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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Your brain is nearly fully connected with your body and controls a ton of its function, but your brain is not a single unit. Your brain itself does things you're not conscious of. Like you ever tried to think of something you can't quite remember, and then you give up and spend hours not consciously thinking about that thing and then suddenly you recall it out of nowhere? That's clearly your brain at work in the background trying to recall the information independent of your conscious mind. Likewise, you conscious mind can be in secondary control of some functions like breathing (your lower brain controlls this by default unless your higher brain overrides it), or entirely removed from control of some functions like your heart beating (no matter how hard you try, you can't make your heart beat to the rhythm of your favorite song). The brain is not just your mind, but a number of sections with different unconscious functions, only some of which do they ever directly communicate to or allow control from the conscious mind. Your conscious mind is actually a relatively small part of your brain's functions, or more likely a manifestation of several different higher level functions together. But your mid and lower brain are wholly sectioned off from your conscious mind and merely interface with it.
I did recently partake in a presentation about control of our own mind. He said much the same as you, but that the brain's subconsciness is pretty much an autopilot with insane processing power, much more than our conscious self. It preprocessed all data we receive, from visual to touch to hunger, even takes full control of a lot of inner organs functions, and then passes simplified and easy to process data to our conscious self, so we can make high level decisions or even reprogram the subconsciness if needed.
We can sometimes even turn off our consciousness and let the autopilot drive, like when you wake up and get ready for work and then suddenly are at you workplace, not remembering how you drove there.
Now interfacing with our subconsciousness or changing our habits can be difficult, as our subconsciness is driven by desire and has the intelligence of a baby who has not yet attained consciousness (or something like that).
Obviously I cannot compress the whole lesson into this comment, and neither can I remember it perfectly, but I find it wildly fascinating.