The Genie Within: Your Subconscious Mind (10 page)

DATA STORAGE

Memory in your conscious mind is short-term and limited. Tests show that most people cannot remember more than seven digits at one time.

Conversely, the memory in your subconscious mind is virtually unlimited. A comedian quipped, “Memory is the thing you forget with.” That is clever but not true. Every sight, sound, touch, smell, and emotion that you have experienced from birth (probably even before birth) to the present is in your memory. If you cannot remember some fact, do not blame your memory because that fact is there. Blame your
recall
.

Your brain has more storage capacity than you could ever use. Each memory creates a pathway in your brain. The narrator on a documentary on the brain aired on PBS TV stated that your brain has more pathways for memory than there are atoms in the universe! If you counted and wrote the number for each pathway in your brain on a single atom, there would not be enough atoms in the universe!

If you accept 10 new facts every second for a lifetime of 70 years, you will accept about 22 x 10
⁹
bits of information. Yet your memory capacity is about 22 x 10
³⁰
bits of information. Someone once estimated that the world’s entire telephone
network could be stored in an area of your brain the size of a pea.

In 1950, Wilder Penfield, M.D. described patients undergoing brain surgery without anesthesia. When certain parts of their brains were touched with an electric probe the patients recalled everything, every sight, smell, texture and taste about a particular event in their life.

A few examples of the capability of our memory are given below:

       •   William James, when he was 90, memorized 12 volumes of John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
in one month because he thought his memory was declining.

       •   Napoleon could greet 1,000’s of his soldiers by their first names.

       •   James Farley, a politician in the Roosevelt era, could greet 50,000 people by name.

       •   Arturo Toscanini could recall every note of every instrument for 100 operas and 250 symphonies.

       •   A contemporary Indian man (I saw him interviewed on TV but I did not pay attention to his name) can recall every number he has ever seen or heard.

OPERATES CONSTANTLY

Your subconscious mind is awake 24-hours-a-day; it never sleeps. It is awake even when you are under anesthesia. Dr. Cheek, a San Francisco surgeon, reported several cases in Life Magazine ca. 1970, where he proved that patients heard conversations of the doctors during surgery.

Dr. Cheek’s son was a victim of one of these conversations. His son had a congenital heart condition that was repaired. The operation was a success but his son became a hypochondriac and short-winded. By using hypnosis on his
son, Dr. Cheek found that during the operation one of the surgeons said, “...we can’t fix that.” On quizzing the surgeons, one said they found a second congenital defect. However, it was not serious, it was not worth the risk it would take to repair it, and since it would heal normally, they decided not to fix it. But his son’s subconscious mind interpreted from the surgeons conversation that, “...we can’t fix that,” and erroneously concluded that his heart had a serious defect that could not be repaired. The boy’s subconscious mind reacted based on its belief.

This literal acceptance by the subconscious mind brings us to the next characteristic of your subconscious mind computer. Your subconscious mind accepts things literally and out of context.

LITERAL

Your subconscious mind does not reason or judge. It takes everything literally, out of context, and with no sense of humor. If someone under hypnosis is asked, “Can you tell me your age?” The logical conscious mind would know that the hypnotist really was asking for his age, but the literal subconscious mind would simply answer, “Yes, I can.”

Consider the following repetitive comments made by parents and teachers. Though they may have been made in a loving way, the subconscious mind takes them literally. And note that the conscious mind that can filter these comments is not totally effective at early ages.

       •   “You silly kid,” or “You’re so silly.”

       •   “You big, bad boy.”

       •   “You dummy.”

       •   “Don’t you ever learn?”

       •   You never seem to do it right”

       •   “You must eat lots of food to be healthy.”

A phenomenon called “organ language” is an example of the subconscious mind accepting words literally. Organ language refers to a dis-ease resulting from a strong emotion that gets locked in an area of your body. Alice Steadman discusses this phenomenon in her book,
Who’s the Matter with Me
, and scientific support can be found in studies reported in the new field of psychoneuroimmunology.

Examples of organ language are:

       •   “That gives me a pain in the neck.”

       •   “Oh, my aching back.”

       •   “That just makes me sick.”

       •   “That breaks my back.”

       •   “I can’t stand that.”

Normally these statements have no effect on a person; but they can have a pronounced effect when they are repeated over and over or stated with strong emotion.

Lecron reports
¹
a case in which a patient had a bad taste in his mouth and was losing so much weight it was affecting his health. Physicians could not find a reason for the bad taste. During analysis, Lecron found that the man was almost called as a witness in a trial. Had he testified in the trial, the defendant, his best customer, would have been found guilty. He did not have to testify but the episode left a “bad taste in his mouth.”

Carl Jung reported a case in which an asthmatic patient, “Could not breathe the atmosphere at home,” and a patient with chronic indigestion, “Could not digest a certain situation.” Dr. Bernie Siegel reported a case
²
about a mastectomy patient
who needed to “get something off her chest” after a long bitter dispute with her sister.

Sylvia Browne, in one of her best-selling books
³
, describes a man dying of bleeding ulcers who kept repeating, “I just can’t stomach life anymore.” Sylvia Browne also tells a story about herself. She had a bladder infection at a time when her family, “Just pissed her off.”

ACCEPTS EVERYTHING
AS REAL AND TRUE

Clinical and experimental psychologists have proved the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined. Drs. J.C. Eccles and Sir Charles Sherrington, experts in brain physiology, state: “When you learn anything, a pattern of neurons forming a chain is set up in your brain tissue. This chain, or electrical pattern, is your brain’s method of remembering. So, since the subconscious mind cannot distinguish a real from imagined experience, perfect mental practice can change and correct imperfect electrical patterns grooved there by habitually poor playing.”

This means that you can learn and improve physical and mental skills by practicing in your mind. The advantage of using imagination is you never practice the wrong motion or action, i.e., neurological pattern. Real practice, conversely, is not perfect and often reinforces wrong neurological patterns.

Experiments have been reported in which three groups of novices are taught a new skill by three different methods. In one experiment subjects were taught dart throwing, a skill not many Americans have acquired. One group listened to lessons on the art of dart throwing. A second group threw
darts. The third group practiced using only imagination. This third group sat in comfortable chairs, was read a relaxation routine, and then practiced perfect dart throwing in their minds, hitting the bull’s eye on each throw. After each of the three groups practiced for the same length of time, the group using mental practice always did as well, or better, than the other two.

Russian scientists did a more precise experiment. Four groups of Russian athletes trained using selected ratios of physical and mental practice as follows:

After a given period of training, Group No. 1 ranked 4th, Group No.2, 3rd, Group No. 3, 2nd, and Group No. 4 came out on top.

Visualization is now standard in athletic training. Of course, physical practice is also necessary. Athletes use both mental and physical practice to obtain the best result. More stories of the importance of mental practice can be found in
The Ultimate Athlete
, by George Leonard.

The use of visualization is not limited to sports. It is also used successfully in job interviews, sales, public speaking, etc. See yourself giving a successful job interview; see yourself getting the job. See yourself giving a speech to a thousand happy people; feel at ease while giving the speech; hear the audience clapping and standing at the end of your speech.

YOUR BIOCOMPUTER OPERATES
THE MOST PHENOMENAL
ROBOT EVER MADE—YOUR BODY

Whereas your conscious mind can only do one thing at a time, your subconscious mind can do trillions of things at a time. Think of what it would take to make a computer that would control a robot that did all the things your body does. A manufactured computer could not come close to doing all the tasks your subconscious mind does every second of your life. It regulates most of the processes going on in your body every second and influences all of them in one way or another. Just a few examples of these processes include: digestion, healing, bone mending, immunity, temperature control, heart rate, respiration, reproduction (no computer can make a baby), and muscle coordination. On top of all that, it communicates with every cell in your body.

The body functions mentioned above are only a minuscule of the whole. Witness the volumes written on biology and medicine.

It is important to note that your subconscious mind does these trillions of functions without effort. It does them
easily, passively, and effortlessly
.

SOFTWARE

The software programs, often called “tapes,” in your subconscious mind computer include your habits, concepts, self-images, and conditioned reflexes. We all react according to our programs when someone or some stimulus pushes our buttons.

Habits are a way of executing complicated processes easily, automatically and with no conscious mind thought. They can be useful, for example:

       •   Tying a bow,

       •   Driving a car,

       •   Swinging a golf club,

       •   Etc.

They can also be harmful, such as:

       •   Smoking,

       •   Crude manners,

       •   Over eating,

       •   Tantrums,

       •   Impatience,

       •   Etc.

Most of these habits were programmed at an early age and you are not aware of them.

When you were born, most of your existing software was in your reptilian brain. You were born with programs that controlled heart rate, body temperature, respiration, sucking, and the other basic functions necessary to keep you alive. The rest of your brain was mostly blank. Thus, your brain was like a new computer with only the basic language that allows you to install all those programs that make a personal computer useful.

Early programming of the brain was described in an article
⁴
summarizing current research and thinking by experts. Following is a summary of that article.

A child’s brain begins as just a jumble of neurons. Every input from the five senses begins to form programs. Programs in your subconscious mind evolve progressively. For example, you learn to roll over; then you learn to crawl, walk, run, lift a glass of milk and drink it without spilling, etc. Each of these
activities is a huge computer program in itself. Even just standing up straight requires a complex program.

The gravity of establishing these programs is that there is a “time window.” After the window closes, programming limits are set up that are difficult to overcome. Experts claim that about half of a baby’s brain cells die by age five because they are not used. There are several basic time windows of development, namely; math and logic, vision, vocabulary, language, social skills, and motor skills.