Freelance Writer

Have you ever had a situation where you were trying to remember something and it was on the tip of your tongue, just out of your grasp? Then later, for no apparent reason the answer just popped into your head? These kinds of things happen all of the time, you may be talking with a friend about a movie you once viewed and trying to remember the name of the lead actor, and then later, often hours after the conversation, and completely without conscious thought, the name will quite literally pop into your head.

There is no great mystery to the way this form of memory recall works, let me try to briefly explain how this happens before I describe a method of using this particular brain function to improve your life. There are two distinctly separate thought engines within the human brain, firstly we have the conscience mind, dealing with all the thoughts you are currently aware of, such as reading this blog entry. Secondly we have the subconscious mind, which is busy processing a whole load more thoughts that you are not overtly aware of. Think of a small computer (conscious mind) networked to a large mainframe with a huge amount of storage capacity and memory (subconscious mind). We do not have very much control over this mainframe, but because it is networked to the smaller computer it can sometimes transmit data to be processed by the smaller machine. We can also, with a little practice, use the smaller machine to program the functions of the mainframe, such as when trying to remember the name of that actor from the movie. What happens, is the subconscious part of your mind goes away and works on the problem all on its own, with no conscious effort on our your part. Almost everyone must have experienced one of these odd recall events, and this has been a very brief explanation of how and why they occur.

Now we know how this happens, and that we have this huge amount of untapped processing power sitting behind our eyes, how do we exploit it? To be able to use the functions of the subconscious mind as a useful tool we need to learn how to firstly set it in motion and secondly retrieve the results. Oddly enough, the second thing, the retrieval is pretty simple, much in the same way that the actors name sprung into our mind, the subconscious will simply make you aware of the answers. The tricky part is seeding it. The best way to set things in motion is to approach a problem from a tangent, do not try to work out an answer by thought and logic, instead simply consider the problem and all of its causes and effects, do not try to make any decisions or find an answer. Finally, once you have spent some time considering your problem, dismiss it totally from your mind, do not keep mulling it over, let it rest, and let your subconscious mind do the work. If you take the time to master this technique, you will find you have the ability to solve complex problems with very little thought or effort.