communicate directly with our conscious mind.  We daydream, imagine, use our intuition and make decisions based on how we feel as ways of attempting to use our subconscious mind.  There are ways to tap into our subconscious mind to create rational results.

One way was used by the poet William Stafford.  He had a habit of getting up before anyone else so that he could write about whatever came into his mind.  He would lie on the sofa, prop up his clipboard with his blank sheets of paper and write about anything.  This position would sometimes result in his mind sliding back and forth from sleep to wakefulness.  This mental yo-yo opened up his conscious mind to what was going on in his subconscious mind.  Then he would write about what he was thinking.

Later he would turn this into a poem with a rhythm or a beat and maybe some rhymes.  As he repeated this cycle of early morning writing, later typing from his daily writing to make a short poem, he was training his mind to imagine words with the same rhythm he used for his poems.  Sometimes his poems came almost whole from his daily writing with little revision.  Other times ideas crept into his daily writing over and over again until he finally typed up a poem.  His poems were rejected for publication about 75 percent of the time.

William Stafford found a process that worked for him to harvest ideas, dreams, images, intuition, and imagination, and turn them into the words that we use to communicate with each other using our conscious minds.