Insight and the unconscious mind

Invoking our superpowers

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein

Introspection
For much of the last 30 years, I have been involved in the design, development and debugging of complex electronic and software products.  At the same time, I worked with the challenges of product management, sales, and marketing, growing and selling companies, and spending a further seven years in the world of a major cybersecurity vendor.

Through this work I have two US and international patents granted in my name.  The first connected with encryption key management, the second concerned with secure, remote management of endpoints, both were designed by me following flashes of insight, painstakingly actualised into commercial reality, thanks to a brilliant team of software engineers.

Both Patents could be referred to as Lateral Thinking, but I would say that neither of the concepts were the result of what we tend to regard as thinking.  A more accurate statement would be that:  I succeeded in lodging an integrated understanding salient factors of each problem with my unconscious machinery, enabling it to ‘scan’ reality for solutions.

Lightbulbs
In the first case, I was driving home listening two people arguing about genetically modified crops, and, knowing next to nothing about the matter, my attention was busily fixated on how repellent the morally superior attitude of the person on the con side was, until, for the benefit of the listeners, they explained that while the GM crop was highly resilient, needing fewer chemicals, and other famine-busting, cost of living-shrinking benefits, it was engineered to potentially have a terminator gene. This means that if the farmer kept, say 10% of his harvest as next year’s seed, it would not germinate, it is effectively dead, or self-terminated after one generation.   The fear of such a terminator gene finding way into non-GM crops, through cross pollination, being the root of the argument.

While I was busy focussing on whether this rather risky idea was already illegal or regulated, and how it was a clever technical solution aimed at protecting intellectual property, or metering its use, I was interrupted, like being disturbed from a daydream, with the realisation that it solved my key management problem.  It came to me as insight, a lightbulb moment, straight from the unconscious.

In the second case, I was looking at the challenges of cloudifying our management software.  The headache was one concerning the security of the online component of our product, the part that would become a critical part of our customers security infrastructure, a failure here could destroy our business.

Weeks of us researching the specifications of the data centres that were available and within budget, their security and backup operations, and the options available to us was exhausting and still left the possibility of some kind of breach or denial of service.
At some point, while looking at how to insure the business against such a risk, and feeling particularly exasperated with how far up the creek this project seemed to be taking me, I said to myself, that ‘it would be easier to a design a system that was secure if hacked.  So that’s what I did.
Although it was months of work for our best guys from idea to release, the concept was so simple that it was just obvious once I had changed the design goal, and the system description practically wrote itself.  You will now see the exact same principle applied to such commonplace items as Apple’s Home technology.  I don’t know when they had the idea, but I was about eight years ahead of their announcement.

I had embedded the problem sufficiently well within my unconscious for it to use what I experienced as the feeling of exasperation, to have me verbalise what I was missing. It is known as a Parapraxis, or Freudian slip.

In both examples, my unconscious mind did the work.   There is no way that I’m consciously that smart, however I do know how to invoke this as an internal process.

The right tool for the job
Consider the number of things that your unconscious can coordinate and do, without you having to think about it.

To walk and talk, at the same time means orchestrating around 300 muscles, according to countless nerve inputs, and data from the vestibular system, and that’s on top of running the LLM that is extracting your units of felt meaning and forming language with accent, intonation, pace, and a whole host of other verbal, and non-verbal metadata.
In terms of processing power*, the most commonly cited numbers are 11 million bits per second for the unconscious, and 40 bits per second for conscious mind.  While it might be very difficult to prove these figures in absolute terms, they provide a useful differential in terms of speed and bandwidth: a factor of 275,000. To compound this difference, the unconscious is massively multi-threaded, meaning that it can simultaneously ‘view’ things from many points at once, while the conscious mind is single threaded.  Broad attention, versus pinpoint attention.

If this data is correct, it suggests that the unconscious is re-rendering reality for us, so that our experience of perception is perhaps just 0.0004% of our sensory input.

To try and give some perspective for these numbers; your unconscious mind will process as much data in a second as your conscious mind can process in three days, or if we look at it from the other end, it would take you a year to think your way through you what you unconscious mind will process in the next two minutes. I’m sure that there is an argument to be had over these numbers, but whatever they are, the factor is mind-bendingly large, at least for our puny conscious minds.

Trust yourself
If you want to really understand something complex, or solve a difficult problem, I recommend that you try to experience it as directly as you can.

Let your unconscious absorb and work upon the matter using some of that 275,000 X processing power, and most importantly, let it direct your interest.  Yes, you should plan your research, but be ready to feel like deviating, and then do it.  You can always come back to the plan after a detour, but that urge to detour, is your unconscious machinery trying to simulate probabilities that your cognitive mind didn’t think of, which is why they are not in the plan.

I call it ‘immersing myself’.  You may or may not have a flash of inspiration while doing this, or at any time after, but what you will have done is upgraded the resolution and depth of understanding about the subject of your interest, often in ways that were not thought of before and that you might not entirely realise afterwards.

 When you go back and look at the initial, root of your interest and ask again, the original questions, you will find that your ability to just know the answers without having to think about them has been transformed.

Next up:  Why the truth will set you free.

*Baars, B. J. (2023). The Conscious Access Hypothesis: Origins and Recent Evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 33-45.

*Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.