Catswatch

Sub – conscious Learning

It is one of the strange phenomena of the human mind that memory continues to work even when the actual task of learning has ceased and even when we are asleep. It is the same peculiar occurrence which helps us to solve a problem while we are dreaming, especially a problem on which we focused our attention before going to sleep and which proved too tough for solution.

The only explanation that is possible for both phenomena are the fact that our sub-conscious mind continues working and thinking while our conscious mind is asleep. The same mental power which produces dreams must be able to work on problems and to solve them. It is evidently wrong to think of our conscious and our sub-conscious functioning as two mental activities which are eternally divided. It is much better to think of them as two rooms whose separating wall is flexible and easily removable. It is figuratively accurate to speak of the “threshold” between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind, for every thought can easily lapse from the conscious over this threshold into the conscious mind.

I am sure this has been happened to you as it has happened to me – and to everybody else. We try to think of the name of a person and cannot remember it. We have known this person for long time, but at the moment the name does not come to us. It is not in the real of our consciousness. However, if at that moment we hear or read a name which is similar in sound or which has some other association to the name in question, then this similarity will be enough to recall the name to our conscious mind.

What happened in between? We know that no impression whichever meets one of our five senses can be entirely lost. While we are not aware of it, it rests in our sub-conscious, where it may be buried for good or whence we may be able to draw it over the threshold into our conscious mind, usually with the help of some association.

Dreams

It is about the same procedure that takes place in a dream or under hypnosis. When somebody awakes from sleep, he may not recall anything that happened. This, however, does not mean that impressions received under hypnosis are entirely lost. They may lie dormant in his sub-conscious and may be drawn over the threshold voluntarily or involuntarily by proper association.