I had always been skeptical about the idea that the subconscious sees and absorbs all and is affected while your conscious is blissfully unaware. It’s also a little disconcerting to think that there might be a back door of sorts into your brain. However I had one experience that indicates that this might be true.
I was waiting in line at the Jiffy Lube when a guy pulled his truck in behind me and got out. I thought, “I bet this guy is a fireman.” I didn’t know why, there just seemed to be something about him. He was fit, attractive and had a kind of All-American look to him you might associate with a fireman but I didn’t have anything to go on other than this feeling of intuition.
Maybe five minutes later I noticed a small fire helmet sticker on his front bumper and realized that my subconscious had picked it up immediately and sent the message “fireman” even though it hadn’t come to my conscious attention.
Anyone else have an experience like this? It would be nice to be able to harness this Sherlock Holmes level of attention to detail that we apparently already have going on.
My subconscious is much smarter than my conscious. When I have a hard problem, I send it off, and some time later the answer comes back. The sf writer Damon Knight, in a book about writing, called his Fred, and said that when he had a knotty plot point to solve he sent it off to Fred, who always came up with a solution.
I have done lots of programming work. Most of it is routine but I will hit really hard problems now and then. I just think about them as hard as I can right before I go to sleep and often wake straight up from bed with the solution and write it down before I go back to bed a few minutes later. That has happened over and over for years. I also have dreams that include factual details from many years ago that I could not have answered if you put a gun to my head before I went to sleep and I sometimes write those down as well.
I’ll occasionally start humming a random tune for no reason, only to realize there was something in my peripheral vision to remind me of that song. For example, I was walking along the road once and started humming a Suzanne Vega song. Only when I got to the end of the street I realized there was a big store sign that I had (consciously) ignored, that read: LUKA.
I remember once wrestling with a take-home exam in an advanced college math class - matrix algebra or something like that. There was one particular question I worked on for hours and hours and hours, and kept coming up with bizarre answers like 2=3 or dividing by zero or things like that, no matter what approach I took. I finally gave up and went to bed with the question unanswered, which is VERY unlike me.
Early the next morning, as I was walking to class, it suddenly hit me that the initial setup violated an important rule, so the whole question was invalid. That’s why I kept getting nonsensical answers. I stopped, pulled out the paper, and answered the question just outside the building. I ended up getting a ridiculously high score on that test, and the professor asked me to change my major to math. I declined.
I do that all the time, too. Not only things that I see, but things that are on my mind will come out in what I’m humming to myself, without me knowing it - I’ll just notice that I’m humming something that relates to my concerns. For instance, I’ll be feeling low some day and not really sure why, and I’ll find myself humming, “All by Myself,” and realize that I’m feeling lonely.
Don’t forget that we have very, very good filters in our brain that prevent sensory overload. Our senses take in EVERYTHING that impinges on them - our brains keep us from drowning in it.
A similar experience, I called a guy about a car he was selling and I knew after talking to him that he was a police officer. But I couldn’t really put my finger on why.
I am sometimes surprised to see a TV show, or a movie on TV, that I’d been thinking of for a while, and lo and behold, there it is seemingly out of nowhere. I’m guessing that I may have, without even consciously registering same, read the name of the show or movie in the Sunday TV guide that comes with the newspaper (I’m always looking up, for my mom, when various reality shows are airing and scan the grids without reading closely.)
I recall reading a book about probability and statistics a while back that was actually quite entertaining (sorry, I forget the specific title). If memory serves, the author told a story of running into his cousin while on vacation at Disney World. Initially he thought this was incredible – what are the odds of meeting his cousin on an out-of-State vacation? Then he sat down and worked out the odds of meeting at least one person he knew on the trip – basically, he considered all the people he knew, how many people he would see in a day at Disney World, and how many days he was there. It turned out the probability of seeing someone he knew was actually quite high.
Now, if he had thought “what if I see cousin Bob at noon on Thursday by the front gate to Cinderella’s Castle” and it happened, that would be quite the coincidence.